When ITV did return, its first evening schedule included a special " catch-up " edition of Coronation Street, in which storylines which would have taken place during the strike were explained away in the form of a narrative chat between Len Fairclough and Bet Lynch.

The show was not a popular success, owing in part to the publication of the ITV listings magazine, TV Times, being suspended because of a strike.

Partially due to the strike of BBC's rival ITV, City of Death scored high ratings ; the fourth episode was watched by over sixteen million viewers, the highest audience ever attained by an episode of Doctor Who.

Channel was the only ITV franchise not to be affected by the technicians ' strike in the summer of 1968, as it was understood by all that any strike action would probably put the company out of business.

Similarly, it was not severely affected locally by the ITV strike of August – October 1979, when the rest of the ITV Network was blacked out for ten weeks by another technicians ' dispute ; while the rest of the network was displaying an on-screen caption, Channel Television continued to broadcast twelve-hours-a-day of films and local news bulletins, as well as other programmes from the ITV archives.

ITV had been off the air across the nation since August due to a massive strike by technicians.

The opening week was disrupted by sporadic strike action ; the following week, the action had spread to all of ITV and resulted in the creation of a management-run ITV Emergency National Service for some two weeks.

Like most of ITV, Thames was beset by conflicts with trade unions, notably the Association of Cinematograph Television and Allied Technicians ( ACTT ) – indeed, the worst strike to hit the network originated at Thames.

( It should be pointed out that its highest figures in 1979 were due to a strike that blacked out the ITV network, meaning the two BBC channels were the only ones the public could watch ).

* On its third showing, there was an ITV strike, leaving viewers with a choice of either BBC 1 or a highbrow BBC 2 offering, ( Channel 4 had not yet started ), and Abigail's Party attracted 16 million viewers.

Despite its eventual success, Minder was a slow burner, not helped by being delayed by a nine-week technicians ' strike which effectively blacked out the ITV network.

And indeed it was a dispute over the allocation of studio days that brought down the axe in 1979 when Hughes attempted to gain an extra studio day for the planned ninth season ( which fell victim to the ITV strike that summer ) following numerous problems during the production of " War of the Empires " ( the sole 4 part adventure that made up season 8 ) which had been given only four days in studio.

In late 1979, ( partly because of an ITV strike at the time ) Garnock Way was axed and production started on a new soap.

He oversaw some of the channel ’ s highest-ever audience figures in 1979, although this was mostly due to the main opposition, ITV, being on strike for over a hundred days.

Season 17 saw the show garner its highest-ever viewing figures during the ITV network strike, with estimates of between 16 and 19 million viewers for episodes of the Williams and Adams penned story City of Death.

Howards ' Way was created and produced by Gerard Glaister and Allan Prior with lead writer, Raymond Thompson as story and script consultant-at a point in the BBC's history, when the organisation was making a concerted populist strike against ITV in its approach to programming.

Several ITV companies in the early 1970s faced strike action as unions demanded better wages for handling the more complex colour broadcasting equipment.

Some examples of the genre include the 1978 Christmas tape from staff at Thames Television which included an especially contrived innuendo-laden edition of the children's show Rainbow and a 1979 Christmas tape from employees of Yorkshire Television which included a send-up of the popular ITV quiz 3-2-1, an adaptation of a popular television commercial of the time from the Italian car manufacturer Fiat and comments about YTV management following the strike which had put the network off the air a few months previously.

Although the viewing figures dipped somewhat during Williams ' first two seasons, they remained fairly healthy and in 1979, the series achieved ratings as high as 16. 1 million viewers ( for episode 4 of City of Death ), its highest ever-although this was partly attributable to the strike which took ITV, the BBC's main competitor, off the air.

For eleven weeks, between August and October 1979, industrial action forced Coronation Street and the whole of the ITV network ( apart from the Channel Islands ) off the air.

Coronation Street returned to ITV screens at a regular time late in 1979.

ITV produced youth-oriented genre programmes during the 1970s, such as Timeslip ( 1970 – 71 ), The Tomorrow People ( 1973 – 79 ), and Children of the Stones ( 1977 ), as well as shows aimed at a wider audience such as the time-travel drama Sapphire & Steel ( 1979 – 82 ).

First aired in 1979 on ITV, the series saw Pertwee as a scarecrow, as well as utilising several comedic voices.

He subsequently scripted and presented for ATV a six-part television series based on this book and broadcast posthumously by ITV between October and December 1979.

His most famous television role was probably as the title character in Quatermass for ITV in 1979.

* Alright Now, was a short-lived rock music television series made by Tyne Tees Television for ITV in 1979 – 1980.

* January 5 – Tiswas starts as a local programme in the Midlands ( ATV ) in the UK, but the television show wasn't fully automatically networked through ITV until 1979 ( 1974 – 1982 ).

A similar character called Robert Box, played by Atkinson, appeared in the one-off 1979 ITV sitcom Canned Laughter, which also featured routines used in the 1997 film Bean.

Over a period of time, most ITV regions did, with Granada Television and Southern Television being the last in 1979.

Tiswas returned to the screens in November 1979 for its sixth series, as part of ITV's comeback ; this was directly referenced in the first edition of the new series, when the " Welcome Home To ITV " jingle was played to usher the programme in and out of the advert breaks, albeit replacing the vocals by the Mike Sammes Singers with a group of deliberately out-of-tune children.

General Hospital is a British daytime soap opera produced by ATV which ran on ITV from 1972 to 1979.

The books were adapted for radio and television a number of times, most successfully with former Doctor Who actor Jon Pertwee taking the lead role from 1979 to 1981 on ITV ; originally produced in the UK, but later in New Zealand

In 1979, Head appeared in the final episode of the ITV programme Return of the Saint.

In 1979, LWT offered them their own series, The Cannon and Ball Show which premiered in ITV on 28 July 1979.

Give us a Clue is a British televised game show version of charades which was broadcast on ITV from 1979 to 1992.

( A one-hour TV special drawn from the performances aired on Britain's ITV network by London Weekend Television in December 1979 to coincide with the release of the Secret Policeman's Ball record album on Island Records, produced by Lewis, of the comedy performances.

Jamie and the Magic Torch was a British children's animated television series, made by Cosgrove Hall for Thames Television and shown on the ITV network, running from 1976 to 1979.

Barker and Corbett also made a number of advertisements that appeared on ITV, most notably for British Leyland ( Austin / Morris ) in 1979 where Corbett played a villain on the run and, " needing some wheels ", gets salesman Barker to show him round the Austin Morris range.

That left ATV in the Midlands as the only ITV station not carrying the show.

ITV television has been available on parts of the east of the Isle of Man on 3rd May 1956 when Granada Television transmissions started from the Winter Hill transmitting station, and to parts of the west of the island on 1st October 1959 from the Black Mountain transmitting station in Northern Ireland which broadcast Ulster Television.

The commercial station ITV had popular successes with Rising Damp ( 1974 – 78, sometimes called the best of all ITV sitcoms ), Man About the House ( 1973 – 76 ) and George and Mildred ( 1976 – 79 ).

* ITV Meridian, ITV station for the south and south-east of England

One of the most controversial Archers episodes was broadcast on 22 September 1955, the evening of the launch of the UK's first commercial television station, ITV.

In part, the number 3 was assigned as televisions would usually be tuned so that the regional ITV station would be on the third button, the other stations being allocated to the number within their name.

On the back of their success on stage and on screen, in 1961 Lew Grade offered the duo a series for the London-based ITV station ATV.

In January 1978, just after their record breaking 1977 Christmas show, the pair left the BBC for ITV signing a contract with the London station Thames Television, which made front page news.

For example, ITV has no record of its live coverage of the 1969 Moon landings after the station responsible for providing the coverage, London Weekend Television, wiped the tapes.

* It emerged in September 2010 that more than 60 recordings of BBC and ITV drama productions originally sent for broadcast in the United States by the PBS station WNET in New Jersey had been found at the Library of Congress.

Commercial station Channel 4 has been more successful than ITV with situation comedies in recent years.

Channel Television ( known on-air as ITV1 Channel Television ) is a British television station which has served as an Independent Television ( ITV ) contractor to the Channel Islands since 1962.

Secondly, there was a problem of connecting the islands to the rest of the ITV Network-the solution was to build a relay station on Alderney, the northern-most island, which would then send the network feed from Westward Television and occasionally Southern Television to Channel Television's studio in Jersey ; this was initially a problem, because the existence of the relay station meant that Alderney itself could not have a broadcast service from the start of broadcasting, and the local authorities refused to lease land to the ITA for the relay station.

The smallness of the station, once described as ' television in miniature ', while having implications for the profitability of the company, has on the whole been to its advantage: it has an extremely close relationship with its viewership, reflecting daily life and government in the islands, and while not producing large numbers of programmes for the ITV Network at the start of the 21st century, it does produce some five-and-a-half hours a week of programmes for its own area, including the local nightly news magazine Channel Report.

Typically this is " This is Channel Television, ITV in the Channel Islands ", or at the handover from ITV Breakfast, " It's 9: 25 and you're watching Channel Television, your local ITV station ".

* The station appeared in an ITV advert for the UEFA Euro 2008 football championships.

The decision by TVS, the new ITV station in the south and south east of England, to drop the Central-produced half of the last series in favour of their own Saturday morning programme No. 73 saw fans of Tiswas picket outside their Southampton studios.

In the UK, after a six-week trial-run on the regional ITV station Yorkshire Television, the Independent Broadcasting Authority considered breakfast television so important that it created an entire franchise for it, the only national ITV franchise except for news provider ITN.