Calendar (British TV programme)
Regional news for Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and beyond.
ITV News Calendar is a British television news service broadcast and produced by ITV Yorkshire. It first aired on the launch day of Yorkshire Television, Monday 29 July 1968, and has been produced at the Leeds studios since then.
Quick Facts
- Genre
- Regional news
- Presenter
- Lara Rostron; Ian White
- Starring
- Kerrie Gosney
- Country
- England, United Kingdom
- Language
- English
- Executive producers
- Mark Hayman (Head of News)
- Location
- Leeds, West Yorkshire, England
- Camera
- Multi-camera
Facts from the source article.
Overview
Calendar (British TV programme) is a regional news service covering Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, northwestern Norfolk, and parts of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. ITV Yorkshire produces and broadcasts it from studios in Leeds, with district reporters and camera crews based in Hull, Lincoln, Sheffield, and York. The programme splits into two sub-regions: Calendar North, which serves West Yorkshire, North Yorkshire, and parts of South Yorkshire, Derbyshire, and Nottinghamshire; and Calendar South, covering East Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and parts of South Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, and Norfolk. For Freesat viewers in Mansfield, Ashfield, Newark, and Bolsover, the default channel 103 shows Calendar East based on their postcode. In some parts of North Yorkshire, aerials pointing to the Bilsdale transmitter receive ITV News Tyne Tees instead, but most viewers in the county use the Emley Moor or Oliver's Mount transmitters to get ITV News Calendar. Viewers in Scarborough and some in Filey receive the programme from the Oliver's Mount relay transmitter.
History
Calendar made its debut on 29 July 1968, the same day Yorkshire Television first went on air. It has always been based at ITV Yorkshire's main studios on Kirkstall Road in Leeds. The first person to present the programme was Jonathan Aitken. Over the years, other presenters included Richard Whiteley, who stayed until 1995 while also hosting Countdown, which earned him the nickname "Twice Nightly Whiteley"; Austin Mitchell, who left in 1977 to become a Labour MP; Marylyn Webb; Christa Ackroyd; and Mike Morris. In 1974, when Yorkshire Television took over the Belmont transmitter from Anglia Television, covering south Lincolnshire and north Norfolk, Calendar began offering a regional opt-out service within the main programme for that area. Yorkshire also acquired Anglia's news offices in Grimsby and Hull and opened a new newsroom in Lincoln. For a number of years, up to the early 1980s, viewers using the Belmont transmitter got a localised weather forecast produced by Anglia's weather team. On 28 March 1977, Yorkshire Television started a six-week breakfast television trial called Good Morning Calendar, a name later used for a regional news programme on Good Morning Britain. It is recognised as the first breakfast television programme in the UK, coming six years before the BBC's Breakfast Time. It ran at the same time as a similar Tyne Tees show, Good Morning North, for viewers in the North East. Both programmes finished after nine weeks, on 27 May 1977. Through the 1970s and early 1980s, Calendar's weekday output included a main evening programme, plus lunchtime and late-night bulletins. Weekend bulletins did not start until June 1988. After ITV Schools moved to Channel 4 in 1987 and daytime programming began on ITV, national ITN and regional bulletins were added at 9:25 am and 11:25 am, along with a mid-afternoon bulletin. In the late 1980s, the lunchtime bulletin was expanded into a half-hour magazine show called Calendar Lunchtime Live. That programme was dropped in early 1988, but it returned for a short time in 2001. From June 1990, for more than twenty years, Calendar was produced and broadcast from a dedicated news centre and studio in a converted roller rink across from the main Kirkstall Road complex.
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