Wire TV

Wire TV was a short-lived British cable television channel produced by United Artists Cable and featured a range of entertainment, lifestyle and sports programming. Branded "The Cable Network", the channel was originally set up and funded with £25m [1] by Cable Program Partners (CPP1), a consortium of British cable operators including NYNEX, US West and Comcast, to bolster alternative content to the satellite-dominated multichannel environment of the time.

Wire TV
CountryUnited Kingdom
Ownership
OwnerCPP1 Consortium
History
LaunchedMay 1992
ClosedMay 1995
Availability at time of closure
Cable
Cable North WestChannel 6
Satellite
IntelsatIntelsat 601, 11.095H

Broadcast from a converted unit in The Galleries shopping centre, Bristol, Wire TV broadcast on weekdays and weekends from 1.00pm to 11.00pm with regional opt-outs from 5.00pm to 7.00pm each evening when operators could insert their own local programmes. It relied on satellite distribution to cable headends across the United Kingdom, Intelsat 601 was used and broadcast alongside both The Parliamentary Channel and The Learning Channel using the first digitally-compressed uplink service.

History

Programming

Daytime schedules consisted of talk-based Afternoon Live, quiz shows such as Lingo, soap operas and comedies. Evenings included phone-ins and Sportswire which featured Vauxhall Conference football and boxing. Weekend schedules consisted of 'best of' repeats and omnibus editions of weekday soaps including Richmond Hill, The Bold and the Beautiful and Santa Barbara.

Presenters included Kathryn Apanowicz, Nino Firetto, Rhodri Evans, Fenella George and also Femi Oke who co-hosted the weekend show Soap on the Wire with television and soap opera expert Chris Stacey. The show proved popular with students and housewives alike and towards the end of 1993 was taking over 200 calls in the four hours it was on air. Producers tried to revamp it into a daily show but Stacey had other commitments and was reduced to one appearance a week so the other experts and co-presenters such as Darren Gray, Jamie Carrington-Colby, Darren Edwards and Richard Arnold were featured more frequently throughout late 1993 and 1994 all proved less popular than Stacey.

Revamp

As part of a revamp in 1994, Mike Morris and Georgey Spanswick went on the road in a bright yellow-liveried bus which was converted into an outside broadcast unit and toured the country, spending a week at a time in different cable franchise areas. The previous varied programming was reduced as sports programming was expanded in a deal with Chrysalis Sport.[2] On 2 March 1994, Wire TV's backers outbid British Sky Broadcasting for the rights to screen the 1996 Cricket World Cup in a £7.5 million deal, it was the first major national sporting event ever to be acquired for a British cable channel,[3] additionally the live broadcast also rights to screen Lennox Lewis' WBC title fights were secured.

Closure

Plans to hive off Sportswire into a separate channel came to nothing. On 16 February 1995, Wire TV was sold to Mirror Television, a Mirror Group plc subsidiary, and closed in order to make way for L!VE TV.[4]

See also

References
  1. The bus broke down, but the show goes on The Independent, 14 March 1995
  2. Sporting push for UK cable-only channel Screen Digest, 1 March 1994
  3. A cricket coup for UK cable Variety, 2 March 1994
  4. Mirror Group buys cable TV channel The Independent, 16 February 1995

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