Avon TV
Avon TV was a local cable television channel that served Bristol in the west of England in 1981. It operated for just twelve weeks, as part of a short, deliberate experiment in local cable programming undertaken by Rediffusion at the prompting of the British government and the Independent Broadcasting Authority. Although it was one of the briefest-lived channels in British television history, Avon TV belonged to an important moment in broadcasting policy: the point at which the government, preparing for a large-scale expansion of the country's cable networks, set out to gather practical evidence about what local cable television could do. The channel closed in 1981, its purpose as a policy experiment complete.
Bristol, a Cable City
Bristol was fertile ground for such an experiment because it was already, by British standards, a cable city. Wired distribution of television had a long history in the city, where cable systems had been used since the late 1930s to carry signals into homes that could not receive transmissions satisfactorily over the air. By the early 1980s the Bristol cable network was operated by Rediffusion, one of the best-known names in British broadcasting and electronics, whose local operation was based at Broad Plain in the city. Rediffusion's Bristol subscribers received the national terrestrial channels — BBC1, BBC2, ITV and, from 1982, Channel 4 — through their cable connection rather than through an aerial. A network of that kind, already passing thousands of homes, was the obvious platform on which to test a channel made for the city itself.
The Bristol Channel Predecessor
Avon TV was not Bristol's first local channel, and it should not be confused with its predecessor. In 1973 Rediffusion had launched the Bristol Channel as one of the five experimental community cable stations authorised by the Minister for Posts and Telecommunications, alongside services in Greenwich, Sheffield, Swindon and, later, Wellingborough. Those experiments were run on austere terms, without advertising or public funding, and the Bristol Channel closed on 14 March 1975, after less than two years on air. Bristol therefore had direct experience of local cable television — including experience of its financial fragility — several years before Avon TV appeared. The 1981 channel was a second, separate attempt, made under a different government, in a different policy climate, and with a different purpose.
A Second Experiment
The origins of Avon TV lay in the change of policy that followed the election of a Conservative government in 1979. The new government was keen to see a large-scale expansion of Britain's cable networks, and it persuaded the Independent Broadcasting Authority and Rediffusion to undertake another experiment in local cable television programming. This time, however, there was no pretence that the experiment was the launch of a permanent service. It was agreed from the outset that it should last for just three months. The exercise was a fact-finding one: a short, controlled trial that would inform the decisions ministers were about to take on the future shape of cable broadcasting in Britain.
Five Towns, One Trial
Bristol was one of five places chosen for the 1981 experiment. During that year Milton Keynes, Bristol, Cumbernauld, Washington and Corby all launched their own local television channels on their cable networks. The selection deliberately mixed places of different character: a designated new town in Milton Keynes, a small Scottish town in Cumbernauld, a new town in the north-east in Washington, a Northamptonshire steel town in Corby, and a major historic port city in Bristol. By running the trial in several communities at once, the government and the regulator could compare how local programming performed in different kinds of places, rather than drawing conclusions from a single, possibly unrepresentative, example. The Bristol channel took the name Avon TV, reflecting the wider county of Avon, of which Bristol was then the principal city, rather than the city alone.
Twelve Weeks on Air
Avon TV operated for twelve weeks during 1981, in line with the three-month term agreed for the experiment. For cable subscribers in Bristol, it added something the network had not offered since the Bristol Channel closed six years earlier: a channel originating locally, addressed to the community the network served. When the twelve weeks ended, the channel closed, as planned. Reference listings of former British television channels record Avon TV simply as a Bristol-only service that closed in 1981. Its brevity was not a failure in the ordinary commercial sense; the channel had never been intended to build an audience over years, win advertisers or establish a permanent place in the city's life. It existed to be observed.
What the Experiment Was For
Despite operating for only twelve weeks, the 1981 channels were judged to have been useful. The trials helped to provide the government with information that was valuable in determining future policy. That policy was already taking shape. In 1982, proposals to liberalise cable television in the United Kingdom were drawn up; until then, apart from the 1981 experiments, cable networks had in general been permitted only to relay the channels available over the air. In 1983, ahead of the forthcoming liberalisation, the government licensed eleven interim franchises for broadband cable systems, each covering an individual town or city of around 100,000 homes. Avon TV thus belongs to the short bridge between the restricted, relay-only cable industry of the 1970s and the franchised, multi-channel cable industry that Britain built in the 1980s and 1990s.
The Aftermath in Bristol
Events in Bristol soon illustrated what the new cable era would look like — and it looked quite different from a local community channel. In November 1983 Rediffusion announced that it would double the number of channels available to the 11,000 Bristol subscribers then receiving the four terrestrial channels over its network. Subscribers were to be given free aerials for the terrestrial channels, freeing cable capacity for additional services uplinked to a communications satellite from a site in London's Docklands and received on two large dish antennas erected in February 1984 on the roof of the Rediffusion building in Broad Plain — the first such dishes seen in Bristol. From the evening of 29 March 1984, households within reach of the network could pay £4.95 a month for a package of Screen Sport, Music Box and Sky Channel, or an extra £8 for a package adding the film channel TEN. The future of cable, as Bristol experienced it, was bought-in entertainment channels delivered by satellite, not locally originated programming.
Legacy
Avon TV's legacy is therefore a paradoxical one. As a channel it was ephemeral — twelve weeks of programming on one city's cable network, remembered chiefly through the records of Rediffusion's Bristol operation and the standard listings of defunct British channels. But as an instrument of policy it did its work: it was part of the evidence base from which ministers concluded that cable television in Britain should be liberalised and expanded. The irony is that the expansion which followed pushed local programming to the margins of the cable business for more than a decade, favouring national and international entertainment channels instead. The idea Avon TV tested — that a cable network should carry a channel for its own community — had to wait for the local television revivals of later years to be tried again in earnest.
