STV Central
STV Central is the Channel 3 licence service for Central Scotland, broadcasting as STV from studios at Pacific Quay in Glasgow and owned by STV Group. It is the largest of the three Channel 3 franchises in Scotland and, through its predecessor Scottish Television, has been on air since 31 August 1957, making it the second-oldest ITV franchise holder still active in the United Kingdom. It provides the ITV network schedule in Central Scotland alongside distinctively Scottish programmes, most importantly STV News at Six, with coverage for the west and east of the central belt, and the late-night current affairs programme Scotland Tonight.
Coverage area
The STV Central region covers Scotland's central belt, the most populous part of the country, including Glasgow, Edinburgh, Stirling, Falkirk, Lanarkshire, Ayrshire, Dunbartonshire, Renfrewshire, West Lothian, Midlothian, East Lothian and Fife, together with surrounding areas served by its transmitters at Black Hill, Craigkelly, Darvel and Torosay. Within the region, news coverage distinguishes between the west, centred on Glasgow and the Clyde valley, and the east, centred on Edinburgh, Fife and the Lothians. Together with STV North, which covers northern Scotland from Aberdeen, STV Central gives STV Group the Channel 3 service for most of Scotland; only the Scottish Borders and Dumfries and Galloway, served by ITV Border, sit outside its coverage.
Scottish Television, 1957 to 2006
The service began as Scottish Television, which launched on 31 August 1957 from the Theatre Royal in Glasgow's Cowcaddens district; its first programme from those studios was This Is Scotland. The company grew into one of the major ITV contractors, producing network programmes as well as Scottish news, sport and entertainment. In 1974 it sold the Theatre Royal to Scottish Opera, for conversion back into a theatre and opera house, and moved into purpose-built studios next door, remaining in Cowcaddens for more than three decades. In Edinburgh, it converted the Gateway Theatre in Leith Walk into colour studios in the late 1960s, a facility that proved valuable in 1969 when a fire destroyed Studio A at the Theatre Royal, and which later became a production centre for the soap opera Take the High Road before closing in the early 1990s. Scottish Television's long-running programmes included Scotsport, broadcast from 1957 until 2008, and Take the High Road, which ran for more than 23 years and ended after 1,517 episodes in April 2003. For many years its regional news programme was Scotland Today.
The rebrand to STV and the move to Pacific Quay
On 30 May 2006 Scottish Television was rebranded simply as STV, and the same identity was rolled out in the north, where the Grampian Television name was retired after 45 years in favour of STV North. STV Central became the legal name of the central region. In July 2006 the company left Cowcaddens and moved to new, smaller studios at Pacific Quay on the banks of the River Clyde, alongside Glasgow Science Centre and close to the new BBC Scotland headquarters. The move, on a twenty-year lease in a building of about 63,000 square feet, involved investment of around twenty million pounds in studio, editing and transmission facilities for approximately 350 Glasgow-based staff. The smaller Pacific Quay base reflected the changed economics of regional television, in which large studio complexes built for in-house production of entertainment and drama were no longer required on the earlier scale.
STV News at Six
News is the core of STV Central's regional output. Scotland Today and its northern counterpart were rebranded as STV News at Six on 23 March 2009, with separate programmes retained for the Central and North regions. Within Central Scotland, STV had already launched separate news services for the east and west in January 2007, initially as a five-minute opt-out within the 6pm programme, with the west presented from Glasgow and the east, covering an area from Anstruther to Dunbar, produced in Edinburgh. Full-length separate editions for the two areas were launched on Monday 23 May 2011, alongside localised late-night bulletins. In May 2018 STV announced a restructuring involving 59 redundancies, including 34 in news, and the closure of its second channel STV2; as part of those changes the full Edinburgh edition of STV News at Six ended on Friday 7 September 2018 and was replaced from the following Monday by shorter east opt-outs within a single Central Scotland programme co-anchored from the Glasgow and Edinburgh studios. STV also maintains an Edinburgh news operation, which moved from George Street to Fountainbridge in 2012; the Edinburgh studio closed in 2024 before the operation moved again to Queensferry Road the following year.
Scotland Tonight and current affairs
STV Central's best-known current affairs programme is Scotland Tonight, a half-hour late-evening programme launched on Monday 24 October 2011, replacing the earlier political programme Politics Now, which had itself begun in January 2004. Broadcast on Monday to Thursday nights after the late news and shown across both STV regions, it combines reports, interviews and analysis of the Scottish news of the day with coverage of politics, business, sport and the arts, and incorporates the late bulletins for its regions. It is presented from Studio 1 at Pacific Quay, the studio shared with the west edition of STV News at Six. For many years its principal presenter was John MacKay, the west edition anchor, who presented from the first edition until his departure from STV in March 2026, sharing duties in later years with Rona Dougall. The programme has devoted special editions to subjects including the Scottish independence referendum debates, major elections and national events, and political coverage remains one of the areas in which STV's output differs most visibly from the ITV schedule in England.
Scottish programming beyond news
Although news and current affairs dominate, STV Central has a long tradition of Scottish entertainment, features and children's programming made for viewers in both STV regions. Titles over the years have included the entertainment series Postcode Challenge, the film programme Moviejuice, the daytime shows The Five Thirty Show and The Hour, and children's output such as wknd@stv. In 2009 STV attracted attention by withdrawing a number of popular ITV network programmes from its schedules, including dramas such as The Bill, Doc Martin and Midsomer Murders, preferring to concentrate on programmes made in Scotland. The policy underlined the difference between STV, an independent licence holder affiliated to the ITV network, and the regions owned directly by ITV plc, which follow the network schedule in full.
Relationship with the ITV network
STV Central is not owned by ITV plc. STV Group, formerly SMG plc, holds the Central and North licences independently, and since networking arrangements agreed in 2012 STV has operated as an affiliate of the Channel 3 network, paying an up-front fee for the right to broadcast network content rather than the previous share of network costs based on qualifying revenue. Relations with ITV plc were not always smooth: a legal dispute between the companies was settled in April 2011, with ITV receiving eighteen million pounds from STV. STV launched an HD service on 6 June 2010, carrying the west Central Scotland feed, and digital switchover in Scotland was completed in June 2011 when analogue signals from Black Hill were switched off.
Local television ventures
STV's ambitions in the 2010s extended to city television. It was awarded local TV licences for Glasgow and Edinburgh in January 2013; STV Glasgow launched on 2 June 2014 in partnership with Glasgow Caledonian University, followed by STV Edinburgh on 12 January 2015, each with its own news service. In April 2017 those channels merged with new services for Aberdeen, Ayr and Dundee into a semi-national channel, STV2, which carried a combined Scottish, UK and international news programme, STV News Tonight, presented from Glasgow on weeknights. STV2 closed at the end of June 2018 as part of the restructuring announced that May, ending the local television experiment, although the licences' legacy included a generation of journalists trained in its newsrooms. STV Central itself continued unaffected as the main channel.
Studios and bases
The Pacific Quay headquarters in Glasgow houses STV Group's corporate offices as well as the Central region's studios, newsroom and transmission facilities, and its position beside BBC Scotland has made the south bank of the Clyde the centre of Scottish broadcasting. The Edinburgh operation provides news gathering, reporting and presentation facilities for the east of the region, allowing the Central programme to be co-anchored from both cities. Reporters are also based in communities across the central belt, and the service is supported by STV's Aberdeen base in the North region for stories of national Scottish significance covered jointly by the two regions.
STV Central today
Today STV Central continues to broadcast as STV on Channel 3 across Central Scotland, on Freeview, satellite, cable and the STV Player, which streams the service live within the STV regions and provides catch-up for its programmes. It combines the ITV network's drama, entertainment and national news with Scottish news at six, Scotland Tonight, regional weather and Scottish feature programming. Approaching seventy years after Scottish Television first went on air from the Theatre Royal, STV Central remains, together with STV North, one of the last parts of the Channel 3 network not owned by ITV plc, and its separate identity, schedule choices and news agenda continue to give Central Scotland a regional television service distinct from that received elsewhere in the United Kingdom.
