How did Thames catch up with the missed Corrie on Bank Holiday Monday (which rated atrociously nationally anyway) or did it just not get shown?

I think two or more regions COULD substitute with the same episode of the same programme (this definitely happened during the brief Granada outage of 1983) but each region would have to play out their own copy locally – Anglia couldn’t just hook up to Central, they’d have their own tape in Norwich.

How did Emmerdale Farm catch up, or like Corrie and Crossroads was it simply a case of going 4 nights a week?

A very interesting and comprehensive article! An additional point re scheduling : the episodes of Sons and Daughters that went ahead as scheduled on some weekday afternoons were due to have been part-networked to Anglia and Tyne Tees. The first three of the episodes were replaced with alternative programming in the other regions, but they must have sourced the tapes from elsewhere and played out three episodes in the scheduled slots the following week. This left Anglia and TTT three episodes behind Thames for a while, until Thames rested the series in late December to allow them to catch up with the capital. I’m not sure if Anglia were allowed to feed the show to TTT, or vice versa, under the terms of the agreement at the time. Similarly, it seems Channel were given special dispensation to take TSW’s replacement programming.

Apologies for the delay in replying.

So after it’s first run on the network, it basically had the same status as the ITC stuff!

I guess Minder had the same status eventually.

Intrigued to know if the 2 filmed series of ‘Special Branch’ ever got repeated nationally or locally on ITV since they were originally shown.

(Obviously these days with Thames material here there & everywhere, it doesn’t really matter now!)

The Sweeney was made by Euston Films, so after its initial network run from Thames, it was sold outside of the ITV networking system to individual ITV stations for use as they saw fit. That being the case, it wasn’t being run off by Thames to the network (each company had their own copy) so wasn’t affected by the ACTT at the other stations refusing to handle Thames network material.