SWINDON CABLE - Swindon View Point - The Local Channel
These pages are a brief history of local programming in Swindon

Local programming in Swindon began life as 'Swindon Viewpoint' on the 11 September 1973 as an experiment in community cable television, or public access television. This experiment started with EMI finance on the Radio Rentals cable radio network. This enabled local people to train and use television production equipment. The programmes that were produced were mainly 'one-off' documentaries and made about such subjects that were of interest to them.
The studios were based at 14 Victoria Road, Swindon. This experiment ended in 1980. Then in November 1981 Radio Rentals Cable Television launched the United Kingdom's first paying movie channel 'Cinematel' which showed films every night and this operation, which was put together in Swindon, was also used by a sister operation in Kent.

The distribution signals were 'electronically scrambled' and to receive the service you needed to subscribe - you were then given a 'decoder' to descramble the signal.

Local programming was started again and headed by Sue Stevens, who had previously been involved with Swindon Viewpoint, as before the programmes were about the local area and also 'one off' documentaries about events happening in or around Swindon. The service also provided another first which was a local 'teletext' service called Thorntel. This provided all kinds of information; bus times, train times, local weather, job vacancies - even horoscopes.

'Scene in Swindon' became the United Kingdom's first local regular news magazine programme and aired for the first time on the 1st May 1984. As well as local news a regular sports programme was also produced; 'Sport on Saturday' presented by Mike West, this was also a 'first' in the United Kingdom as local teams had their results published shortly after the games had finished.

In 1984 Radio Rentals Cable Television moved from Victoria Road to the Hawksworth Industrial Estate and re-launched the station as 'Swindon Cable' which was opened by HRH The Duke of Kent. The news magazine programme was also re-launched as 'Focus on Swindon' and was again produced by Sue Stevens with presenter / reporter Trevor Cribb. The programming was so successful that Focus increased from twice to three times a week. The programmes theme music was also used later on as the theme from 'Whickers World'.

Unfortunately, due to a change in the cable television industry at this time, Thorn EMI sold their interest in the station to British Telecom. This spelled the end for 'Focus on Swindon'. The last programme was shown on the 4th February 1986. The station was then replaced with programmes brought in such as The Bold and The Beautiful.

CONTINUE TO NEXT PAGE