Televised Football in the Regions: Wales & The West

Having a single ITV company for Wales and the West of England caused considerably headaches which weren't really resolved until the early 1980s.

It was always likely that the spread of regional television into Wales would bring challenges that the industry’s regulators would find difficult to manage. Television transmitters, after all, will only respect national borders to the extent that those who determine their positions and strength of their transmissions allow them to and, as with any other area of commercial broadcasting, there will always be competing interests between financial imperatives, political will, and the interests of viewers.

In addition to this, the geography and landscape of Wales itself made reaching every community difficult. Hills and mountains are not natural bedfellows of the television transmitter. But over the course of sixty years, and not without substantial financial and political ructions, Wales now has the television service that it deserves, along with a regular football programme which should serve as a template of how to broadcast the game on a tight budget.