The increase was very tiny – an extra half hour of programming per day permitted. Meaning the weekday increase from 7 hours to 7.5 hours per day, and on Saturdays/Sundays the increase from 7.5 hours to 8 hours per day.

Not much, but it was a start. The next increase came around 1971 when BBC and ITV were given 8 hours per day, seven days a week as their allowance.

Thankfully, the Edward Heath conservative government, elected in June 1970 to everyone’s shock and surprise (including Harold Wilson who called the election for June 1970, thinking he would win) led to Heath actually doing one good thing, lifting all broadcasting restrictions on television hours, with the announcement given in the House of Commons on January 19th 1972, with the then minister Christopher Chataway announcing the complete lifting of all restrictions on broadcasting hours for both television and radio with “immediate effect” according to the Hansard report on the announcement in the Commons.

Finally by October 1972, a full codified, linked daytime schedule was running on ITV, who from the spring of 1972 used the lifting of the restrictions to gradually increase their daytime output month by month, leading up to the Monday 16th October 1972 relaunch.

Even the financial trodden BBC offered a near linked daytime service, with the launch of Pebble Mill at One for example.

Well said Arthur! I agree about Han Cooper’s remarkable contribution to TBS!!
Kif Bowden-Smith. Founder. TBS.

Maybe I could borrow H E Cooper’s time machine and, after I have done that, go, armed with a video recorder and some converter device that would convert the old 405-line signals to 625-line ones, then record several days of telly from when it first started to now, then get that bloke who has spent a lifetime colouring in Jon Pertwee Doctor Who episodes and Dad’s Army episodes that were made in colour, but the colour was lost, and record stuff that, originally, was never recorded – that way, there’s a record of what happened – all those plays and one-off dramas believed lost or wiped are now not only found, due to a time machine c/o H E Cooper, the time travelling exploits of Arthur Leslie Vasey and that bloke with the VidFIRE machine – are now available in full colour – not remounted with modern actors, not animated, not shown as a combination of Tele-Snaps, existing footage of the original episode and animation or puppets – might seem strange to people who saw it first time round – maybe even record the news, both local and national and give it all to Transdiffusion, so it can be told more accurately!

If only I could!

I’m afraid you need to travel back to 1969 and take that up with the typesetters of the original report.