PETE PRICE, Liam Fogarty and former Liverpool captain Robbie Fowler are to be given star billing on the new Bay TV channel which was today awarded the city's local television licence.
The channel, which is run by Mercury Press Agency in Brunswick Business Park, beat off bids lodged for the Liverpool licence by Phil Redmond's Our-TV, Irish outfit Made TV, and Birmingham's YourTV.
Liam FogarrtyIt will be one of the new digital terrestrial Local TV stations that will be aired on Freeview Channel 8 and on Sky and Virgin TV.
Ofcom said it selected Bay TV Liverpool based on the nature and viability of the proposals.
“The broadcast licencing committee considered that Bay TV Liverpool’s application demonstrated the greatest understanding of the needs of the local area and put forward programming proposals which would address those needs to the greatest extent,” it said.
Phil Redmond's vision for the channel was "time-share" television - in which a wide range of public sector bodies, voluntary groups and businesses would be invited to participate.
Phil RedmondBay TV Liverpool says it will employ a total of 19 staff, broadcasting locally made programmes covering news, politics, current affairs, music, entertainment and its own features.
It is chaired by Jack Stopforth, former CEO of the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce and founder-directors are former Granada Television Liverpool station manager Chris Kerr, and Chris Johnson owner of Mercurry.
It is not the first time Liverpool has had its own TV channel and at one point it had two.
Live TV, back in the mid 1990s and the brainchild of despised ex-Sun editor Kelvin McKenzie, had a studio in Old Hall Street's Cotton Exchange. Broadcasts featured the News Bunny and the weather in Norwegian. It would never happen today.
Then there was Trinity Mirror's equallly ill-fated Channel One, just across the road, in which Pete Price also had a show.
Who could forget its 24-hour rolling news broadcasts from the Echo and Post newsroom wherein newspaper staff on the other side of a glass studio window provided a bustling backdrop for shows as they went around their daily and night time business.
Channel One LiverpoolWho knows what the public made of the newspapers' genial librarian, Les, as he wandered the empty floor retrieving spent bags of photographs and cuttings from desks and tipping them into his handy Kwik Save trolley.
Little could he have known that his actions were being beamed to the screens of possibly hundreds of viewers as news anchorman Jonathan Caswell (now Liverpool Vision spin doctor) delivered a sombre and indepth report into one of the burning issues of the day... the theft of supermarket shopping trollies!
