Night Network

Night Network is C11’s overnight broadcasting service. It began on Friday 28 August 1987, airing on Regional Television (now C11), specifically, ECN (Euro City) and Harris Television (Harrisville), before expanding to other regions during the summer of 1988. Whereas overnight broadcasts are commonplace today, back in the late 1980s, RTV decided it would take a more cautious approach with Night Network only initially broadcasting between 1 am and 4 am in the Friday and Saturday night schedules, and between 1 am and 3 am in the Sunday night schedule.

The show was produced for Night Network Productions and British TV station LWT by Jill Sinclair who had been the producer of BBC1's Pop Quiz and Channel 4's The Tube at Tyne Tees Television, aiming for a similar audience to that of these two shows. The format of Night Network was similar to Channel 4's Network 7, or even a late night adult version of Saturday morning kids TV, as it was a mixture of quizzes, celebrity guests, imported serials and bands.

Feature segments included Street Cred with Paul Thompson, Video View with Steve Allen and Kate Davies, Rowland Rivron in The Bunker Show, Tim Westwood's N-Sign Radio, Emma Freud's chat segment Pillow Talk, Geoffrey Cantor's video segment The Axeman, Barbie Wilde's video review for The Small Screen, and quiz show The Alphabet Game hosted by Nicholas Parsons, whilst cult TV series Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons and Batman were also frequently seen. Originally, on Sunday nights, classic movies were shown but this was only until the programme was expanded to other RTV regions on Friday 2 September 1988.

Although it proved a success, Night Network was never broadcast nationally – companies such as Rainbow (airing in Lliferbow) opted out of the entire programme from the start to provide its own schedule. With more programmes (be it imports, repeats or original output) competing for the overnight slots, the Sunday edition was eventually dropped in Autumn 1988. Around the same time, the first hour of Night Network became a regional For Euro City only on ECN while the remaining two hours continued to air across other regions, albeit in differing timeslots depending on the stations' preferred schedules.

Night Network was broadcast for the last time in it’s origin country on Friday 31 March 1989. Despite this, NN continued to broadcast in the ER, with local presenters. Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons and Batman remained in the lineup, and were joined later on by series such as Z Cars and Doctor Who. the Euro Republican version was also broadcast on Channel Television, who had a secondary affiliation with RTV, and mainly with ITV, until the latter bought the entire station in 2011. The ECN hour was moved to 11:30pm in the same year. Night Network also began offering news updates in 1990. Around this time, RTV was bought by EuroMedia, owners of TV3, and in the same year, Night Network began being simulcast on TV3, allowing all of the Euro Republics to view the service.