Local TV (excluding rebroadcasting of a national channel) really does
seem to scraping the bottom of the barrel, both from a presenter point
of view and a technical standards point of view.
When I lived in Bracknell, their cable service included a local channel,
probably from Reading. That broadcast county/UA council meetings,
entirely in wide shot and with the microphone several miles away so the
room colouration of the sound made it almost unintelligible. The
councillors had mikes on their desks, but for some reason those were not
fed to the recording shown on TV. Their local news bulletins were
presented by people who had difficulty reading the autocue (probably
made more difficult because had not written the word that they were
speaking); one male presenter looked like a rabbit caught in the
headlights - he was more wooden than Pinocchio and looked as if he was
terrified that the camera concealed a machine gun.
Later on, still in analogue days, there was a station in Oxford which
was a mixture of the dire and the very interesting. Studio programmes -
eg cookery - seemed to have a lot of problem with overexposed,
featureless orange highlights on people's faces. Some of the programmes
were excellent: there was a series called Wild presented by a naturalist
called Sasha Norris who lived in the city and travelled all over the
place presented reports about the environment and ecology, but in a way
that managed to avoid being holier-than-thou. I remember a programme
from the Eden Project in Cornwall, and one from close to home where
draft horses were being used in preference to diesel plant for hauling
felled trees out of forests to a place where the could be sawn up in
manageable lengths to take to the sawmill.
At least most of their output was local, and not lazy time-filling music
videos or rebroadcasting of another station.
With a local transmitter which looks as if it is part of a national
transmitter like Emley Moor, there is no excuse for not making the
channel appeal to residents of the target broadcast region.