I’ve had several discussions about this in the past on Transdiffusion’s many Facebook pages. Chris Bowden-Smith of Transdiffusion told me a fair few times that Thames and Yorkshire played the anthem before both dropped them at different points in the 70s, he didn’t specify the visuals, though.
Don’t forget there will be many examples of regular closedown routines that won’t survive because of the rarity and expense of domestic video recorders before 1981-ish. Plus different formats would have meant in many cases recordings on old video formats being disposed of when replaced by something newer of a different format in pre-internet days. I’ll bet a lot of N1500/N1700/SVR recordings were dumped in the early 80s and the 90s!
It’s impossible to say that “XX company never did this as standard” based just on video recordings for companies before the early 80s. That’s where memories of people like the older Transdiffusion members come into play, they had interests in this kind of thing so would have paid more attention than the average viewer.
Don’t forget there will be many examples of regular closedown routines that won’t survive because of the rarity and expense of domestic video recorders before 1981-ish. Plus different formats would have meant in many cases recordings on old video formats being disposed of when replaced by something newer of a different format in pre-internet days. I’ll bet a lot of N1500/N1700/SVR recordings were dumped in the early 80s and the 90s!
It’s impossible to say that “XX company never did this as standard” based just on video recordings for companies before the early 80s. That’s where memories of people like the older Transdiffusion members come into play, they had interests in this kind of thing so would have paid more attention than the average viewer.