Pre-BBC 2 television channel number list

[GMH]

BBC 2 is usually on channel 2 on most people's television sets and ITV 1 is mostly on channel 3 on most people's television sets, yet BBC 2 started broadcasting nine years after ITV did. I think that I know that BBC 2 is on channel 2 because of the number 2, but was ITV on channel 2 before BBC 2 went on the air and so had to move to channel 3 as a result when the bagan in 1964? I have noticed that many regional ITV stations from 1955 to 1968 such as Associated-Rediffusion were being announced as being on "channel 9" or "channels 8, 10 and 12" or something like that. Was that the channel numbers that viewers had ITV on back then or was it just frequencies on the dial? I can't really see a pre-BBC 2 station line-up listed as: Channel 1 - BBC TV; Channel 2 - Nothing; Channel 3 - ITV. If anyone can remember back that far, does anyone have any ideas on what it used to be?

[gammaray]

I think they were just listed with the station ident. They weren't identified by number because there were only effectively two channels. BBC to start with and then the commercial channel. It's only your TV set that numbers them for ease of identification. It would be a pain if you had to identify the channel by wave length. But in reality that's all they are.

[mushroom25]

bbc1 and itv were originally broadcast on vhf 405 lines and in the London area (where I lived) were channels 1 and 9 respectively. BBC2 began broadcasts on uhf 625 lines and as such was the only station capable of being broadcast in colour when the BBC began their colour service. BBC1 and ITV were also broadcasting on uhf 625 by the time their colour services started in 1969, this is probably where the classic channels 1, 2, 3 came from.

[EssJay1]

A long time ago, our black and white tv had to tuned by turning a tuning dial. No channel numbers - but we knew which frequency the channel was broadcast on. We then got a Grundig colour tv which had 8 buttons - button 1 was bbc 1, button 2 was bbc 2, 3 was ITV London and 4 was ITV Anglia and buttons 5 - 8 were not used!
But we could have tuned our tv any way we wanted - and had bbc1 on channel 5 if we'd wanted. It's the same with the video channel. Most people have it as 0, but I've had it on 8 or 9. It's only now with self tuning tv's that we appear to have no choice with these numbers, but I guess it's possible to choose which button you give to which channel.
BTW after the 1st 5 channels my cable tv and my freeview tv have no channel numbers that match.