Regional publisher Archant is to launch its new TV channel on Freeview next month, it announced today.
Norwich-based Mustard TV won the licence to broadcast local TV services for Norfolk last year and has been broadcasting online since January 2013.
Now the channel is to be available on Freeview channel eight from 5.30pm on 24 March.
It will be the second local channel to go live in the UK, following the launch of Estuary TV in Grimsby in November.
The Mustard TV team
The station will broadcast from 5.30pm to 10.30pm on weekdays to up to 162,000 homes in Norwich and surrounding areas.
It will feature sport, politics and business content as well as hourly news bulletins.
Other programming will include ‘The Mustard Show’ – a magazine programme promising a “daily dollop of all things Norfolk” – and ‘Archive Half Hour,’ a six-part series produced in association with the East Anglian Film Archive and Fragment Films.
The first week will also feature the UK TV premiere of Splinter Bike, the documentary charting how two men from Norfolk set the first official world land-speed record on a bicycle built entirely from wood.
Mustard TV managing director Fiona Ryder said Mustard TV would “provide a new voice for the people of Norfolk.”
She said: “We want to redefine what people think of as local television. We hope to engage the community in ways that other stations covering wider patches just can’t.
“We will put Norfolk and Norwich at the heart of everything we do, celebrating the best of our county and concentrating on the issues that really matter to our communities.
Miller Hogg, MD of Archant East added: “Mustard TV is owned, produced and managed in Norwich for the people of Norwich and I am proud that Archant which already publishes the main newspaper and magazine media in Norwich since 1845 can now boast in 2014, some 169 years later, television as part of our latest media offering to our audience and advertisers.”
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Does anyone else think ‘Alan Partridge’ when thinking of Mustard TV?
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Nice to see some cultural diversity in the team photo!
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Aha!
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Tbf it is Norfolk.
That ‘Splinter Bike’ thing is an accident waiting to happen. They obviously haven’t checked the cuts.
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I hope they have the two evening news magazine presenters laughing inanely at the end of the item, regardless of the tone of the piece, just before the handover to the weather.
And they go Live to a reporter standing in the rain outside an empty court house telling us that someone was accused of something there hours before.
And lots of items based on FOI requests into things that have been going on at a local health authority.
And glorified beach huts built on a sand dune three feet from a cliff which inexplicably fall into the sea during a storm.
And Cromer’s oldest windmill sailcloth supplier unexpectedly closing after 450 years trading.
Oh, and fights in a pub car park – and monkey tennis?
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169 years later, Archant the innovators, apparently the are expecting email soon
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Mustard? Estuary? I wonder how much Archant paid to brand developers to come up with those stunning, evocative names for their TV stations? I suspect Archant is spending too much time and energy on somebody’s pet projects while failing to devise a decent digital strategy worth the pixels it’s (not) written on (sorry, that didn’t really work did it?!)
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