Lifestyle (UK TV channel)
| Lifestyle | |
|---|---|
| Launched | 30 October 1985 |
| Closed | 31 January 1993 |
| Owned by |
WHSTV |
Launched on 30 October 1985, Lifestyle was a British daytime television channel dedicated to women and family, and was broadcast on cable and on transponder 5 of the Astra satellite from 1989. Lifestyle's daytime lineup mainly consisted of magazines, novelas and movies. The programming was linked by an in vision continuity announcer, David Hamilton. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the channel was showing a range of classic American comedies and crime dramas such as Divorce Court and Remington Steele along with film noir classics from the 1940s and 1950s. The channel's logo originally consisted of three-dimensional graphics forming a face, but when the channel relaunched, it was changed to a colourful pastel butterfly graphic along with a signature flute tune, typifying the gentle pace and reflective style of the channel as a whole.
In 1990, from 10pm to 6am the transponder was used to broadcast the Lifestyle Satellite Jukebox, a music video request channel which also ended 31 January 1993. The hours between the ending of Lifestyle's programmes and the start of satellite Jukebox were filled by Sell-a-Vision home shopping programmes. For a time, The Children's Channel also transmitted on transponder 5, airing during the early morning before Lifestyle programming started.
In the early 1990s, Lifestyle's transmission time was extended and it aired 10:00 to 18:00. The channel became more associated with the Sky television brand by becoming part of its advertising campaigns for the Astra satellite on which all Sky channels and Lifestyle could be seen. The channel was airing the successful chat show Sally Jesse Raphael along with several popular American gameshows including Classic Concentration, The Joker's Wild, Tic-Tac-Dough and Supermarket Sweep. More recent programming was also acquired, and Australian series including Rafferty's Rules and Skyways aired along with American soap operas Search For Tomorrow and The Edge of Night. The channel's fate was sealed because it never achieved huge ratings, and Lifestyle closed down on 31 January 1993, with its most popular shows moving to Sky One and a new channel for women launched a few months later called UK Living. Astra transponder 5's programming was eventually replaced by a German channel, VOX.
A separate Lifestyle Channel was also available on some Rediffusion Cable networks.