series were rare in regional television stations before NTA was founded in 1977. TV shows such as Moses Olaiya's Alawada on WNTV (later NTA Ibadan), Village Headmaster and Hotel de Jordan on NTA Benin became available more widely after the merger. Apart from these few notable shows, there was little original content in dramatic series production during the 1970s. By 1980, when the new NTA network took over state-owned broadcasting stations in the country, there was a concerted effort to increase the quality of locally produced content. NTA began offering support to the production of notable country-wide network programs such as Tales by Moonlight, Cockcrow at Dawn, and Mirror in the Sun as early as 1977. In 1982, a drama produced by NTA Sokoto, Moment of Truth won a prize at the fifth URTNA festival held in Algiers. To cultivate interest in original broadcast content from Nigerian producers, the network set a ceiling of 20% broadcasting time to be allocated to foreign programming, during a period when the cost of acquiring those programs was much less than the locally produced ones. With just a portion of the broadcast week for schedulers to work with, foreign imports were routinely some of the most popular shows from the UK and the U.S., such as Yes Minister, Charlie's Angels, Dallas, Dynasty, and Falcon Crest. Cockcrow at Dawn, an agriculture promotional drama partially sponsored by UBA and produced by Peter Igho, who directed the award-winning Moment of Truth, emerged as one of the first nationally televised drama series in Nigeria. However, it was short-lived due to "government structure syndrome". Acada Campus, a show produced by Bode Sowande, was also short-lived. These series were widely available thanks to NTA's monopoly on broadcasting. In the 1980s, a series of critically acclaimed soap operas were promoted on the network. The first was Laolu Ogunniyi's Wind Against My Soul, followed by For Better or Worse and Lola Fani Kayode's Mirror in the Sun. The last of these, produced in 1983, was well-received by critics, but its broadcast was interrupted after two years due to a lack of financial support. In the mid-1980s, another group of soap operas dominated the airwaves, including the short-lived Behind the Clouds and Turning Wheels. In 1984, NTA began to broadcast Tales by Moonlight, a children's programme narrating traditional African folklore stories. The network also broadcast Adelia Onyedibia's adaptation of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall