and until 3 January 1956 on 441 lines. For a period, experimental 625-line transmissions (test cards) in colour using the French SECAM system (see below) were made on the channel's VHF network each Tuesday morning. La deuxième chaîne ("The Second Channel"), created on 21 December 1963 and broadcast on UHF 625 lines, initially in black and white only. Colour transmissions in SECAM were introduced (on this channel only) on 1 October 1967. Regional television Regional television, for areas outside Paris, was slow to develop compared with the situation in the United States of America and the United Kingdom. The first regional station, known as Télé-Lille, began broadcasting on 10 April 1950 with two hours a day of programming for Lille and its surrounding area. The station's main news programme was called Images du Nord ("Images of the North"). Télé-Lille's signal did not stop at the country's borders, with the result that the station had five times more viewers in the Belgian provinces of West Flanders, East Flanders, and Hainaut than it had in northern France. By February 1952, the establishment of a co-axial link with the RTF's studios in Paris meant that Télé-Lille, when not televising its own programmes, could relay RTF's main Paris-originated programming. In an attempt to counter the spread in Alsace of the viewing of programmes from regional television in the neighbouring German Land of Baden-Württemberg – the inhabitants of Strasbourg had, for example, been able to watch the coronation in June 1953 of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom only on West German television – Télé-Strasbourg began broadcasting on 15 October 1953. Marseille followed on 20 September 1954, Lyon on 8 November 1954, Toulouse in August 1961, Bordeaux on 25 January 1962, and most other regional centres opened shortly thereafter. From late 1963, the regional programmes were also broadcast on La deuxième chaîne by using optical standard conversion in the regional centres (a 625 lines camera aimed at an 819 lines monitor with a special CRT) in order to better adapt the regional coverage to the new "regions" created in France, and they remained even after the opening of La troisième chaîne (The Third Channel) under the ORTF on 31 December 1972, all three networks broadcasting the regional news, sometimes from two or even three different production centres (e.g. Niort broadcasting Poitiers on networks 1 and 3, and Nantes on network 2). Directors The directors