At least you got a nice message and animation Dave. Ours was switched off a couple of years ago, and there was no on-air announcement at all - just there one minute and gone the next. I was still using the faithful old 34cm portable that I had grown up with then, and I think it took me about six months to get around to finding a converter. (As you may have guessed, TV is not much of a priority for me these days!)
To be honest, I don't really see a huge need for going digital - while the analogue signal is somewhat wasteful of bandwidth, all of the extra spectrum space will just be sold off to commercial interests anyway.
Analog broadcast television, IMHO, really did get a lot of things right. I do miss it.
Yes, and there is quite a lot more to it than most people think. I have had a reasonably good understanding of TV for a while, but tended to think of things like sync signals as more digital/pulse waveforms. However I recently read a book from back in the sixties, explaining television for non-technical people. (Judging by the book, non-technical people must have been a lot smarter then than they are now!). It explained all the analogue pulse-shaping circuitry for processing the sync, and how the transmission standard was specially designed to overcome the limitations of the receiver circuitry. There are quite a few subtleties to the system that are not immediately evident. (Hands up, how many people really understand equalising pulses?)