Bringback Thames Television back to ITV
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Is it me?or does it seems ITV's problems stem back to the last franchise round?Since 1993 and the introduction of the new ITV companies like Carlton and Meridian!,can they ever be considered worthly replacements for Thames Television and TVS.In my opinion I think not!Carlton and Meridian have not pulled their weight!,their contribution to the ITV network as major companies enjoying the spoils from the richest parts of the country that they serve has been absolutely appauling,Today with Des and Mel,if that's the best Carlton can do,no wonder ITV is in trouble.How they were passed the quality threshold and their broadcasting licences is no more than a complete travesty!!! No one can surely deny the old recipe with big five,Thames,LWT,Central,Granada,Yorkshire,six counting TVS commited to contributing a majority of the network's programming worked.The new system where all the ITV companies in England and Wales are now one company under the Carlton/Granada merger has restricted healthy competion and made it a slave to the shareholder.Forever cutting costs,restricting in-house production in favour of those from independent production companies and concentrating too much on money making exercises like ITV Play.ITV has lost touch with it's viewership and doesn't want to listen! The new recipe is like trying to make a cake from stale flour,dried egg and forgetting the baking powder,a disaster!!!If ITV really wants to get back on form go back to the old recipe,the new one clearly isn't working!!!
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As an indirect problem for her, the bidding for the breakfast franchise was lost to TVAM and went to GMTV - Thatcher didn't want TVAM to lose the franchise and phoned the director on the day they lost the franchise to apologise.
Bring Back Thames TV!
The Conservatives, need you say more?
Space after the comma.
The generic ITV network one is at http://www.tv-ark.org.uk/itvlondon/thames/idents/thames1989-itv.rm
And the last version is at http://www.tv-ark.org.uk/itvlondon/thames/idents/thames1992new.rm
of course they still make programs for other channels.
as for the ITV franchises, what will happen after analogue switch off? will there be such a thing?
Indeed Thames TV is still active, i.e The Bill
apologies for the late editing. put the extra line in before I saw your reply. honest guv..
Des and Mel isn't made by Carlton though.
If Thames had survived then it probably would have bought Central tv, and then got itself in a buying race with Granada to control ITV, then merged to create ITV Plc. You have to remember that its Thames that started the whole pop idol craze, that lead ITV to go in to reality programming in a big way that it did.
We're living in different times .. the big ITV contractors were swimming in money in the 1980s and early 1990s, and the commissioning process was far less competitive and money oriented than it is now...
Bring back Thames sure .. but don't expect halcyon days that are long gone..
sadly.
p.
Thatcher was furious. After the programme was transmitted a team of lawyers were called in and every one of then said there was nothing illegal with the programme.
Allegedly, Thatcher was determined to punish Thames. The franchises were due for renewal and instead of awarding them on programme quality, the Conservatives decided to award them to the highest bidder.
Although Thames was a wealthy company, there was no way they could compete with the financial muscle of Carlton.
The rest is history.
After the franchises were awarded the IBA was also disbanded and was reformed under a different title with less powers.
IBA was disbanded way before the franchises were awarded (well a year previously!) the ITC who took over the IBA's role were mainly made up of people from the previous regulator. So any changes really were not ultimately the ITC's fault but were thanks to the 1990 Broadcasting Act.
Initally the franchises were awarded for stations to transmit from 1982 to 1990 but were obviously extended to the end of 1992 to allow legisation etc to be passed thorugh. Carlton nearly took over Thames in the mid 80s but a new Executive to Thames under the name of Richard Dunn cried to the IBA that this shouldnt be allowed and the merger was pulled off nearly at the last minute.
At first, the 1990 Broadcasting Act would allow franchises to be won to the highest bidder but with thanks to David Mellor, a quality threshold was put in place. If the highest bidder would have been the ultimate decision then even Carlton wouldn't have won London as there was one another bidder who bid about a couple of thousand more than Carlton (I believe it was CPV-TV) and Mersey TV would have taken Granada's place up North for example.
Thames and Carlton were two different companies. Carlton was a programme publisher, basically they didn't need to set up studios as all their commissions came from outside companies. Thus yearly costs of Carlton of maintaining their company would have been lower than Thames. The early part of the 90's saw Thames start stripping their workforce down to get them ready for the 1991 Franchise round, I wonder what Thames would have been like if they won the franchise and would they even existed what with the takeovers etc.
People always say Carlton ruined ITV but I believe it's Granada who really put the bloody axe in. It's them who have closed down regional studios, got rid of all branding to have just one brand (and you thought Carlton were bad) Introduced Chav type telly and the rest is what's been said on here many times before.
Well they put in a bid in for the channel back in 1992 but they were the only ones who bidded for the station but the ITC did not allow it to go through saying it's best to get some more time to research the channel etc (oh and to get some more bidders!)
Southbank is Granada thesedays sadly.
Great bring politics into it, why don't you? :rolleyes:
ITV went crap when Tony Blair became Prime Minister in the late 1990s, not under the Conservative government. I recall that ITV was better in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher so you can't blame her for that. Although the franchise awards and the handover from one company to another happened under John Major, the franchise process was expiermental that obviously proved as unsuccessful. We all expierement on different things only to find in the end that tey don't work.
You can't blame Mrs Thatcher for Thames losing its franchise. The late Richard Dunn bid less than Carlton and so didn't retain the franchise. TV-am was a great company as well as Thames. Bruce Gyngell was an excellent boss and kept his company together.
I blame the Labour government for allowing ITV to dumb down since the late 1990s. The Conservatives were not in power when the Carlton/Granada merger was completed in 2004. We did not get Coronation Street more than three times a week under Margaret Thatcher. I prefer Thatcher-era television than Blair-era television.
To avoid a slanging match, I will leave it right here.
The whole takeover sha'bang started on Nov 24 1993 in which the National Heritage Secretary annonced limited relaxation to Channel 3 ownership rules, allowing, subject to parliamentary approval, a Channel 3 regional company to hold two regoinal licences in areas with the largest advertising revenue, but not the two London licences. Within 5 days, Carlton made agreed bid for Central (bearing in mind they had at least 20% stake already in Central) and a further 5 days from that, Granada made a hostile bid for LWT.
People forget that the group behind Meridian took over Anglia and later went onto takeover HTV but once larger groups were made as one, this in turn allowed further takeovers to take place and all went ahead once the Monopolies and Mergers commission agreed so.
Even if the franchise round of 1991 was successful, it was set up in a way with thanks to the 1990 Broadcasting Act that once a franchise was in place, the said franchise holder could renew their franchise for a further five five years providing it was done at least 24 months before the said franchise ended and coughed up a fee to the treasure. So in theory, the franchises that started in 1993, even without mergers could run and run providing their franchises were not evoked.
TalkbackThames is a different beast to Thames the broadcaster. Before the loss of the franchise, Thames had a transmission site on Euston Road, an O.B. site at Hanworth, West London, and a studio complex at Teddington Lock. The transmission site has been redeveloped(knocked down), the O.B. site is now a Wickes or Homebase, and half the Teddington site sold off to Haymarket Publishing for offices.
Before Carlton, Thames had about 600 staff, by the end of 93 it was down to 42. Bit of resturcturing went on as it made itself into an indepedent studio production company at Teddington, and sold off everything else. Most staff were made redundant, though a lot came back as freelance.
The whole business model of Thames changed, and all the departments that were essential for a network provider(artists payments, air-time sales, overseas sales, network productions) just were'nt needed any more.
Those staff are long gone, and so is Thames as an ITV network company.
Long live Talkback/Thames
Best wishes, P.