What was your favorite regional ITV station growing up?

Production-wise, and in terms of the journalistic quality it was solid. In terms of presentation it was weak; neither of the presenters were very engaging (Lynch in particular was very wooden, but Thewlis wasn't great either although she did get much better in later years with the BBC) and I don't think it did at all well in ratings against either Look North or the North's production, which was a key factor in the decision to go back to a single production from Newcastle (with opts) with Mike Neville as anchor.

Found this site today on YouTube - it's the Thames TV archive operated by Freemantle. Fascinating revisiting programmes I watched as a youngster - so was of course my favourite.

https://www.youtube.com/user/ThamesTv/featured

Some brilliant archive stuff on there. My only slight gripe is they tend to edit out opening and closing credits of complete shows. I really don't know why given it seems to be an official channel.

It's a digital shop front more than anything else. "Come and buy bits of the Thames back catalogue", they're saying. The TV-am channel is the same. There are probably other examples too.

To answer the OP’s original question, Southern Television and London Weekend Television.

Also a way of them easily monetising bits of archive they'll probably never sell through YouTube ad income.

Yes the Thames archive YouTube account was very good at uploading topical archive footage, for example if someone famous died or was in the news they'd put up a clip of when they were on Afternoon Plus.

It's obviously a way of promoting clip sales

There must have been a time when we were growing up, and disappointed that an ITV company changed their logo. Yes, I accept very few did, but STV did in 1985, from the joined up letters to the thistle, and I was a bit disappointed they had, but it grew on me.

Of course, going to Whitely Bay in 1993, and discovering Tyne Tees had changed their logo (well they hadn't, Yorkshire done it for them), from the joined up TTTV logo, to the chunky TTTV not joined up, disappointed me.

Controversially I found the drab grey thing that Tyne Tees had so dull and uninspired that when Channel 3 North East came along after 4 long years, I was the opposite and happy for something just a bit more... interesting to be onscreen. Okay, so it puts me at complete odds with everyone else, but it was more what it represented for the name that seems to be most people's problem. However quickly it may have been rumoured to been put together, both in terms of the actual visuals and audio (even with the off the shelf music) it was a huge improvement over what had been on the screen immediately prior for nearly half the 90s in the north east.

Also as some people were talking about the Euston Road Thames shop before, it suddenly reminded me of this bit of IVC I've had knocking around for a while. Here's Sally McLaren in the Thames booth in 1989 plugging some of the pretty poorly branded up tat you could get from there in a slightly cheeky fashion.


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Also called Look North. There's three BBC regions with the same name for the local news, Leeds, Hull and Newcastle.

When I said that I meant Tyne Tees's Northern programme Tyne Tees Today. But yeah Network North was something of a ratings disaster against anything you could compare it with 😉

Network North was good in one sense, that it tried to cover a smaller area, to deflect complaints about stories in the south of the region being largely ignored. But, would Yorkshire have expanded the coverage area of the programme, to the North of the Yorkshire region, had it been successful?