ITV stations that lost their franchise

This humming noise was the same noise heard on the original Carlton idents, before and after the 8-note jingle played.

My gut feeling is if Thames hadn't lost the franchise, they'd have probably consolidated play-out with LWT anyway (either in NW1 or SE1). And such a thing certainly wasn't a new idea, didn't ATV and ABC do exactly that in the 60s in Birmingham for 'Midlands' play-out ?

Yep they shared a building - Alpha Studios.

Yes it probably would have happened, both companies needing to save money and having operational areas that are unused for parts of the week is very inefficient. LNN incorporated 3 of these operations of course.

These days of course, outside of Sky, all playout is done out of house so its not such an odd idea. If it had happened it would have led to quite some job losses, but of course better for the staff than what did happen

You'd have hoped they'd have done it on the South Bank considering what happened to Thames Euston

<Ahem> BBC Nations playout is still in-house.

The point about sharing playout in Birmingham in the 1950s and 60s is an interesting one.
Why could ATV and ABC do it there, but not Rediffusion and ATV in London or Granada and ABC in Manchester?

Was it down to the way those companies interacted with each other?
Was it that neither ATV (who were focused on the London franchise) or ABC (who were more focused on the North) regarded the Midlands as an area that was of secondary importance to them, so sharing facilities made more sense there?

Maybe. I suspect politics over ruled practicality with the other ITV 'sharer' companies.

Also don't forget ITN were on the 7th and 8th floor of Rediffusion's main base in Kingsway (Bang opposite the BBC's Bush House BTW)
I read somewhere, ATV had some office space in there too ?

The ground floor of the building today is a large Herman Miller (posh office chairs) showroom.

Didn't the Alpha studios building house BRMB from 1974 ?

Yes, good point. So is BBC News and BBC Parliament (although the latter wasn't at one point)

Well, to be fair, BBC News doesn't really have a playout operation - it's just the on-air news gallery playing out promos as if they were news items, and a network router allowing switches between studios to happen. (A bit like Five Live handles radio playout I think?)

Like just about any radio station, (with two or more studios !)

LWT committed to build a new transmission suite within the South Bank Centre in the event it was awarded a licence. It would have done so no matter who else was awarded a licence. It also said it would be happy to co-operate with whoever won another licence. And so the suite was built, very largely to TLS’s design but subsequently modified in conjunction with the LNN staff as they came on board - but there were not many until about 6 months or so before the handover from Thames. The LNN News operation was based on a Carlton design and was heavily modified from their original design which rumour has it was going to be based ‘in the City’. It was installed by IPK (a very pleasant and professional outfit as I’m sure you know). The cost at the time for these two areas, including substantial building modifications to the Centre, was said to be £13m.

LNN (or the JVOC as it was initially known) was created after LWT and Carlton won their licences, as I recall I saw the first LNN employee about 6 months after the licences were awarded. Nice bunch of people.

Apart from the main BBC Radio networks - who all have presentation operations with the exception of Five Live?

I did say just about

I'm not sure Radio 1 and 2 do, they use the 'flip:flop/offer:accept operation between studios I think ? I'm pretty sure all the national and local commercial stations are the same ?

So it's probably just Radio 3 and 4 ?