The 1980 ITV franchise auction

Wasn't it one oz man that turned the company around?

But the IBA hated his involvement, even if he made the business successful.

Was partly the ITA's fault for LWT's early woes by deciding that viewers needed high-brow entertainment at the weekend.

Was that the ITA? How I understood it was that LWT was made up of old BBC staffers that wanted to bring more arts to the schedule?

It really was the ita. Lwt blow them out of the water and the ita loved it. Viewers hated it

Yes, but the ITA didn't have to accept their proposal, it was them who decided it was great and what the viewers needed and gave them the franchise because of it. They could have given it to one of the other applicants (I think ABC were expecting to get it at the time- the shotgun marriage with Rediffusion to form Thames was I think compensation for them not getting it).

LWT only had one opponent in both 1980 and 1991. Are there any reasons why the London weekend franchise was an unpopular choice?

Did LWT exist (or thought it existed) for London, for the weekend, or both?

The reason why that franchise existed was because the regulators didn't want one company running the London service due to the sheer population size of the area.

An educated guess as to why LWT only ever had one opponent in 1980 and 1991 was because of the amount of PSB commitments that had to be crammed into 2 and a half days of airtime, LWT only just managed it but became good at it, I think any new company would have struggled thereafter.

There was a great LWT documentary on YouTube that I think has been removed, which was made shortly after the Granada takeover in 1994, but it was noted that 'if you could succeed at LWT, you could succeed anywhere.'

That, and - an attempt at increasing advertising revenue competition. The thought being the London/South East market was so big and lucrative having one ITV programming provider on all week wasn't very good for the market.
So, the theory being if you split it up to weekday/weekend you'd then pitch Thames and LWT sales teams against each other, to offer advertisers different slots with different costs (i.e lower price) rather than one offering one price, no matter when it filled the gaps in programming...

..although that seemed to work quite well in larger geographical regions for Central, Scottish or Granadaland.

And London wasn't the only region to originally be split between weekends and weekdays. When Independent Television was first set up, London, the Midlands and the North were all considered so big in terms of population that they were all originally "dual regions".

North: weekdays Granada, weekends ABC
Midlands: weekdays ATV, weekends ABC
London: weekdays Rediffusion weekends ATV

In the 1968 franchise changes, the north region was split with Granada getting the north west franchise throughout the week and Yorkshire Television winning the new franchise for the other chunk of the old region. The Midlands became a single region, with ATV winning it, but losing their London Weekend franchise. This famously didn't stop ATV keeping their London studios at Elstree (now the BBC Elstree centre) and they continued to make many programmes down south despite having a Midlands franchise, much to the annoyance of the ITA/IBA.

Although no longer updated, this is a good website with regards to ITV Southern England, and in the TVS and Southern sections, has bits on the 1980 franchise battle.

http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~jamiebro/index.html

Weekends in the Midlands and North, did ABC operate the same schedule in both regions, or two separate
services ? ABC had a studio in Didsbury, Manchester, but wasn't playout/pres shared at Aston in Birmingham with ATV ?