26th Anniversary of the biggest shake up in ITV

As things turned out half the stuff that survived after 1992 continued to run for years long after Thames had left the network. As above, TIYL moved networks (and then I think it came back to ITV in the 2000's?), The Bill ran until 2010 and Wish You Were Here was still on air as late as 1999 or maybe 2000.

Of course if Thames had taken all this stuff to Sky or the BBC, its plausible I suppose they wouldn't have received the same amount of money for them (especially from Sky at that time) and some other show on ITV may have decided to become really successful and rack up a successful 15 odd year run. Its all speculation however and we'll never know.

Talking of formats that survived after their home networks folded, Through The Keyhole started as a segment on TV-am in 1983 on the first edition, and was later farmed off altogether into its own show that ran for 20 odd years first time round.

Not only Through The Keyhole, David Frost's Sunday morning show outlived TVam too.

Through the Keyhole went from TVam to ITV and then to the BBC and now back to ITV (oddly the first episode of the current version went out the night before Frosts death)

This is Your Life was brought back by STV in the 2000's but only last 1 episode I think

Wasn't Breakfast With Frost show on the BBC effectively a different show from what he did on TV-am though? I don't think the production crew moved over. I'm not sure someone presenting a similar format on another channel is quite the same as a show moving over wholesale.

Im sure though the key hole went to sky after the bbc?

Pretty sure it was seen as a continuation, and there was only a week or two between one finishing and one starting. Of course it was a BBC production tmrather than a TVam or a Paradine one, knowing how Frost worked he probably did take some staff over to the BBC, after all it was a new programme not a replacement for something else.

Think it did. They were scrapping the barrel when it came to famous people when it was on BBC1, god knows what the calibre of them was on Sky

Frost on Sunday ended in summer 92, it never come back after the summer holls expect for one of speical 28th Dec? Then bbc started screening the series in jan 1993.

Frost only worked 30 to 40 weeks a year on tv am. Other speical included tvam reports, Anne dimond on Sundays etc.

Yes, the Beeb didn't have a Sunday morning political programme before then, but Frost's programme had become so established and such an important part of the political week that they snapped it up. As mentioned, it wasn't an all-year round show on TVam and he'd actually stopped in June, before coming back for one final show on TVam's last Sunday.

Breakfast with Frost had the same editor as Breakfast News and their production team was responsible for the news bulletins within it, but as mentioned, it was pretty much sold as a straight swap and it was pretty much exactly the same format.

David Frost was very good at bouncing back, of course despite CPV-TV being beaten by Carlton in the franchise auction he did quite a few shows for Carlton, including the revival of his old sixties Frost Programme. He owned the format for Through The Keyhole, hence why he pitched it to any channel going and came with it.



Yes, they made a single episode for ITV in 2007 - Trevor McDonald presented and Simon Cowell was the subject, though they got rid of the surprise element of the format, he was billed from the start as being the subject (funnily enough he was also the subject of the final episode they recorded of the previous run). They announced it was planned to be an occasional series but they never did another one, which is perhaps a shame as it's still a good format and it could still do a job for a channel.

Of course at the turn of the century there was a similar format on ITV called Stars And Their Lives, introduced by Carol Vorderman, where in the first half the audience would be invited to guess who a mystery celebrity was, who was in on it, and then in the second half the celeb would have to identify various people from their past. It was never a series but they did quite a few, although later the name changed to Star Lives and the guessing bit was dropped and the subject was announced beforehand.

In reality, though, it would be highly unlikely for Thames to have taken all their shows away from ITV to other channels. If you're an independent production company, especially one that specialised in light entertainment and drama, you would have been mad to turn down offers from your shows from the biggest broadcaster of those programmes in Britain. Indies work for whoever wants them.

Of course the biggest show to make the jump was Men behaving badly, but Thames never owned that?

Its a valid point to throw in as the show was co-produced by and presumably presented to the network by Thames, even if the show's first series was never seen again until the entire lot was pushed out on DVD. Harry Enfield felt he wasn't suited to sitcoms, though he would eventually appear in them years on albeit not as a main character.

Wasn't there a BSB tie-up at some point too, which also then included BSkyB?

That was just the TV-am news. When the announcement was made that TV-am had lost their franchise, they closed their news service, and for a one off fee, Sky News provided the news bulletins and also some reporters.

No - I don't mean the news outsourcing contract that Sky had with TVam. There was a deal between BSB/BSkyB and Frost ISTR.

Doing a bit of digging it appears that an edit of the TVam 'Frost on Sunday' show was broadcast on BSB Now. I though this continued with Sky - but I think I may be wrong.



When Frost moved to the BBC he brokered a deal that allowed him to sell the show to Sky, who repeated it on Sky News.