26th Anniversary of the biggest shake up in ITV

Even though The Bill was popular, it was nowhere near as popular and long running as Coronation Street.
If Granada had taken it elsewhere it would have been a big problem to ITV.
I'd agree that whatever decision had been made in 1991-3 that the direction ITV has gone by now would have been very similar with or without Thames. I don't remember Carlton with fondness, and it is a pity that Thames was lost to the network (not to mention those staff employed there), but a shake up was on the cards. Changing TSW to Westcountry or TVS to Meridian wasn't going to be enough.

In a Digital Spy thread on this matter, someone says that Thames "left at the right time" in that they didn't have to stick around into an era when they could not have been what they had been, and I think that's right. Certainly it's complete nonsense to suggest - as someone did, *again*, on DS - that the values of the old ITV could have survived simply because Thames did. Those values would have proved unsustainable in the new environment anyway, and the complete culture change that Granada made proves that. If they could transform themselves so completely, Thames most certainly could have done. Happily, you don't see anything like as much of it on this forum as you once did, but you still see quite a few instances on DS of the whole idea that Thames might have been able to make something like The World at War as a licence holder in, say, 1995, which can utterly be disproved by the rather obvious fact that Granada didn't make anything remotely like Brideshead or The Jewel in the Crown. You'd have needed different political and social values for a very long time *before* the early 1990s for things to be different, not different licence holders. Someone on DS recently even suggested that if Thames had stayed on they'd never have closed the news channel and would have a commercial version of BBC Four. For f***'s f***ing sake!

As has been stated in this thread, Thames' output was definitely starting to feel out of step with the times (the argument often used apropos Southern). I know they initially commissioned and networked the first two series of Men Behaving Badly before the Network Centre didn't want it and it became a huge success for the BBC, just as Southern did do Noah's Castle and Going Out as well as the Famous Five & Worzel, but Thames' sitcom output tended to be very archaic and Terry and June-esque - it was a demographically better (more southern and hence, mostly, more affluent - I stress the "mostly" because I knew parts of Medway & Thanet with terrible deprivation and, of course, 1950s-style school apartheid making it even worse, and I know about e.g. Harrogate) way of being old-fashioned than the Yorkshire sitcoms that LWT hated having to show, but that's about all that can be said for it. They were, as Andy Medhurst said of T&J in The Listener at the time of its last series, Macmillanite sitcoms, as out of step with what was really happening to capitalism in London and the south-east as actively socialist series would have been. The last of those sitcoms, Law and Disorder with Penelope Keith, was actually shown over a year after Carlton took over the licence, and feels like the absolute last knockings in the same way that Mother's Ruin, also from 1994, does for the old style of northern sitcom.

Ultimately the technological and social changes were always going to happen, and it was probably kindest to Thames' reputation that they only saw the first couple of partial years of them as a franchise-holder. If they'd stayed on and Granada had lost (although Coronation Street going to Sky would have been so controversial that I doubt it could ever have been more than a threat, and it's often said that the quality threshold, the product of Hurd & Mellor who had more traditional conservatism in them than most other cabinet ministers by then, was introduced at least partially to ensure that it wasn't lost to the network, which would have devalued it massively and made the higher bids unsustainable), and they had thrown the old values on the fire to ensure that they came out top, people on Digital Spy would be saying that the old values might have survived if only ITV had still had Granada - and they'd be every bit as stupidly wrong then as they are now. It is social and cultural changes that count, not franchise/licence changes.

When Thames lost the licence, The Sun naturally got excited about Sky bidding for The Bill - but even though it wasn't an institution like Coronation Street, it was popular enough that it was sufficiently important for ITV that they'd have wanted to hold on to it at all costs. Which indeed they did without much hassle until it reached the end of its natural life, as almost all series do in the end. Sky was nowhere near big or established enough to get it at the time.

Seeing/hearing coming back off-air is the ultimate confirmation all is good ? I agree, LWT 'losing' their signal
wasn't their concern, but nevertheless.........

I wonder if we will arrive at the day when Coronation Street arrives at the end of its natural life?
I did watch it many years ago when it was on twice a week, but stopped when Hilda Ogden left.
It now seems to be on every day twice (I'm sure it can't really be) so it must be still doing well enough.
But, is it sustainable?

What was Thames promising in programming terms? All I can say for sure is if it had won Dangermouse, Count duckula And Victor and hugo would have all been give repeat airing on citv. Also was the money going to he there if who was ever trying win the franchise was also trying to sell if off?

Also why didn't CPV just say, If TVAM loses its franchise were take over the new operations since there already in place etc. Win win either way? since there would have the building either way.

On a vaguely related matter (connected to ITV's conscious efforts over a long period, starting in the 1980s, to reduce its dependency on those who would soon be heading for such places): were regional adverts for care homes particularly commonplace in the pre-1993 days? I saw such an ad for one in Cornwall on ITV on New Year's Day, just before the racing. Far better production values now of course than would have been on TSW ...

Taking over the building and operations of a closed TVam is a different proposition to sharing operations with a TVam that is still on air.


The latter is a lot cheaper as there are many synergies between the two operations. The former means more staff and more costs for CPV as everything will be dedicated to them rather than shared.

It kind of blows their whole business plan out of the water. An alternative would be more than just 'we'll take over their building'

Yes you make a very valid point and I agree with you. The specific point I was trying to make was why would Thames be concerned if Home and Away was getting through to LWT or not? They would have lined up the circuit way before the handover period mid programme. If you're sat in Thames MCR watching off air before or after the switch point you have no idea whether what you’re seeing back is from your tx suite or LWT’s (apart from a big bump in the picture at the appropriate time!). I only raise it in conjunction with this specific example.

Let us not forget that Carlton were given an official b********g for the quality of their programming from the ITC barely a year after they went on air.

Yeah, they just double endcapped it. A Thames Television Production. A Yorkshire Television Presentation For ITV. That lasted until they allowed indies to make shows for the network.

Well, yes, but it was still the case that Thames would get some stuff on air more or less because it was Thames' "turn" to do things. Actually in Independent Television In Britain it says that Thames weren't especially popular around the network because they would often throw their weight about and be very demanding. In the old system you would get things like LWT dropping Cannon and Ball in 1988 because they were considered too downmarket and their ratings were declining, only for them to be signed up by Yorkshire so they still had to show Cannon and Ball because Yorkshire were guaranteed X number of hours on a Saturday night.

Ostensibly the Network Centre would have stopped that, although obviously there were plenty of politics about. I remember reading that the various companies would bombard the Network Centre with stats about which shows performed below average in their regions, and there was that famous incident in 1997 when Beadle's Hotshots was dropped mid-run by request of LWT because it was perfoming so badly in what was a key slot for them - despite the fact it was actually made by LWT. But presumably the idea was to avoid weak shows staying on because it was the specific company's "turn" to fill this or that slot.



Well, yes, but many other companies were similarly rebuked - Yorkshire and Tyne Tees got a ticking off for doing too many pan-regional programmes of poor quality, and I remember HTV were criticised for the poor quality of their local programmes (at which point they immediately promoted them to 7pm on Mondays and Wednesdays and moved the network shows to 5.10 to prove a point).

As I mentioned, I've got no brief for Carlton and it is true that they had teething troubles in their first year and several programmes didn't work, but they were launching a lot of new programmes at once. There was probably also a factor in that quite a lot of people behind the scenes had vast experience in televison but maybe not so much in primetime ITV which is undoubtedly a very tough area to compete (Lose a Million is the perfect example, it might have worked on C4 or even BBC1, but not on primetime ITV).

Besides, LWT's first year or so on air was a total disaster, for many of the same reasons. Worked out OK for them in the end, didn't it?