50th Anniversary of Thames Television

Today marks 50 Years since Thames Television first went on air on 30th July 1968..

This has gone largely unnoticed today. I only heard about it from an email from Network DVD. There's no mention of it on the official Thames website or twitter account (there's a few posts about it on unofficial facebook pages), and I suppose that's partly because the Thames TV of today is a completely company from that of 50 Years ago.

YESTERDAY was 50th Anniversary of YTV and this coming week its LWT 50th its been all over twitter .

Thames does still exist today as a production company but completely different to the one that dominant pre 1993. There's been plenty of postings about Thames' 50th on twitter under the #thames50 and #thamesday hashtags.

I know we like a bit of companies house action here so I've nicked these from the similar thread on DS....

This is the listing for Fremantlemedia, look at the company name history: http://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/00276928

The original Thames Television also still exists, though as a non trading dormant subsiduary of RTL: http://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/00926655

No idea why they did it that way though


EDIT: to make URLs work

Wonder why Thames' date starts from 1933?

Look at the incorporation document, British and Overseas Film Sales is the company name which was ABPC - not Thames TV, Thames TV seem to have bought the firm in 1973 and it became Thames Television International Ltd, a Distribution Arm I guess

https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/00926655

Yes Wikipedia says it was a subsiduary of ABPC so it's not a case of Thames buying the company, but a renaming of a sister company. Remember Thames' majority shareholder was ABPC, although by 1973 APBC was part of EMI.

It looks like they took an old film distribution and sales company that was part of ABPC and used it to form Thames sales and distribution arm.

That company, founded in 1933 is now FremantleMedia, one of the biggest TV production companies in the world

Correct. In fact it's more accurate to consider FremantleMedia the successor to Thames rather than the production label Thames.

What was pre-93 Thames TV became Pearson TV, with Thames as a label, and then Pearson became FremantleMedia.

In fact at one stage Thames was very nearly the name for FremantleMedia until it was decided it was too hard to pronounce globally.

I can see where they got that idea (1 minute in)

It never even occurred to me to pronounce it any other way, but it is logical if you've never herd of one of the most famous rivers in the world!

My other half had always deliberately mispronounced it 'the River T-Har-mees'

Maybe they should have called the company 'Tems'

Although I think the Oxfordshire town of Thame whose name is presumably derived from the river ( or vice versa?) is (I think) pronounced Tame ?