Branding Carlton

Close enough

To clarify, the font for the station's name was the font that station had been using beforehand - Bank Gothic for Yorkshire and Palatino Bold Italic (the 1989 ITV corporate font) for Border, for instance.

You're right that they didn't all share the same font, although to be picky, Yorkshire only adopted Bank Gothic at the point the heart idents were launched. Previously they'd used the same serif font as Tyne Tees (the name of which escapes me right now) which made it as far as the original (unseen) heart idents...

In order for that to have been successful, the rules would have had to have been relaxed. Had the rules been relaxed, Granada would have had UNM sooner. People always talk as if Granada and Carlton were on the same playing field. That's true when it came to the rules, but Granada had phenomenally deep pockets due to its other business interests.


and while we're at it...

Might have been different if Thames had stayed
No. Thames' owners were determined to get the hell out of ITV. They would certainly have not had the appetite to cope with the changes within the network and increased competition from multi-channel and would have sold out at the first opportunity.

Might have been different if Granada lost its franchise
This would have replaced a cash rich company with a relatively small fry operation backed by companies without deep pockets including Yorkshire Television which itself almost went bankrupt in 1993. So yes, might have been different, but not sure if that would have been a very nice different.

What if Carlton was allowed to buy Thames in 1985.. That would have stopped all this Crap. Expect for the mergers but that would have been pushed further down the line.

Looks like FrizQuadrata to me, used by Thames pre-1993

Law & Order uses that font too.


Granada's, Anglia's, and Meridian's were all Times New Roman, I think? Though Granada used tighter kerning than the others.


Would Thames still have been sold to Pearson then? The company now called Fremantle Media who still owns them to this day?


And wasn't the other North West bidder Mersey Television, which is now Lime Pictures?

That's the fella!

I'm not sure how attractive Thames would have been to Pearson - it would have been a much more expensive proposition.

The North West bidder was North West Television which was a consortium which included Mersey TV, Trinity Newspapers and Yorkshire. I believe it was headed by Phil Redmond.

I make an educated guess that Granada would have bought NWTV had Phil Redmond been successful, or encouraged him to reject the franchise and jump on board as a share holder in Granada. I base that on the approaches made by Granada to Tyne Tees and Yorkshire asking them to relinquish their new licences and join the lower bidding applications that Granada were a part of.

Never heard that before, where did you read that?

I think Phil Redmond mentions it in his autobiography.

Apologies, just to correct myself - Granada asked Tyne Tees to consider giving up their licence and joining their NETV consortium which had bid £10m less.

White Rose Television spent a lot of time badgering the Yorkshire board to do something similar. When the Yorkshire board refused, White Rose took the decision to review, but didn't really get anywhere (although they were quite correct in asserting that Yorkshire had overbid).