Lorraine September 2017 onwards

When TM moved to London, a new studio floor and production areas were built for them in the Princes Wharf building. When It was decided to go HD (which ITV Studios dithered about for years) it was more cost effective to use an existing studio gallery that was already HD and wasn't in use - ST 7.

The original studio cameras (Ikegami) were indeed brought down from Liverpool, and the studio mixer (pal) was ex- TLS studio 2 (GVG 300 - lovely, lovely mixer).

I don't understand references to Gabriel's Wharf? Gabriel's Wharf is the area to the East of the studio site that houses a number of bars, restaurants and designer shops. It has no connection to the ITV site.

I'm pretty sure the background was faked for quite a while before the HD refresh. I saw on one of the Celebrity Juice's segment intros set in the This Morning studio, the background was completely black.

They're 'smart' windows which allow someone to control exactly how much light is coming into the studio. This can give the effect of the windows being totally blackened or overly exposed. It means that if something is happening on the Thames such as a police search in the water then the windows could be blacked out.

What advantages of London?

You mean the daily soap starts travelling down from Leeds and Manchester to appear, or many of the external recorded links with film starts promoting their films? Or the myriad of other guests who also appear on BBC Breakfast, in Media City, either day before or day after? Whilst the cooks, fashion designers etc etc Even Dr Chris Steele (if he still does the show) are actually from the North and come down for the episodes!

I think you may be missing some of the history here - the programme was made in Liverpool initially then moved to London citing availability of guests as one factor.

What about Phillip, Holly, Eamonn, Ruth, Rylan and various others who live in (or pretty close to) London?

How often s Philip in Media city, Scotland or even in Hilversum, Netherlands recording programmes. Same go for the other presenters.

How does BBC Breakfast do when majority of their presenters are south-east centric?

Citing guests as one factor, which over time has proved not to be accurate, or the fact that its main presenters wanted to move to south-east/London to supposedly increase their own profiles and actually blackmailed Granada (as it was) to move to London and rent studios from LWT/The London Studios.

Didn't Granada own LWT by that time though?

How? In terms of celebrity guests you're always going to have easier access to the bigger names in London. Just ask The One Show.

In terms of the presenters being able to travel to other cities to do other shows, yes they can, but they will tend to be series recorded in a few days which no doubt sees them being put up in very nice hotels and not invovling a daily 400 mile round trip for 4 days a week days a week.

It's not just the presenters, the majority of the people invovled in making that show will be based in the South East.

You could point to BBC Breakfast as being a success story of sorts but that doesn't rely as heavily on celebrity guests and the decision to move it was purely political.

So the advantages, (a window looking out at water) are far outweighed by the disadvantages.

Availability of guests is irrelevant when ITV haven't got the space in Salford to accommodate anyway and has made its arrangements for TVC.

A pretty convincing "window" illusion can be created using screens, as the likes of GMB and (most) ITV plc regional news programmes prove.

I'd be surprised if TM isn't planning to have some sort of faux window at TVC.

To us TVF types of course, anything less than e.g. Ultra HD screens don't give a convincing enough "window" illusion. But, I'll wager that to most "normals" even crappy grainy back projection (which looks desperately unconvincing to us lot) is probably sufficient to fool them. So, TM needn't necessarily invest in anything expensive to achieve a "window" at TVC.