Split Personality

It went out over a six weeks period during May and June 1985, most others had a film,

STV did its own thing, TVS was trying to clear off Knight Rider and Anglia and Grampian had riptides. plus Connections since all plus london were trying to clear it off.

One wonders if it was used to make up LWT hours for local programming on the cheap?

I assume that was intended as an ironic feature rather than something genuine intended to be useful to people on the commute home?

I don’t think this has been answered. From what I’ve seen of Thames and LWT, trailers for weekend shows were shown on Thames, and weekday programme trails went out on LWT. In the examples I’ve seen, these were generic “on ITV” trails rather than branded Thames or LWT.

Normally the ITV company who produced a show would make a generic ITV-branded trailer that any region could use, as well as a local version to show in their own region, and often a third “version”, which was just the raw footage for companies who wanted to make their own promo for the show in their local branding. (Tyne Tees, incidentally, often just ran the raw footage with a live voiceover and super). Post 1989, I believe there was a dedicated network promotions team who produced the trailers, but the principle was the same.

I’ve occasionally heard Thames announcers promoting a weekend programme in vision (normally if it had some relevance to what had just been shown, perhaps part two of a mini series they’d shown part one of) but they would again refer to the channel as ITV rather than LWT.

EDIT: I’m sure I’ve seen weekday programmes promoted on LWT in Carlton branding (“Tuesday night on Carlton”) so either things had relaxed by then due to the relationship between Carlton and LWT being more amicable than that between Thames and LWT, or I was wrong to assume that most “cross-promotions” in the Thames/LWT era were generically branded.

In Danny Baker's second autobiography he says it was part of an attempt to move the station upmarket.


Makes sense when you think of what was happening in London at the time, Yuppies and all that. They didn't want a big LE style show doing quirky stories. It was around the same time that LWT smartened up their presentation, ditching the 70's black black backgrounded logo for the smart white one. Wasn't there a poncy promotion where all their stars were photographed by Lord Lichfield?

The new ident come in two years earlier, the poncy promotion by the photographer, Snowdon come in 4 years earlier. So the seeds had been growing for a while.

It doesn't sound like it, and the fact it's Fred Housego* doing it would suggest it was for real. Also it would have been too expensive and too technically complicated for an ironic item I'd have thought.


Problem is that travel news on TV in the evenings doesn't really work as it's most useful to people at work who aren't in front of their telly. London Tonight had it at the start too with Fiona Farrell at New Scotland Yard with their traffic camera network.

*a few years later he was employed by LBC as a big name to do their drivetime travel reports, he presented a comedy clips show at the weekend too

It has always puzzled me why the requirement for local news in the capital differed to that in the rest of the country. Not just the lack of it on LWT over the weekend, but the fact that the BBC showed a cartoon or similar in London when the rest of the UK saw their regional news summaries. The London/SE region, particularly on the BBC, extended far beyond the capital itself - as far as West Oxfordshire to the west and the Kentish coast to the east, and there was no less “news” in these towns and cities than anywhere else. A bus strike in Oxford, a robbery in Leytonstone or a house fire in Acton were unlikely to feature on the national news.

Exactly, which is why I thought it might have been done with tongue in cheek.

Don’t forget not even Thames had a proper local news programme until they were sort of forced to reboot ‘Today’ in 1977 after the Sex Pistols business.

The BBC London and SE region was both ludicrously large, and weirdly shaped. It was partly the result of the old VHF area served by Crystal Palace which was far larger than the subsequent UHF area. And CP VHF had relays such as Hungerford and Rye fed from it.

There’s a debate on DS currently whether or not Oxford BBC 1 VHF was tied to London or Birmingham

The BBC didn’t really react for years to what ITV were doing in Kent, East Sussex and Oxfordshire. All a bit odd really

Nice of him to welcome me personally in his opening link.

In 1988 they also dropped Cannon and Ball and Jimmy Tarbuck, so there was a genuine attempt by LWT to hike upmarket a bit and drop programmes that had been playing to ageing, declining audiences. Greg Dyke was Chairman of ITV Sport at the time and 1988 saw the dropping of wrestling and darts because they were too downmarket.

Weekend world was also given the boot. Bullseye started being moved to 2pm or delayed.
Of course price is right getting swapped with 9pm programmes.

Its wasn't all dyke. John birt also had his finger in this.

Did it really work.