Yeah, there were definitely Carlton trails in the last week of Thames along with those closing montages. I definitely remember a Superman II trailer ("New Year's Day on Carlton!") appearing on Thames on New Year's Eve - it might *only* have been Superman II because New Year's Day was a Friday so there wasn't much of Carlton to promote...
While on screen they handled the crossover with some dignity, the mood behind the scenes was nasty.
Thames and Carlton (along with the rest of the network) had been at loggerheads throughout much of 1992 over Thames' programme rights. Apparently there was an agreement made previously which would have meant Thames couldn't repeat its programmes on a rival terrestrial channel for a ten year period (at the time Thames were bidding for Channel 5 so this could have been an issue). Thames retaliated by saying it wouldn't produce any new programmes for the network for the rest of its franchise, which would have left huge gaps in the schedule. In the end, the network relented.
They also tore up the rule book where it came to its local programming quota, and took the attitude of "what are they going to do... take our licence?"
Also, Thames had its share of the film rights for movies that were shown on the network, and it was a condition of its existing licence that they should be sold on to Carlton. Thames refused the offer that Carlton made, inflating the value by having Channel 5 Holdings (effectively Thames under a different name) offer £20 million for them, ,more than double what Carlton was offering. It went to court and Carlton ended up settling for around £14 million.
As a result of all this, where were just a handful of Carlton trailers shown in the last week of 1992, merely pointing to programmes that Thames would itself have advertised for the following week had it kept its licence.
Last edited by Whataday on 26 January 2016 12:34pm