Did the loss of Thames result in a decline of standards?

Yes, and the IBA suggested changes to the narration as well. Then said the programme was good to go. So it did. Followed two years later by the IBA. Mind you, speculation dictates what could have happened to the scenario had the IBA not been replaced by the ITC...

I guess even if Thames had stayed it's quite likely This Week would have gone (or been dumbed down) sooner or later anyway.

I seem to remember that as a curmudgeon version of Watchdog,
it was the TV version of Radio 4's Checkpoint? Info-tainment that always ended with Roger Cook getting beaten up by small time criminals.

John Pilger's films for ATV, Death of a Princess also ATV, YTV's First Tuesday strand, and of course This Week and Granada's World in Action are the programmes history will quite rightly record.

To be fair Cook report is up there with First Tuesday, and World in Action. For most of the late 80s and nearly all the 90s the Cook report went after everyone. IT got a BAFTA for of outstanding quality investigative reporting.

I sometimes found the Cook Report rather scurrilous and appealing to the baying mob mentality. For example, Cook's repeated hounding of Colin Stagg wasn't proper journalism; it was a witch hunt based on nothing more than a hunch, like the treatment of Christopher Jeffries by certain tabloids.

In an article in the 17th October 1991 edition of The Times, a spokesman from Thames stated: “We can be more profitable this way, being forced out of broadcasting will save us £32.5m a year in bid payments, £30million a year in advertising revenue taxes and about £10m in transmitter cost”.

Thames had made a (confidential) contingency plan in the event that it lost at the 1991 franchise auction to become an independent producer and close down the Euston road studios. Is it therefore safe to say that the management of Thames secretly want the company to lose but did not have the courage not to re-apply for its licence because the closure of the Euston Road studios would have resulted in a large number of redundancies?

Some thoughts about a name: Thames is truly robust and timeless name for an ITV company holding the London weekday franchise. Mention Thames to anybody in the world and they would immediately think of London even if they had never visited the city or watched a single programme produced by Thames. Carlton in comparison is not just unconnected to London and unconnected to television but is a very vague name that could be the name of almost anything. A Vauxhall Carlton? Therefore it has the potential to make Carlton a weak brand. If Thames had won in 1991 but was eventually morphed into a single unified ITV then would that have resulted in the loss of Thames as a visible brand? Thames also had an international presence whilst it held the London weekday franchise which acted as a further impetus to safeguard its name – on its productions at least. It's somewhat intriguing that both of the companies which merged to form ITV had vague names unconnected with the regions that they originally broadcast in.

I'd say it's very unlikely. It's not the closure of the studios themselves that would have caused massive redundancies, it's the loss of their core business! Also of course in the course most of it's management would have been in the firing line in that scenario, if not when the operation was wound down but when it was inevitably taken over afterwards.


Only the most ruthless manager would actively want to make many hundreds of people redundant and then get a nice pay off. From what I hear about Thames (and I did work for them a bit after they went off air) I don't think there was anyone there secretly going 'yes!' when they found out that they were losing their license


and that's because of the TV station not the famous geographic feature?



Hence their logo, which morphed into 'London'


Which was their first advert.

'Carlton' as a word has/had a few conotations, there are some nice hotels called Carlton


Probably, see for example 'Granada'



It kinda makes sense, a company would a geographic name would find it hard to expand out of it's area. Had things been different having an ITV company based n Plymouth or Birmingham called 'Thames' wouldn't work.

(mind you since then 'Capital Radio' has popped up all over the country so it's maybe not that strange! Heart FM also was originally a geographic name)

I suspect it may have more to do with the river than the long-gone TV station, bearing in mind the river's been present for centuries, whereas Thames the TV station was only "there" for just under 25...



Rediffusion wasn't connected to television before it came around. Neither was ABC, or ATV or Granada (the name of a Spanish province and also city in Spain). By your logic if we had to have names that were connected to television and the area they served we'd all get stuck with North West Television.

This is what is known in the industry (and everywhere else) as "putting a brave face on things".

Just to put things into perspective, Thames' annual profits before they lost their franchise were around £70 million (in today's money). The entire of FremantleMedia makes about £8 million profit each year.

Actually yes it was, they used to provide 'piped radio' and latterly television to homes... an early cable system. Hence the name. Although of course Carlton was also involved in TV before it became a broadcaster


Yep, althouh three were involved in similar, rival mediums (cinema, newspapers and theatre) and got into TV so they didn't have to compete with it

It raises a question whether Thames wanted to be a broadcaster or a producer over the period from 1993 to the turn of the Millennium or whether the spokesman was indeed putting on a very brave face. I have not checked any of the figures yet for validity but, assuming they are roughly accurate, it's undeniably a big tumble from about a £70m to an £8m annual profit even if what the spokesman said was true that Thames saved £72.5m a year being forced out of broadcasting.

My own gut feeling is that if Carlton didn't win the London weekday franchise in 1991 then they would have taken over whoever else would have won it. Therefore it is probably safe to say that Thames was 'saved' from a takeover by Carlton by losing. What I find intriguing is that if Thames really wanted to be a broadcaster after 1992 then, apart from its partnership with the BBC in UK Gold and its failed attempt to win the Channel 5 contract, it has made no effort to re-enter broadcasting and by the mid 1990s it had disposed of almost all of it's broadcasting facilities. It's also notable that Thames could have re-entered broadcasting as a cable TV channel for London and its surrounding towns because a high percentage of streets had been cabled by the late 1990s. Was the lack of desire for Thames to become a broadcaster in the late 1990s a reflection of Thames showing little interest in broadcasting apart from popular entertainment at prime time whilst it held the London weekday franchise, and considered news and most other programmes to be a 'nuisance' only to be produced in order to maintain its public service commitments? The core business of Thames was broadcasting rather than production of programmes but was broadcasting something they, as a company, really didn't enjoy doing at all but only did so because commercial breaks in London were very lucrative? If Thames had attempted to replicate themselves on a satellite or cable channel then they would only have earned only a small fraction from commercial breaks as they did on ITV.

Going back to the figures of £70m vs £8m profit as a broadcaster vs independent producer then does this go any way to explain the claim made by the OP in the first post about the fall in quality of programmes produced by Thames?

But Thames (albeit under the ownership of Pearson) DID remain in broadcasting and have broadcasting facilities. They were a key part of the successful Channel 5 bid.

Thames stayed at Teddington until 1996 when they moved to Pearson's HQ at 1 Stephen Street. Two studios were constructed within the building, which were used primarily to produce Channel 5 programmes. Channel 5 was played out from Stephen Street by "Pearson Television Broadcasting" which was a rebranded (and likely trimmed down) Thames Engineering.

I believe these studios are since gone, but Stephen Street is still the HQ of FremantleMedia UK (and therefore Thames).

Footnote: I believe UK Gold was based at Euston Road until 1994 or late 1993 at least - Thames had a long term lease on the premises and were hoping to sell the building to the BBC but no sooner had this been agreed was the entire site compulsory purchased for redevelopment. UK Gold ended up being played out from Stephen Street also (Pearson still holding a 15% stake in UK Gold until Flextech acquired this in 1996).