The photograph above is indexed as follows: 1 is a rough ground plan for our new building; 2 is the ICL block; and 3 the Euston Tower. The illustrations below are marked similarly.

This photograph shows the shell of the studio and technical areas. While work goes on with the upper floors, the interior of this area will be finished. Already the studio floors and walls are made, windows are being fitted to enclose the operational areas and the ventilation plant is being installed.

The sketch shows the full depth of the building – longer than Television House – from the Euston Road front door to the back overlooking Drummond Street. The part built extends only to the first ‘roadway’ passing through the building and only goes up to the second floor ceiling.

It is this first section with office space for some 50 people (phase 1), which will be completely ready for colour in November – the whole will not be ready for occupation until June or July of 1970.

There is still some shuffling of office areas going on and will probably go on until May 1970, but the general layout is now settled.

The second floor, starting from the Euston Road end, has wardrobe office/workroom, Telecine, VTR, Sound Maintenance, the Telephone Exchange, Technical Film Department offices, and then the Film Department, taking the major slice, right to the end of the floor.

The Film Department also have areas on the floor below and a vault in the basement, all joined by a goods/staff lift.

The third floor is entirely Programme Department, except for a cluster of Preview Theatres and viewing rooms, and overflows on to the fourth and fifth floors too. The fourth floor is mainly Sales, complete with Press, Research, Promotion and other closely-allied departments. On each of these floors the Director in charge has his office and immediate staff – thus there is no ‘executive floor’ as such.

The fifth floor does have the highest executive concentration, however, for instance the Board Room and Conference Rooms are all up there. The Restaurant and Club take up about one-third of the area and should have a good view over the whole site. A lot of thought has been applied to finding a layout for this area in which the cross-traffic is reduced to a minimum, and our architects’ experience on previous jobs like the Hilton Hotel (if not the Bunny Club – another of their designs) is proving valuable.

“Three teams of architects are working on the project and the co-ordination of all the contractors and sub-contractors is quite a major headache” says Phil Berkeley Head of Engineering Projects for Thames. “Team One is designing the building shell for the development company, Team Two is adding the internal work to make it a Television Centre, while Team Three are looking after the Technical areas where all the acoustic and other specialised problems occur.”

Philip’s job is to find out what people in Thames want (or think they will want in 1970/75) and feed this information in architectural terms to these teams. And of course to keep a co-ordinating eye on all the Engineering Department people planning technical facilities in detail. Currently we have Bob Warren looking after the Master Control, Presentation and C.A.R. areas – the heart of the system, Gunter Karn looking after Sound and Talkback – the nerves of the studio complex, while Alan Blockley looks after Telecine and VTR area – the eyes and memory if you like. The sole survivor of Engineering in Television House, Len Sutton, is looking after Film Department equipment requirements, and pretty major their changes are for colour.

Dozens of other people are involved, adds Philip, and the number will increase as the months go by.

Ken Pike is involved in the internal telephone and intercom systems, Fred Atkinson and Mike Coxhill with the GPO lines joining us to the Tower (right opposite but still needing 18 months’ notice to get the cables installed) and of course Stuart Sansom keeps an overall eye on engineering principles, policy, money, the ITA requirements and such ‘seeing the wood from the trees’ matters.

This leaves out all those at TVH who are actively helping to define the requirements, lay old ghosts and warn of new developments – have a new look at the familiar problems and try to anticipate how colour will affect all this. As Philip says, “Colour does indeed penetrate almost every aspect of our work, and we are continually using Boris Townsend and his team as a sort of talking encyclopaedia and instant idea testing station!”

Their work is beginning to show results at Teddington, where Studio One is most of the way to colour operation.

The post Euston – a bird’s eye view appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

D Day help for Staff

For some people the first sign that decimalisation was with us came with the arrival of the Jictar Report for the week ending 10 January. The cost per thousands, previously expressed in shillings, were in new pence.

Sales Department and their clients are already getting used to the new type of information. Example: a 30 second commercial slotted at the end of This Is Your Life on 6 January reached 1,920,000 homes in the London ITV area at a cost per thousand of 83 new pence (previous cost per ’000 would actually have been 16/7d but rounded up in the ‘old’ reports to 17/-).

For most of us Decimalisation is still something to be grappled with.

D Day, Monday 15 February, is however only a fortnight away, and Chief Accountant Max Lawson and his department are making their final preparations in a process of changeover and indoctrination that has been going on for almost two years.

Change Stations

One move will affect us all. From Monday 15 February, our restaurants, bars and trolleys will only accept the new decimal coins. This will avoid confusion and cut down delays in service. But to make purchases easier for the staff, Accounts Department is establishing a number of ‘change stations’ at crucial points. Old pence and threepenny pieces may be changed in multiples of 6d or 1/- for the new 2½p or 5p coins.

The change stations will be located at the following places:

Teddington

Chief Cashier’s office during normal working hours. Reception desk in the main hall during normal working hours. The ground floor of the Restaurant from 12 noon to 2 p.m. from Monday to Friday.

Euston

The Petty Cashier’s office (3rd Floor) during normal working hours. The Reception desk in the main hall during normal working hours. The cafeteria from 12 noon to 2 p.m. daily from Monday to Friday.

Hanworth

Mrs. Luccarini will change old pence for new during normal working hours.

Thames to screen next moon walk

Apollo 14 is due to land on the moon on the morning of Friday 5 February, and the astronauts will attempt a moon walk that afternoon. The team at ITN Moonbase will be Alastair Burnet, Peter Fairley, Paul Haney, Dr. Robert Jastrow, Head of the U.S. Institute of Space Studies, and Sqdn./Ldr. Gordon Sharp, of the Institute of Aviation Medicine at RAF Farnborough. Robert Hargreaves will be at Houston Space Centre in America.

Thames will be screening the moonlanding at 8.00 am and the moon walk at 2.30 pm and 6.30 pm. During these transmissions viewers will be able to telephone the ITN Moonbase on a special hot-line to the studio to have their questions answered on-air by experts.

Look-In off to good start

The first two issues of Look-in, the new Junior TV Times which went on sale earlier this month, were a virtual sellout. Alan Fennell, the new paper’s editor, reports preliminary figures of 470,000 and 435,000 for numbers one and two respectively. Both issues were supported with strong Magpie give-aways (cardboard models of the studio and production team). Each issue will feature Magpie, and Wreckers at Deadeye is being serialised during the first six weeks.

Thames on SFTA short-list

Magpie, The Benny Hill Show, Writer’s Workshop and producer Reg Collin have all reached the short-list of nominations for the 1970 Society of Film and Television Arts Awards.

Benny Hill has been short-listed for the Light Entertainment award; Magpie and Writer’s Workshop as two of four official ITV entries for the Rediffusion Star Award for children’s programmes, and Callan producer Reg Collin for the Producer/Director Production Award. This is the second year running that both Magpie and Reg Collin have reached the finals in their respective categories. The awards will remain a secret until 4 March when the winners will be announced at an Awards Ball at the Royal Albert Hall.

Top Ten and Twenty

The JICTAR figures for the first two weeks of the new year (ending 17 January) show that Granada jumped ahead of Thames into second place – a position which we occupied throughout the last 9 weeks of 1970. Top Twenty positions to date are: BBC with 11 programmes, Granada 9, Thames 7, ITN 6, Yorkshire 5 and LWT 3.

In London we maintained our lead in the list of the Top Ten programmes screened in the area (Thames 13, LWT and BBC 7 each), but lost our lead to the BBC in the table of the top ten originated programmes. Figures for this chart were: BBC with 7 places, LWT 6 and Thames 5.

In the Top Twenty chart for week ending 17 January, This Is Your Life was the highest Thames entry (equal third with 7-85 million network homes). Man At The Top leapt up 9 places from the previous week to 9 with 7.35 million homes and Shadows Of Fear entered the chart for the first time at 12 with 7.10 million homes.

Emergency measures for GPO strike

Special arrangements during the postal strike have been made by Teddington and Hanworth Manager Ken Pike. They include special delivery to all ITA premises and stations, all ITV companies and the Independent Television Companies Association, all advertising agencies, Post Office Telecommunications HQ and the Post Office Tower, Rediffusion Television and EMI. Urgent mail for overseas is also being accepted.

The company’s despatch riders are continuing to carry out their normal duties and in addition are also delivering important letters which would normally go by post.

All other post is being held by the secretaries in each department, to avoid a pile-up in the Post Room.

Postal Supervisor Bert Short and Travel Officer Don Heaven report “no panic and no problems to date.”

Previews at NFT2

After almost two years of research and filming, Till I End My Song will be seen on the network at 9.00 pm on Tuesday 16 February. It will be previewed at the National Film Theatre’s No. 2 cinema on 11 February. Written and produced by Jeremy Isaacs and directed by David Gill, this documentary records the sights and sounds of the Thames. It looks at the varied activities of the people whose lives centre around the river – from swan-upping to garbage disposal. It is the first Thames programme to be shown in the new peak time documentary slot of 9.00 pm.

Early in March the exciting Thames documentary exclusive on the ascent of Annapurna’s south face will also be previewed at NFT2. The programme, The Hardest Way Up, will be seen on the network on 16 March at 9.00 pm.

New officers sought for Club Committee

The Annual General Meeting and Elections of the Club will be held on Monday 1 February at 6.30 pm in the Teddington restaurant. Neither Club Chairman Ron Walsby nor Secretary Bernard Burke are standing for re-election. Urgent nominations are required for these posts and the rest of the committee.

The Club Committee is responsible for the Club bars (opening hours, service, prices, catering, etc.) and various social activities during the year. It is important therefore that as many as possible vote at Monday’s AGM.

The post Newsletter – 29 January 1971 appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

Designers get together

One of those joint conferences between ourselves and the BBC in which rivalry is forgotten for a while has recently taken place at Teddington. Members of the Guild of Heads of Television Design accepted the invitation of Patrick Downing to a meeting at Teddington on 7 October to discuss points of interest and mutual problems within the industry and to exchange ideas.

(Patrick is founding chairman of the Guild which came into being at the beginning of this year).

Those present were: Michael Yates, Head of Design, London Weekend; Peter Alexander, Head of Design, Scottish Television; Richard Levin, Head of Design Services, BBC; John Dilly, Head of Design, Southern; Eric Briers, Head of Design, Tyne Tees; Geoffrey Martin, Head of Design, Yorkshire; Richard Greenough, Head of Visual Services, ATV; Peter Roden, Head of Scenic Design, ATV; Alpho O’Reilly, Head of Design, Radio Telefis Eireann; Malcolm Beatson, Head of Design, ITN; Peter Ash, Head of Design, Granada; Clifford Hatts, Head of Scenic Design, BBC.

An added reason for the meeting was that it was the last opportunity all the members had for a meeting with Richard Levin, before his retirement. After the meeting Patrick on behalf of Thames, entertained members of the Guild to dinner on the MV Iris.

No floods

The time of extreme flood danger from the Thames early this month has now come and gone without the river bursting its banks – though some newspaper reports just before the danger time talked of “the gravest threat of floods in one hundred years”. Sighs of relief everywhere – including Thames studios at Teddington where the Admin Department had taken precautions.

Inevitably there is a sense of anticlimax and some people have wondered: was there unnecessary panic? As far as Thames was concerned there certainly was not. Flooding on a serious scale could have occurred. That it did not was due to a combination of three lucky factors: little rain to swell the rivers; very high barometric pressure; and a wind blowing against the tide.

Report — Munich

Director Jolyon Wimhurst, reporter John Morgan and a Report film team have just returned from Munich where they were completing the new dramatised documentary on Munich which will be screened in the Spring of 1972. Munich, the Bavarian capital, has always had a weakness for extravagance and a reputation for laissez-faire. This attitude gave birth to artistic and political excesses – from its Baroque architecture to revolutionary ideas, culminated by the rise of Adolf Hitler. In the year of the Munich Olympics Report tells the story of the city from the beginning of the 18th century to the present day.

EMI contract

EMI Electronics has won a major television equipment contract worth almost £200,000 to re-equip a Belgian television studio for colour broadcasting. The contract, which includes the first export order for the company’s new ‘2005’ three-tube colour cameras, is for the replacement of existing EMI monochrome equipment at the Brussels studio of Belgium Radio Television’s Flemish Service.

Still winning

As already reported in the Newsletter, the Thames Vauxhall Firenza at its very first appearance at a race meeting scored two out-right wins and broke the class record twice. The car continued its winning ways on its second outing at Inglistone on 10 October. It won the first saloon car race of the day, after Gerry Marshall had clocked the fastest lap in practice. Incidently the win was achieved despite the fact that the opposition was “formidable” to quote Bill Blydenstein. Before the final saloon car race (in which the Firenza was entered) the organisers gave each of the previous race winners a lap of honour. The unfortunate result of this was that the Firenza’s engine oiled up its plugs and although the plugs were changed the car went on three cylinders again during the race and finished seventh overall. But for the lap of honour it might well have come away with a double victory again.

U.S. Rivals

“Variety”, the U.S.-published, international show business magazine has a unique vocabulary. For those of us who don’t see it regularly, the following review of Rivals of Sherlock Holmes may be amusing:

Thames TV, the London independent, has whipped up a promising ITV network series meant to redress at least some of the balance with regard to the great detectives of Edwardian fiction. Hence the overall intriguing handle for this series of 13 hour long colorfilm mellers which has already sold in a number of off-shore markets.

The initialer featured John Neville as a smoothie forsenic scientist – a bit too smooth, in fact, since Philip Mackie’s script (from an Austin Freeman story) portrayed the hero as a man of immaculate gee-whiz intellect as well as urbanity. It was, in short, no contest from the start in this tale of a brothel murder. Never mind the plot cliches – the producers couldn’t be faulted for being faithful to the original text in that respect. And include among the cliches a compliment to the Baker St. hot-shot, in that Neville, too, trailed a Watson-type sidekick.

The seg was, however, nicely paced and sharply cast, and the Edwardian flavor came across effectively if economically. In notable support of Neville were James Cossins as his acolyte, Terence Rigby, Bernard Archard, Paul Darrow and, in particular, Eve Pearce as the madame-cum-innocent-landlady.

Fast Workers

Records were broken at Euston on 29 September to get a Daily Express ad on screen in the shortest possible time. The story began at 8.45 pm, when advertising duty officer Tony Clemens received a call from the Express asking if we had a spot available that night. We hadn’t, but one was cleared at 9.58 pm. By 9.45 pm, the script and artwork were ready and cleared, and were taken to Presentation for taping, and the commercial duly went out one hour and ten minutes after receipt of the first enquiry. John Robertson, the Publicity Manager of the Express, came to see the transmission, and expressed his gratitude for the co-operation we had given his organisation at such short notice.

Armchair for Armchair

There’s a neat compliment for the Armchair Theatre series in a glossy magazine campaign by Parker-Knoll at the moment for their Buccaneer suite of chairs. The ad shows three photographs of a man watching telly while sitting on a Buccaneer armchair. The captions read: “It’s an armchair for ‘Armchair Theatre’”…, “A knees-up for ‘Come Dancing'”…, “And an escape from the fifth repeat of the ‘Wooden Horse’”… Fortunately for our reputation the man is sitting up keen, alert and vigilant for “Armchair Theatre”; very relaxed for “Come Dancing” and sound asleep for the “Wooden Horse”.

Out in front

At the end of the first 39 weeks of 1971, Thames has established a clear lead over the BBC and all other ITV programme companies in numbers of programmes in both the Network Top Twenty, and the London Top Ten. Up to 3 October, we had had 169 programmes in the Top Twenty (21-5 per cent) compared to Granada’s 153 programmes (19 4 per cent) and the BBC’s 149 programmes (19 0 per cent). In the London Top Ten we had screened 244 programmes (55-8 per cent) and originated 127 programmes (29 1 per cent). Full tables:

Network Top Twenty

TOTAL	785	100
THAMES	169	21.5
GRANADA	153	19.4
BBC	149	19.0
ITN	126	16.1
YORKSHIRE	80	10.2
ATV	53	6.8
LWT	51	6.5
OTHER ITV	4	0.5

London Top Ten Screened

TOTAL	437	100
THAMES	244	55.8
BBC	112	25.6
LWT	81	18.6

London Top Ten Originated

TOTAL	437	100
THAMES	127	29.1
BBC	112	25.6
GRANADA	66	15.1
LWT	57	13.0
ITN	42	9.6
YORKSHIRE	21	4.8
ATV	11	2.5
OTHER ITV	1	0.2

Booked?

No, not quite! Ciss Stapleton, lady cleaner with Thames, gets a big smile from the local traffic warden, Ciss had just collected her new trolley from Bob Hurley, so she decided to invest in ‘L’ plates until she feels ‘qualified’. Ciss, by the way, has been with Rediffusion and Thames for 15 years.

The post Newsletter – 22 October 1971 appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

The ITA have recently announced that advertising revenue for all companies during June 1969 is down on June 1968 by £886,504 even before the present government levy of varying rates up to 47½% is deducted. Current Company policy is to conserve and not waste money. The sales functions at Teddington in no way contradict this policy. They fall into three main categories. (1) Advertisers or agents using our premises for Sales Conferences. (2) Entertaining people who may be of use to the Company. (3) Promoting Thames to advertising agencies by using slides and other visual aids accompanied by a commentary persuading them that the most profitable way of advertising is to spend money with Thames. These functions include an escorted tour of the Studios, which seems commonplace to us but is of immense interest to people outside Television.

The first example mentioned involves Thames in the provision of facilities and organising the function. The second requires organising and costs the Company a small amount of expenditure on refreshments but the possible return of attracting future clients completely justifies this. The third function is obviously more expensive and financed by our promotion budgets.

Our dealings with Qantas Airways is an excellent illustration of how we profit from these occasions. They held a reception for all the leading travel agencies on MV ‘Iris’ to celebrate the opening of their television advertising campaign with commercials featuring Warren (Alf Garnett) Mitchell. Organising this function resulted in us gaining the exclusive advertising contract, which is worth approximately £100,000 between July 1969 and February 1970.

On 30 July fourteen women connected with advertising in London and belonging to a club called Adwomen were entertained at Teddington. In the future any one of them could be in a position to influence advertising with Thames.

In conclusion it should be emphasized that our major source of income is commercials and anything which we can do to increase that revenue benefits us all.

The post Sales talk appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

We were well prepared. Each car carried a survival heater, “A must”, said the locals, stressing the point with tales of motorists stranded on the prairies and frozen to death. We also had insulated underwear, gloves and socks.

Two hundred miles south of Rapid City we crossed the border of the Reservation. It was not typified by the tepees and feathered Indians depicted in Hollywood films. Pine Ridge is a shanty town of shacks, unpaved roads, garbage dumps, wrecked cars and the occasional dead, frozen dog. Inside a typical log shack one finds the walls crudely lined with newspaper or cardboard in an attempt to stop freezing winds whistling through the gaps between the logs. It is an exceptional home that has electricity to provide heat and light.

The inactivity of the town is striking. Most of the Indians are unemployed. They stroll around the reservation aimlessly, with blank expressions on their faces, or lounge in the corridors of the local government office, where they draw their welfare cheques. One thing they have in common with the whites is the American addiction to jeans, T-shirts and chewing gum. The buckskins, beads and feathers have long since been stored away in family treasure chests to be brought out as a tourist attraction in the summer.

The Indians have given up hope of getting a fair deal from the white man and it was hardly suprising that at first we were treated with great caution and suspicion. Each member of the unit had his share of public relations work to do.

It was not unusual to arrive at an Indian home ready for a day’s filming to find a note on the door: “Had to go to visit my mother today”, or to drive fifty miles to film a Pow Wow only to find the hall in darkness and to be told by a lone Indian to “try Monday, maybe we have Pow Wow then.”

We experienced a kickback of the commercially exploited Sioux on our second Reservation – the Rosebud. Henry Crowdog, a revered elder of the tribe eventually agreed to arrange a Ghost dance for us to film. After much haggling over price, a date was set. In their own time the dancers arrived announcing a “rehearsal day” for which they required “rehearsal fees”. Marshalling their forces took most of the day and the rehearsal lasted half-an-hour.

We presented ourselves hopefully early on the second day. The Indians arrived an hour later and spent two gleeful hours making each other up in the lurid colours of the Ghost Dance. After 20 minutes filming they announced a lunch break. Hadn’t they danced long enough? After all it was a 2 minute film sequence and they’d danced for more than 2 minutes! Ross assumed the title “Big Thundercloud” when he discovered that during, lunch they had washed off their make-up and couldn’t remember who had worn w hat colours…!

During this location we lived off the reservation, just over the border in Rushville, Nebraska – the heart of the Bible Belt of the Mid-West. The town is populated with the sleek, well-fed citizens of the American Dream who looked up from their malted milks only long enough to wrinkle their Conservative noses at the mention of the “tragic” Indians 20 miles away. They preferred not to discuss the problem. “We give them social security don’t we – and all they do is get drunk on it!” However, having revised their original opinion that we were hippies from California, the people of Rushville welcomed us with open arms. Some of them assumed that we constituted the whole of THAMES’ staff and were a local station. We explained that THAMES Television broadcast “coast-to-coast” in Britain and has a cast of hundreds… This, together with coming from London, England, put us in the celebrity bracket and they rallied round to give us any help we needed.

Our VIP status was somewhat shattered, however, by one of the Indians, who, at the end of the trip said: “Where is England anyway?”

The post Now that the Buffalo’s gone appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

The Entertainments Committee are organising a ‘MISS THAMES 1970’ Competition to find a woman with sufficient poise, personality and figure to satisfy a panel of judges. Contestants must be employees of THAMES and can be nominated by any other member of staff. With a First prize of £50, a Second prize of £25 and a Third prize of £10, the competition is well worth entering.

Contestants will be asked to appear before the Judges in cocktail dresses.

There will be an eliminating round at a dance to be held at Teddington on Saturday, 6 December with music provided by the New Era Jazz Band.

Finalists go forward to the crowning ceremony, which will be held during THAMES Staff Party at the Lyceum on 9 January. The Evening Press will cover this event.

Nomination forms are available from Peter Goodwin at Teddington and Hazel Warburton at Television House.

The post Miss Thames 1970 appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

Answering John Tasker (Head of Sound, Teddington), when he suggested that “it shouldn’t take a crisis to get management and staff together”, Mr Thomas repeated what he and the Chairman had said at the two earlier presentations at Euston. “In an industry which is at the very centre of communications, we seem to find difficulty in communicating effectively with each other. There has got to be an improvement: and I hope you will see these talks by the Executive Directors as a positive step forward.”

All three presentations were well attended and the general opinion was that useful information about the company had been put across. The question sessions at the end were particularly valuable.

Extracts

The Managing Director introduced the presentation by reiterating Thames’ position as ITV’s leading company. “Let me remind you, then, that Thames now makes more of Britain’s most popular programmes than any other ITV company. That in its own area, London, Thames is consistently more popular than the BBC or London Weekend Television. And that in sales of commercial time, despite a period of comparative recession in the advertising industry, the company has outstripped its competitors.”

Technical operations

Having described the divisional structure of the company, he paid tribute to the engineers. “The technical operations of Thames are second to none in ITV. The studios at Teddington, and those here at Euston and also our outside broadcast division at Han worth, keep us on the air and they also keep us one step ahead of the game in this fast-moving business. It was Bernard Greenhead and his team who did such a great deal to pioneer colour television for ITV.”

Sales

He then introduced George Cooper, Director in charge of Sales, Research and Publicity. Mr Cooper reminded the audience of ITV’s growth from a medium reaching only half a million homes across the country in 1956 to one now capable of being seen in 16.6 million homes. 94% of the total population was now covered by ITV, and advertisers spent £98.5 millions in 1969 to reach that audience.

He went on to talk about the Thames area. First its size: “If you take the whole of the population of Australia plus the population of New Zealand, and put them into an area half the size of Tasmania, you have the Thames market in size and population. It is the largest and most influential of all television areas. It contains four-and-a-quarter million Independent Television homes and fourteen million people”.

Its buying power: “Although our single area contains 25% of all the television homes in the country, it accounts for over 30% of total national sales. Many companies can, and do, operate successfully and profitably in the Thames area alone. With its high concentration of retail outlets and stores, its higher than average incomes and the sophistication of its population, it offers considerable economies in sales and marketing costs and gives opportunities for exceptional rewards to companies who are geared to take advantage of these conditions.”

ITA forecast beaten

Mr Cooper then turned to Thames’ actual performance in selling time.

“The Independent Television Authority calculated that from 1968 the five main companies would earn revenue in the following order:

1. ATV with seven days in the Midlands.
2. Granada with seven days in Lancashire.
3. Thames with four-and-a-half days in London
4. LWT with two-and-a-half days in London.
5. Yorkshire with seven days in Yorkshire.

And they divided the London contract on an almost equal basis, with 50.4% of the revenue to Thames and 49.6% to London Weekend.”

In practice, he continued, the ITA’s forecasts have not materialised. Thames soon became, and has remained, No. 1 revenue earner and not third as the Authority predicted. And what about the roughly 50/50 split of London revenue between ourselves and LWT?

“In fact, we are considerably above the 50% line and LWT are well below it. We have been steadily improving our share of the London revenue going up from 55% to 60% and in June 1970 as high as 65%. This in spite of intensive efforts by LWT to improve their position with attractive rate offers to advertisers. These achievements made Thames No. 1 in London and No. 1 across the Network, a position we intend to maintain.”

Future

Finally he looked to the future: “Advertising budgets are being cut, money is being spent on promotional activities other than television and press, and our customers want more help and services from us. We have pioneered support activities like the Ansafone Service, reply coupons in the TVTimes, inclusive production facilities and many other services which are time consuming and sometimes costly. But these facilities are necessary if we are to attract new sources of revenue to make up for losses and to encourage our customers that television is right for them. Colour, videotape, studio facilities for the smaller advertiser – these and many other services will be necessary to develop our advertising income and maintain the excitement and effectiveness of the medium.”

The post Staff communication to be improved appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.