BROADCASTING licences are reviewed every six years by the Independent Television Authority. The major shake-up, which comes into effect today, 13 years after the start of ITV, is a severe warning to the various independent companies that there is no room for complacency.

The very fact that the oldest independent company of them all, Rediffusion, has not retained complete control of London’s weekday programmes is an indication that licences will not automatically be renewed.

Today, it has merged with ABC TV, and as from now your programmes from Monday to Thursday [sic] inclusive are coming to you by courtesy of Thames Television

At a Mansion House luncheon, the service was launched in the presence of figures prominent in London’s Government and business, in London’s music, art and sport, and in the nation’s Press and Parliament which reflect the life and power of the capital.

Speakers included the Lord Mayor, Lord Aylestone, chairman of the ITA, Sir Philip Waster [sic – Warter], chairman, and Howard Thomas, managing director of Thames Television.

Eamonn Andrews introduces recorded highlights of the luncheon at 11.30 tonight. Andrew Gardner describes the scene and talks to some of the distinguished guests present at the Mansion House.

At the weekend – Friday [sic] through to Sunday – programmes will be controlled by the London Television Consortium (London Weekend). This is the company that attracted Michael Peacock away from the BBC and has David Frost as one of its star men.

Then, as in the past programmes made by regional companies will be fed into the schedule for the London area.

Coronation Street, for instance, will continue from Granada, as will University Challenge, What the Papers Say and other well established programmes.

But there will be additional material from the north – from Yorkshire Television. For the territory up there has been divided down the Pennines: Granada hold the rights for the county of the red rose, Yorkshire Television – the company that attracted Alan Whicker away from the BBC – for the county of the white.

It was 18 months ago that Lord Hill, then chairman of the ITA, announced plans to change the face of ITV.

The richest and most sought after prize was London. The contract winners were announced first over a year ago.

Lord Hill said of the London weekday contract “With our principle of programme quality in mind, we felt that Independent Television would gain benefit if the abilities of ABC and Rediffusion were to combine in providing the weekday service. The combination of these two companies seemed to ihe Authority to offer the possibility of a company of real excellence.”

Unlike Thames Television, there will be no opening ceremony for London Weekend Television. And unlike other companies there will be no station symbol – just the name.

London Weekend Television is backed by an impressive line-up of television professionals: men such as Aldan Crawley, Michael Peacock and David Frost.

Of this company Lord Hill said: “Of the applicants for the weekend, the London Consortium impressed us most, particularly because of its creative talent.”

At a recent luncheon in London, managing director, Michael Peacock promised: “There will be a lot of charges in your weekend viewing. New shows, new faces and new times to remember”

Well, what is in store for the viewer?

Thames Television

DRAMA

Frontier: New adventure series set in the North West Frontier when the British Army kept the peace in the Asian equivalent of the Wild West.

90-Minute Dramas: Three plays adapted by William Marchant from short stories by Noel Coward. Already in production, Star Quality, starring Glynis Johns and Robert Hardy, to be followed by Bon Voyage and The Kindness of Mrs Radcliffe. A new adaptation of Mary Shelley’s famous Frankenstein by Robert Muller and an adaptation of Uncle Silas the ghost story by Sheridan Le Fanuare planned.

Premiere: Live, one hour television dramas will be presented through October with top directors, distinguished casts and writers.

The Sex Game: Romantic 60-minute plays. Trials and tribulations of lovers who ultimately merge to live happily ever after.

The Mind of Mr. J. G. Reeder. Adaptations of Edgar Wallace stones starring Hugh Burden and Willoughby Goddard.

CHILDREN

The Tyrant King: A London adventure for children. The first modern colour film TV serial made in Britain for children.

The Queen Street Gang: A new children’s adventure series in which a professor is captured by criminals and rescued by the Queen Street Boys, a highly organised gang, led by his own son.

Once Upon A Time: A series of 15-minute programmes in which celebrities will tell classic or original stories to a children’s audience.

The Sooty Show: Harry Corbett, Sooty, Sweep and the rest of the gang in a children’s entertainment series recorded at The May Fair Theatre.

Pinky & Perky: A series of 15-minute shows featuring the famous puppets Pinky and Perky and their colleagues.

COMEDY

Best of Enemies: Situation comedy written by Vince Powell and Harry Driver about two members of Parliament: a young Labour newcomer to the House of Commons and a wily old Tory. Tim Barrett and Robert Coote star.

Father, Dear Father: Patrick Cargill stars as the divorced father of two very highly nubile mini-skirted teenage daughters with Sally Bazely as his literary agent and good friend.

Comedy Tonight: A season of six new comedy plays written by top authors including Ronald Wolfe and Ronald Chesney, Vince Powell and Harry Driver and Dave Freeman.

Sid James: A new series, as yet untitled, written by Vince Powell and Harry Driver, starring Sid James.

Horne-a-Plenty: Comedy-Revue starring Kenneth Horne assisted by Sheila Steafel and Kenneth’s friends, which might well bear an amazing resemblance to the radio series Round the Horne.

SPECIALS

Already announced are two one hour specials starring Tommy Cooper; The Max Bygraves Show; Liberace in London; An Evening with Jack Benny, in which comedian Jack Benny conducts and stars with the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall; a comedy concert with Victor Borge; The Frankie Howerd Show and, of course, The Goons, a half-hour radio show for television starring Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe.

Hughie Green’s Opportunity Knocks! returns for a new season and The Eamonn Andrews Show takes a completely new look when it comes from the May Fair Theatre in the heart of the West End.

FEATURES

Today: A live, dally topical entertainment and information show about people and places in and around London with Eamonn Andrews.

Robert Kee Reports: A series of monthly 45-minute documentaries on important issues of the day.

Applause! Applause! A series of six documentary programmes on great stars of variety and the music hall including Grade Fields, Max Miller, George Robey, Sid Fields, George Formby and Lucan McShane.

Magpie: A weekly magazine programme for children, Forty minutes of information and entertainment plus the serial story of Captain Fantastic.

ADULT EDUCATION

Ballet For All: A series of six half-hour programmes to help bring appreciation of this unique art to a wider audience.

So You’re Going on Holiday: An in-depth appreciation of the countries of Europe – the historical and cultural background behind the holiday facade.

The Tools of Cookery: A new series in which top TV cook Philip Harben demonstrates the importance of using the right tools for the job in the kitchen, from knives and saucepans to ovens and mixers.

World of Crime: Eight new programmes which examine specific cases of the victims of crime in Britain and North America.

RELIGION

A new ten-minute series entitled Last Programme – this will be shown seven nights a week, London Weekend Television will show the series on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

THE AVENGERS

A new series starring Patrick Macnee and introducing Linda Thomson [sic – Thorson] as John Steed’s new partner, Tara King.

Among the successful programmes which will carry on in the new schedules are This Week, Armchair Theatre, Hullaballoo, Callan, The Eamonn Andrews Show, Sexton Blake, Opportunity Knocks!, and Public Eye.

So far as London Weekend Television is concerned plays return to Sunday night; David Frost has three shows; and there is an abundance of comedy to suit all the family. Concerts by Leonard Bernstein, Yehudi Menuhin and Benny Goodman are planned. So are productions of the Beggar’s Opera and Benjamin Britten’s The Golden Vanity.

Saturday specials are planned to broaden the range of cultural programmes. And sports fans are catered for with Sports Arena on Fridays and World of Sport on Saturdays.

All we have to do is wait and see.

The post The new look 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.

TWW lost their contract to Harlech; Telefusion Yorkshire gained a foothold and half of Granada’s service area: ATV was to end their Midlands weekday/London weekend split and entrench themselves solely in the Midlands.

The most significant of the changes was that there would be no weekend contracts in either the North or Midlands, and ABC – undoubtedly the most distinctive of all ITV incumbents – had put their bid in for the weekends at London, a move they had been well-prepared for over a long period of time, and the award of which appeared to be merely a formality.

However, two events changed the course of ABC’s fate.

The David Frost-Aidan Crawley London Television Consortium (later London Weekend) was bright, intelligent, cultured, and promised much for the future, and under the ITA’s ethos that the system had to be open to newcomers, the LTC were awarded the weekend contract for the capital that had been ABC’s by right.

Secondly, Rediffusion had, for a long time, appeared to be creating a number of problems between themselves and the ITA, culminating in an interview that was disastrous for them.

The Authority then decided to suggest that a joint company to provide London with a weekday service could be devised from the resources of Rediffusion and ABC.

This was Thames Television.

New ITV contractors needed to sign up the best talent they can find, as well as devising ratings-winning programmes, so as to establish a reputation for quality.

Thames had an advantage over all the new companies, as well as many of the older ones, in that they could develop new programme strands as well as incorporate elements from the outputs of both ABC (showbusiness, drama) and Rediffusion (current affairs, children’s and schools programmes).

They also had a number of artists on contract, ensuring that they had access to creative talent, and technical expertise and experience.

Added to this, they had Teddington Studios, a riverside location that they would use to the full in years to come.

The share split in Thames – ABC 51%, Rediffusion 49% – inevitably effected a number of decisions made in the company to the point at which Thames was, effectively, ABC in disguise.

From the first day, Thames was attempting to establish a loyal audience by scheduling a brand-new magazine programme “Magpie”, guaranteeing that viewers would tune in by incorporating episodes of the “Captain Fantastic” serial into it – itself previously a feature of Rediffusion’s “Do Not Adjust Your Set”, soon to be revived by Thames.

Eamonn Andrews would now be the anchor of “Today”, from Monday-Thursday. “This Week” would continue. There were a few sitcoms, like “Never Mind the Quality, Feel The Width” that had begun in the ABC era, and “The Avengers”, “Callan” and “Public Eye” would be mainstays of Thames drama.

However, there was one disadvantage for the new company. The previous London weekday contract was for Monday-Friday, morning to closedown.

Now LWT had extra hours from Friday, 7pm to close, which meant that Thames had, at best, four evenings a week in which to build an audience and to gain vital advertising revenue.

This led to some oddities in scheduling: “Opportunity Knocks”, an ABC Saturday night talent show, was to be slotted into a 6.45 slot on Monday evenings.

Eamonn Andrews’ chat show, on which he had previously interviewed “Sunday Night People”, was scheduled for Thursday evenings.

“Just Jimmy” with the Clitheroe Kid himself had been moved from Saturday teatime, where it had been a family show, to Friday teatime, as a children’s show.

Over time, Thames planning staff worked out the best network slots for many of their programmes and out of the three mentioned, only “Opportunity Knocks” survived in its original Thames timeslot.

8pm Wednesday became the slot for variety specials and one-offs, drama was featured at 9pm, and 7pm became a time for sitcoms.

“Armchair Theatre” was moved into various places throughout the week, but never quite fitted, and never really regained its hard-won reputation: there were, however, attempts to update it, notably “Armchair Cinema”.

In June 1974, “Regan” was shown in this strand, to unanimous praise, and this film led to commissions for “The Sweeney”. “Armchair Cinema” later became “Armchair Thriller”, and was allowed to disappear from the screen forever.

One thing that should never be overlooked is that Thames, with roots in ABC and connections to EMI could make use of those relationships to the full. Thames were able to reap rewards from cinema films of “Callan”, “Sweeney!” and “Sweeney 2” and, most lucratively, “The Best of Benny Hill” – made for very little, using video-to-film transfer of the best of the early Thames series.

The best years of Thames were probably from its inception to 1979, when there was still a great deal of the ABC staffing on board and when production values were maintained at a high level.

They had signed most of the major talent, such as Morecambe and Wise, Tommy Cooper, Mike Yarwood and Kenny Everett, and had won a number of international awards.

The company was also about to make significant inroads into the US, thanks to Don Tuffnell’s sales of “The Benny Hill Show” and an entire week of programmes shown in the USA in September 1976. It might also be true to say that Thames lost their way in trying to establish themselves as world players.

What a pity that at yet another ITV franchise round, the company lost its contract to Carlton.

The legacy of Thames lives on now in both the name of an independent production company and an archive of programmes that has continued to be shown, frequently, on satellite and terrestrial television.

These programmes show, to both those who saw them first time around and to younger viewers just discovering them, that Thames had plenty of grace and style – qualities that both ABC and Rediffusion had in endless supply.

Not at all a bad thing.

The post Take me to the river appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

Lloyd Shirley, Controller of Drama
Armchair Cinema, Armchair Theatre, Callan, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Man at the Top, The Mind of Mr J. G. Reeder, Napoleon, Public Eye, The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, Six Days of Justice, Special Branch, Van der Valk, The Way of the World.

Lloyd Shirley, Thames Television’s Controller of Drama programmes, began his broadcasting career with TV in his home province of Ontario and came into British television in 1956. In ITV’s early years his productions ranged across the whole output from arts programmes and documentaries to World of Sport, but he later began to specialise in drama with such successes as Armchair Theatre, Public Eye, Frontier, Callan and lately The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes.

The title Controller of Drama is, to say the least, an odd one. You cannot legislate drama into existence any more than you can dictate any creative process successfully from the outside. All you can do – at least, all I feel I can do in my department -is bring together a group of professionals who write and produce and direct drama, and give them the facilities to do it in a certain way. A way that will both satisfy them as programme makers and also please our audience as consistently as possible. For me that is as far as you can go towards ‘controlling’ drama. But what you can do from outside is to finance it, and how you do that is important to results.

The Board of Thames Television has just allocated my department’s programme expenditure for the next two years: £5½ million. That is a great deal of money but no blank cheque, because programme production is very expensive. Yet there are two vital things about the allocation. First it gives us the chance to plan well ahead, which helps us to vary our output properly. Secondly, it comes without strings. It is financial backing for the programmes we would like to make and which we hope viewers will enjoy.

Our most striking new venture is, I suppose, Armchair Cinema. We shall go on making Armchair Theatre (including a new Terence Rattigan play, incidentally) but Armchair Cinema will be a £1 million series of films made especially for British television. There will be new thrillers – indeed the whole concept began when our films rumour and suspect were so successful – and there will also be comedy and romance and domestic drama. There has been no other project like it in Britain, and if it sounds hackneyed to describe it as a challenge I can only say that is exactly how we see it.

Another departure for us is a cycle of Restoration comedy, a series of linked adaptations which Peter Hammond will produce. We are calling it The Way of the World, borrowing Congreve’s title because it exemplifies the way we intend to present the plays: not as a quaint period revival but as a living revelation of wit, manner and morals which is relevant to the present. George Markstein’s adaptation of De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater will again be a portrayal of an earlier period, but all too clearly relating to our own society. And for a present-day message actually written in this century, we are negotiating with Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s representatives to serialise one of his works. I hope to announce the details soon. None of these will be in the studio for several months, though they are all in active preparation. One which will appear rather sooner is the new eight-part series on Napoleon which Philip Mackie has conceived and is writing.

In naming those particular series I do not mean to imply that we have lost interest in popular contemporary story-telling. The role of television as a presenter of popular fiction seems to me an important one. But we are more interested in a series that reveals some human truths than we are, say, in just a good detective story. Frank Marker in Public Eye is a detective, but the series concentrates on him and his cases as human problems, Callan is a sensitive character with believable emotions. In another genre, Joe Lampton of Man at the Top is a complicated and interesting human being. In all of those it was the characters that attracted us first, the stories second. The same is true of Nicholas Freeling’s Dutch detective Van der Valk, which is a series going into production shortly.

If there is any theme in our work, I hope it is this sense of humanity and of relevance to ordinary life. We do not, in the main, create escapist fantasy. That is not to say that Callan and Public Eye are heavy with social undertone. But neither are they a couple of handsome heroes who solve every problem with a bullet, Six Days of Justice illustrates the point very well. Courtroom drama is hardly new. But we took an ordinary magistrates’ court and tried to present, exactly as they would happen, the cases which represent day-to-day British justice. Cases about ordinary people that take place by the hundred for every one dramatic trial at the Old Bailey.

We had a great deal of praise from the critics for it, but many of them said in effect that it was too authentic to be entertaining. That, as one of them put it, it would never reach the Top Twenty. In fact, each programme has been watched by around thirteen million people and it was in the Top Twenty every time. Now that is very gratifying, because with only one channel it is part of our responsibility to make our work appeal to a large proportion of our audience. We want, if you like, to fill our theatre and not have half the seats empty. But much more rewarding than that is the knowledge, from letters and calls and comments, that people were excited by the very lack of traditional dramatic ingredients in Six Days of Justice. Because the professionals who work for my department learned long ago that dramatic power doesn’t lie in the barrel of a gun. And we never tire of proving that the audience knows it too.

The post People behind programmes: Lloyd Shirley appeared first on THIS IS THAMES from Transdiffusion.

It’s 10 months since Thames Television came to London.

What difference has it made?

To the London ITV audience?

It’s grown. Grown, for Thames’ evening programmes, by an average of 200,000 homes. That’s more than 14% up on last year.

The facts: Thames transmits to the London ITV area from Monday to 7.00 pm on Friday. In Spring last year before Thames began, audiences between 6.30 and 10.30 on those days averaged 1,309,280 homes*. This year, Thames has boosted the average to 1,497,600 homes.

Outside those peak viewing hours, the average audience for the same period in 1968 was 818,300 homes. This year the average Thames audience was 873,600 homes: and increase of over 6%.

So after less than a year, and despite a difficult start, Thames is consistently attracting more viewers than the Spring 1968 average:

*Comparisons over eight weeks ending 3 May 1968/2 May 1969

To London ITV programmes?

They’ve changed. To help win these bigger audiences, Thames has introduced new programmes to London in all three major fields: drama, light entertainment and features.

The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten has been the most successful documentary series ever to appear on the screen. Three new light entertainment programmes – Max, Two in Clover and Father, Dear Father – have regularly appeared in the London Top Ten list of most popular shows. (Max, starring Max Bygraves, topped the list three times.) Of the dramatic series, Callan has been exceptionally successful; Frontier was described by a leading critic as “the most promising of all efforts by the new ITV companies”; and The Mind of Mr J.G. Reeder has already become one of London’s favourite programmes. Among the new plays produced by Thames to date have been the Premiere series of live “first nights” and the widely-praised productions of Noël Coward’s “Star Quality” and Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Uncle Silas”.

Report, the new one-hour current affairs series, has already had three programmes chosen for the National Film Archive. And Today, first ever local programme for the London ITV area, is watched in more than a million homes five nights a week.

To children?

They’re beginning to like us. Last year they mostly watched the BBC, but not any more. For example Magpie, Thames’ magazine programme for London children, quickly became so popular that it went national, twice weekly. After only ten months on the air it’s watched by more families than the BBC’s excellent Blue Peter.

Mothers like us too (ask them) because we make a really wide range of children’s entertainment, from Sooty and Once Upon a Time to Do Not Adjust Your Set and The Tingaree Affair. That’s why all Thames’ programmes for children are more popular than last year’s counterparts.

To viewers all over Britain?

There’s a new name for good television. Since Thames began, its productions have won more places in the National Top Twenty than any other company. These nationally popular Thames programmes have included This Week, Opportunity Knocks, Callan, Max, Life With Cooper, The Avengers, Mike and Bernie’s Show, Two in Clover, Armchair Theatre and many others. More than a quarter of Thames’ places in the list have been filled by entirely new programmes.

To the BBC?

It comes second. From Monday to 7.00 on Friday, London viewers can choose between Thames, BBC1 and BBC2. The programmes they like best come from Thames. Each week we make a private check on the ten most popular programmes in London during our transmission time. The latest figures, for eight weeks ended 2 May, show that Thames had 78% of London’s ten weekday favourites against the BBC’s 22%.

We don’t usually publish our weekday top ten. But that’s how it looks.

To advertisers?

They’re getting more for their money. In terms of cost per thousand homes viewing, the latest available figures for eight weeks ending 2 May show that Thames’ peaktime rate gave an average cost of 19/1d [rounds to just under 95½p in decimal, £15.75 in 2018 allowing for inflation] per thousand homes – compared to 21/10d [rounds to about £1.09, £18 in 2018 allowing for inflation] in peaktime for the same period last year. The difference: 12½% cheaper on Thames.

(Because Thames’ peaktime rate covers an hour more than last year’s, the chart shows how the Thames cost compares with 1968’s 7.00 to 10.00 and 6.30 to 10.30. Thames is cheaper either way.)

To London’s skyline?

It’s altering. Thames’ new headquarter and colour studios are nearing completion close to the Post Office tower at Euston, ready for the start of colour broadcasting in November. From this new central complex, and from the riverside studios at Teddington, Thames will continue to produce outstanding programmes for London, for Britain and for the world.

That’s the promise we made ten months ago, and it’s one thing we haven’t changed.

THAMES

Television House, Kingsway, London WC2.

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