Thames Television

Thames Television was a franchise holder for a region of the British ITV television network serving London and surrounding area on weekdays from 30 July 1968 until the night of 31 December 1992.

Formed as a joint company, it merged the television interests of British Electric Traction (trading as Associated-Rediffusion) owning 49%, and Associated British Picture Corporation—soon taken over by EMI—owning 51%. It was both a broadcaster and a producer of television programmes, making shows both for the local region it covered and for networking nationally across the ITV regions. Thames covered a broad spectrum of commercial public-service television, with a strong mix of drama, current affairs and comedy.

The former ABC studios at Teddington became Thames main production base. Thames' corporate base moved to their newly constructed studios and base at Thames Television House on Euston Road in 1970, when they relinquished Television House, Rediffusion's former London headquarters. The Teddington studios were highly desirable, as they had participated in colour experiments and were already partially converted by the time of the franchise change.

When Thames was formed the new company acquired numerous other properties of the former franchise holders. Rediffusion's main studio complex at Wembley was leased to London Weekend Television by order of the ITA before being sold to Lee International in 1977. ABC's Midlands base in Aston, Birmingham (see Alpha Television), co-owned with ATV, was sold in 1971 when ATV moved to new colour television facilities. Their northern base in Didsbury, Manchester was used by Yorkshire Television prior to their Kirkstall Road studios in Leeds being completed, and eventually sold to Manchester Polytechnic in 1970, with a lease on sales offices in central Manchester being surrendered.

In 1982, The Independent Broadcasting Authority decided to change the franchise area, which resulted in the Bluebell Hill transmitter in north Kent, its associated relays and the main relay at Tunbridge Wells being transferred from London to the new South and South-East of England, Television South franchise, in order to serve the new region better.

In 1985, Carlton Communications had executed a failed take-over bid for Thames after Thorn EMI and British Electric Traction decided to sell its share of Thames. Thames finally floated on the stock market in July 1986, after being denied by the IBA in late 1982; the shares on offer were being sold by BET and Thorn EMI, who planned to reduce their share holding from 100% down to 28.8%.

During 1989 reports appeared that talks were taking place with Carlton Communications about an agreed merger, which resulted in no action taking place. The flotation was not a great success, EMI and BET only managing to reduce their shares to 56.6%, with management acquiring much of the new stock. In March 1990, EMI and BET tried once again to sell off their shares in Thames, with Cartlon and CLT (Luxembourg based media company) both in the running. However, by October talks had stalled, with EMI and BET still controlling Thames before heading into the 1991 franchise round.

On 16 October 1991, Thames Television lost its ITV franchise to broadcast to London during weekdays from the beginning of January 1993 as a result of losing the silent auction used to renegotiate the new franchises. Thames bid £32.5 million while Carlton Television placed a bid of £43.2 million, and since both Thames and Carlton were deemed to have passed the quality threshold, the franchise was awarded to Carlton for having submitted the higher cash bid.

In June 1992 Carlton and the ITV network centre had backed down over their demands for Thames to relinquish its right to broadcast repeats of its own programmings on rival channels for ten years. Thames believed Carlton's demands were unreasonable and would have forced it to drop most networked programmes on ITV during the autumn of 1992. Thames Chairman Richard Dunn publicly stated that Michael Green (Carlton Chairman), had done everything in his power to obtain the London weekday franchise since being blocked by the IBA in 1985. Carlton was forced to advertise on LWT to promote its new programme line up, until Christmas 1992, following an acrimonious High Court dispute between Thames and Carlton over the selling of rights of hundreds of films in Thames' library. Carlton settled out of court for £13.1M.

Thames Television was involved in an attempt to win the Channel 5 licence when it was first advertised in the Spring of 1992. Thames was the main shareholder in a consortium (alongside Warner Bros. Television and others) called "Channel Five Holdings"; the consortium became the only bidder for the licence in December 1992 after two other groups dropped out. However, the ITC rejected the bid as a result of concerns about their business plan and investor backing. The deadline was therefore extended twice before finally handing the licence to Channel 5 Broadcasting Limited.

Following the loss of Thames' franchise, the Euston Road base of Thames was sold off and demolished.The studios at Teddington were sold to a management buy-out team and were part of the Pinewood Group, owners of both Pinewood and Shepperton Studios.

Thames Television was acquired by Pearson Television in 1994. Pearson Television was itself sold by Pearson PLC to the RTL Group in 2000, and rebranded as FremantleMedia in 2001. In 2003, Thames Television was merged with another FremantleMedia subsidiary, Talkback to form Talkback Thames. That subsidiary was split into four new production companies at the start of 2012, with the new Thames producing light entertainment programming.