All set for TV 'wedding'

Details of the "shotgun wedding" between commercial "telly" giants Rediffusion and A.B.C.-TV are likely to be revealed shortly.  For I hear that after weeks of hard bargaining Rediffusion chief Mr. John Spencer Wills and A.B.C. boss Sir Philip Warter have at last thrashed out terms for a joint to provide London viewers with Channel 9 programmes from Monday to Friday.

I hear, too, Rediffusion could pick up around 13 million from the sale of their Wembley TV studio.

It was just six weeks ago that ITA supremo Lord Hill dropped his bombshell on the future of Independent Television contracts - shattering the calm surrounding commercial TV firms.

His suggestion that A.B.C. - supplying Midland and Northern viewers with weekend programmes - should link with Rediffusion, the London mid-week programmer [sic] lopped millions of pounds from the share market values of the two groups.

Revenue loss

For in Rediffusion's case it meant that the company was being offered just a half-share in an operation where it had previously enjoyed complete control - with subsequent loss of advertising revenue.

But shares in both companies have since rallied strongly. Those of Rediffusion, which dipped to 12s following Lord Hill's shock announcement were last night changing hands at 13s 9d. While [sic] A.B. Picture shares - down to 28s last month - are now priced at 30s.

The Daily Express has long stood in the shadow of its great rival, the Daily Mail.

In the 1960s, the Express was the bigger seller of the two, both of which were broadsheets, and specialised in the celebrity gossip and public outrage stories now staple diet of almost every newspaper.

The newspaper has been troubled in recent years, both internally with changes in ownership and externally as readers have fallen away.

Read on at www.express.co.uk

The story itself was mostly true.  Rediffusion had eventually agreed terms with ABC (under a direct 'take it or leave it' order from the ITA) on the creation of what would become Thames.

The Thames organisation thus conceived was very heavily dominated by ABC staff, in so far as Teddington, and later Euston, were Thames main production bases. In staff terms, Thames was 80% ABC and 20% Rediffusion.

The staff at Rediffusion's Television House in Kingsway moved to Thames, while the large staff at the Rediffusion Wembley studios were effectively "sold" as part of a going concern to LWT who rented and later bought those studios from Rediffusion, London.

It is remarkable how often the connection between Rediffusion and LWT raises its head. If a TV company is mainly the staff, then you can say that excluding most of the management, Rediffusion won the weekend contract after 1968, having done weekdays since 1955. By that metaphorical token, ABC won the London weekday contract, after 13 years doing North & Midlands weekends.

The domination of Thames by ABC people was absolute in presentation matters. ABC had had the most highly developed and effective presentation department in ITV, and it moved to Thames wholesale.

Head of Presentation at ABC and later Thames, Geoffrey Lugg, said, "We had always taken the view that as we were only on the air 2 days a week, albeit across two regions, we were going to plug our name very hard, and we always did. We took that philosophy to Thames"

Graphic designer Martin Lambie-Nairn is amongst those confused by the mass-transfer of Rediffusion staff to London Weekend. In his autobiographical coffee-table design book, Lambie-Nairn states that Rediffusion was the weekend contractor and lost out to the new LWT. He also opines that the contract transfer took place in 1969.

This is explicable, as Thames was only a fully corporate entity from the colour launch late that year. During the period of 1968-9, it was not possible to merge the two organisations as they both had business interests outside the ITA remit. It was agreed, entirely temporarily, that Rediffusion staff at Kingsway would make the local, schools, news, epilogue, and documentary programme output of Thames, whilst ABC staff at Teddington would produce drama, comedy, variety, quiz, filmed, children's and musical material. This would all be under the Thames brand name but the differences were obvious, especially to former ABC viewers. To all intents and purposes it was like ABC getting the weekday contract in London.

An early plan to caption "An ABC Production for Thames TV" or "A Rediffusion Production for Thames TV" was vetoed by the ITA. Thames almost used the ABC chimes & drum over the Thames picture and a copy of that experiment is still exists.

The creation of the Euston Road studios effectively finally created the new Thames as a corporate animal in its own right. From that point onwards ABC and Rediffusion receded into the shadows as BET lost interest in television and ABPC succumbed to an acquisitive EMI.