► This summer on Thames! 

3 November 2016 tbs.pm/9811

From the last week of Rediffusion London in July 1968 comes this exciting promo for what Thames Television will be showing soon.

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4 responses to this article

Joanne Gray 3 November 2016 at 7:10 pm

Was that Redvers Kyle doing the voiceover? If so, it’s a bit odd that he would be promoting Thames as he was about to head up North to Yorkshire.

Russ J Graham 3 November 2016 at 9:05 pm

It’s Philip Elsmore.

Joanne Gray 4 November 2016 at 12:11 pm

Ah, right. Thanks :)

n hewit 12 November 2016 at 1:51 pm

Pure Nostalga, up here in the main component of the new company ‘ABC, your Weekend in the North Franchise area’, we were informed of its imminent departure South on the last weekend of its transmissions. In fact as previously noted in a previous entry, the entire last week was devoted to celebrating its illustrious 12 years broadcasting with fulsome tributes to the Didsbury based Studio’s and staff from major stars of ABC’s, who provided the companies high audience rated Entertainment each and every Saturday night on most of the ITV Network, (the ATV London and usually Anglia would opt out of certain programmes and replace these with alternatives). Ken Dodd was particularly fulsome of his praise with,’Goodbye Diddy Didsbury’, a personal eulogy to the company and the quality of the programmes it provided: remember in the Northern Franchise area the more comprehensive Regional News Coverage was provided by ABC at Large on Saturday evenings, during the week it was pot luck if you got a magazine at 6PM or an abridged bulletin which could have been re hashed from the Manchester Evening News. This was followed by either the Beveley Hill Billies, the talking horse: ‘Mr ED’, or when these finally ran out: Gilligan’s Isle , probably if the Week Day franchise hadn’t gone for this popularist stragtegy they would have still be in hock to Rediffusion.
Hughie Green in typical style introduced more gravitas to his contribution to ABC’s final Saturday evening, broadcast Opportunity Knocks from a some what naked studio and during intervals either showed, or demonstrated pieces of equipment, such as cameras, prompt cards that were in use at the launch of the Winter Hill Channel 9 Service. Hughie and Opportunity Knocks re-appeared re-branded as a, ‘Thames production’, like most of the former ABC menu of popular Saturday Night programmes, in a time slot when the company held the London Franchise in this case, 7PM on a Monday Evening, could this be why BBC consistently won the Saturday night ratings war, so often that by the early 1980’s the Big Five were even prepared to let TVS join the fight with Bobby Davro, Roy Walker and Catch Frase, and those Glamour detectives of down town Maidstone, Leslie Ash and Gill Gascoigne in the Crime thriller ‘Cats Eyes’
As for ABC’s imminent departure from the TV screens in the North, their fare well proved a little premature, they were all back on screen the following weekend providing the Emergency Service, which if I recall correctly was only thinly disguised as any thing other than THAMES: the programmes were very good, a number of series such as the one with the Malevolent and menacing pumpkin on Sundays at 18.30 hours were not continued when; ‘NORMAL SERVICE RESUMED,( Salford factories, Salford Shops and parts of Ancoats which the Franchise holder seemed to think was their, ‘target’ audience)

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