And Kirsty Wark too before she later went to Newsnight and also presented the series One Foot In The Past for BBC2 as well. That series ran from 1993 to 2001 at the time too.

Please forgive me if you’re already aware of this but recently I’ve been watching a series on KZfaq called ITV In The Face which tells us the history of each ITV franchise and region. I live in the South East so I’m only aware of Gus Honeybun because of ITV In The Face! Of all the regions in England my parents could move to, they chose the South East because it’s (or was at the time) the least prone to natural disasters! (We did have an earthquake in the middle of the night one night in 2015 that lasted a few seconds though) Sorry for spoilers but apparently Thames were in Thatcher’s crosshairs over a documentary that presented the truth about a killing that Thatcher didn’t want the public to know and while the Broadcast Act was going through Parliament, some allies of Thatcher got in and successfully executed a plan to strip Thames of their franchise! (I have a learning disability so I can’t piece together the full picture) Personally, with all the media bias that’s made all sorts of bad things happen in Britain, especially from 2010 onwards, including Brexit, the ongoing privatisation of our NHS, our hottest days on record, care home residents being billed hundreds a month and more, I feel our media is in dire need of a reboot! I am sick of the public being duped into accusing the good guys of being the bad guys! Not to mention, as grateful as I am for the amount of Disney programming GMTV gave us, I still feel it was unfair that GMTV were able to take the ITV morning franchise from TVAM so easily. Furthermore, making a TV channel look mostly the same all over the country makes things less interesting! I find it fascinating how ITV was different in each part of the country, what with different programming, different on air looks and more. Soaps aren’t my thing but if I had a cousin who lived faraway and he or she asked me to tape Corrie for him or her due to a power cut, vacation or whatever, I’d love to know how he or she reacts to my region’s different idents and adverts!

@@adultmoshifan87 Yes ITV In The Face was a brilliant retrospective on the good old days truly independent regional television stations.

I thought Westcountry looked visually very good. It had a strong regional news programme and good facilities. Compare that to HTV, which overbid on its franchise and had to make drastic cost-cutting exercises, resulting in some seriously low-budget looking programming (the news for example seemed to be made for about 11p).

@@benreadspoetry7958 I remember the early days of Westcountry Live. Whilst the graphics were slick, they had a staff of generally very inexperienced reporters, because of the low budget. It was also ambitious of them to commit to a full hour of regional news every weekday at six. It did look laboured at times. The contrast with TSW Today was stark. In fairness, Westcountry did eventually find its feet. Richard Bath and Alexis Bowater made an excellent presenting team in the later years, before ITV plc axed the Plympton operation.

On reflection, certain things weren't all bad. Westcountry's regional news service with the 4 subregions was far superior to TSW, which had never moved on from Westward. They were still doing a single pan-regional programme skewed towards Plymouth but pushed out to the entire region and short bulletins read by continuity announcers with no inserts even into the 90s. That might have been defensible in the 1960s where the tech limited how far out you could go from the studio to get footage back for the 6PM show and where there was no possibility of making more than one full news programme a day with the resources available, but TSW were still only offering basically the same 30 years later when they had full scale ENG going on and could have improved. Also London Tonight gave the London region a joined up news service that was consistent throughout the week from the LNN collaboration which would be unlikely to have happened between Thames and LWT. Prior to this if anything major happened in the London region at the weekend but not of national interest to get picked up by ITN, LWT just didn't have the resources committed to covering it as well as Thames would have on a weekday. In the case of TSW and TVS, they both massively overbid and would never have been able to even continue the service they had under the new contract, let alone improve on it. Had they won they would both have been inferior post 93 to their replacements. It was an insane system that made no sense but this doesn't mean the new contractors didn't manage to improve in some areas and also not everything was quite as perfect pre-1993 as the rose tinteds suggest.

@@chriswathen9612 You are of course so right there then too in your words which are very interesting too. Of course also, when Meridian took over from TVS they added a third area based in Newbury, as well as those then in Maidstone and Southampton too. Living in the London region as I do, I did not see the other ones, but I do remember when Carlton took over from Thames that they joined up with LWT to form London Today or Tonight as so then too. And yes, at least they had local news coverage 7 days a week I guess from then on as such too.

@@chriswathen9612 Sorry but there was definitely more bad rather than good of the outcome from all these changes. Carlton should never have been allowed to replace Thames, it was like giving a green light to a 3rd division team replacing a premier league one. Thames from all their initial years right up to their decades later into the early 90's of still broadcasting over London, had remained a constant stellar bar of ITV broadcasting, they had not dipped at all in their quality output and were still a huge part of the ITV programme supply chain. And Carlton got based on what, FA that is what. Instead just the money they put down!! And as for London Tonight that wouldn't have happened under a joint Thames LWT venture...yes okay their history operating with each other was a rocky 1 yes there was acrimony because of certain things that happened. But you know something who is to say sensible minds as representatives from both couldn't have acted so that London Tonight would have been still. For the existence of London Tonight that became a reality between LWT and Carlton, it was too little to equal so much that was lost when Thames was over. Way too much!

You are of course so right there then too in those words. Too much occured and then ITV ended up all the worst for it too?!@@jeffreyweitzman6463

Of course, the info on the other clip could always be wrong! I recorded this myself and the original recording nestled alongside my other clips of early Carlton so I'm quite sure this was January. Sarah Dunant refers to an event to be held on February 4th, and then goes on to talk about how the landscape of British broadcasting has changed since they were last on air (the 1992-3 Christmas break) - but if you still believe the clip to be from Nov 1993 then I will happily stand corrected