Carlton Television Limited is the United Kingdom Channel 3 (ITV) licencee for London, Monday 9:25am, to Friday, 5:15pm. It is owned by ITV plc. It is managed with London Weekend Television as a single entity, ITV London. Major programmes include London Tonight , The London Programme and London Soccer Night. Christy Swords is the company's managing director

History

Carlton Television was originally a company set up by Michael Green's Carlton Communications to bid for an ITV franchise. Having failed to oust Thames Television from its London weekday slot in 1987, Carlton finally succeeded in the 1991/2 round for reasons that were seen as political.

Rather than acquire its own studio complex, Carlton hired space from London Weekend Television and took over from Thames at midnight on January 1 1993. Unlike Thames (which was both a production company and a broadcaster, and following a merger continues to produce programmes as TalkBack Thames), Carlton commissions programming from independent production companies.

In recent years changes in rules concerning media ownership enabled Carlton to buy out many of the other ITV stations, including Central Independent Television, Westcountry and HTV as well as acquiring the rights to the archives of ATV and its subsidiary ITC Entertainment , as well as the Rank film archive.

The ITC archive is particularly lucrative since it includes such favourite shows as Thunderbirds, The Prisoner, The Saint and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) (original version), as well as feature films that include The Return Of The Pink Panther, On Golden Pond, and Capricorn One.

Many Rank Organisation films are also part of the Carlton library.

Carlton has released all of this material on video and DVD via A & E Home Video, MGM Home Entertainment, and Lions Gate Home Entertaiment.

On 2 February 2004 Carlton Communications plc merged with Granada plc, creating ITV plc. ITV plc owns all of the ITV franchises in England and Wales. Carlton Video became part of Granada Ventures.

ITV London

Since 26 October 2002, Carlton Television (in common with all the other ITV companies except Scottish Television, Grampian Television and Ulster Television) has been known on air simply as ITV1 (London). The Carlton brand continued until 2004 to be seen on production captions however. Since Carlton and London Weekend Television now use identical presentation and logos, the division between the London weekday and weekend franchises is now invisible.

With the merger of Carlton and Granada, Carlton Television and LWT are now run as a single entity (ITV London), with a single management team appointed to both companies. Both continue to have a separate legal existance however, and still have separate licences. Programmes made locally for Carlton Television now carry an "ITV London" logo, while those made for the ITV1 network carry a Granada London logo.

External link

• www.itv.com/london — Carlton Television/ITV London.