Carlton Television was 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 still continues to produce programmes), 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.

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 continues 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.

The ITC archive is particularly lucrative since it includes such favorite 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 merged with Granada Television, creating ITV plc. ITV plc owns all of the ITV franchises in England and Wales.

External link

• www.itv.com/london — Carlton Television/ITV1 (London).

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