Thames Valley Tonight

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Thames Valley Tonight

Genre	News
Created by	ITV Meridian
Starring	Wesley Smith Mary Green Hannah Shellswell
Country of origin	United Kingdom
Production
Running time	Thames Valley Tonight: 30 Minutes Thames Valley Today: Varies
Broadcast
Original channel	ITV1 Central (South), ITV1 Meridian (West) (ITV Thames Valley)
Original run	December 4, 2006 – present

Thames Valley Tonight is a regional news programme broadcast to part of the ITV Network in the Thames Valley area of southern England. The new Thames Valley news region launched on Monday 4th December 2006.

The region was created by a merger between Meridian West and Central South's regional news services, and broadcasts to the Meridian West sub-region from the Hannington transmitter, and the Central South sub-region from the Oxford transmitter. Like all ITV1 regional news programmes, it uses the generic ITV font and idents. The Thames Valley operation cover Berkshire, Buckinghamshire (west including Aylesbury), Hampshire (north of and including Winchester), Oxfordshire, Surrey (west and including Camberley) and Wiltshire (east and including Swindon). In all the population of the patch is around 3 million people.

The Head of News is Robin Britton who previously was the Head of News for Meridian West. His News Executive team include:

Kim Hewitt - Producer
Jim Stevens - News Editor
Reshma Rumsey - Features Producer
Kate Taylor - Forward Planning
Janet Hayman - Assistant Producer
Steve Atkey - Technical Co-ordinator
Amanda "Blue" Hall - Graphic Designer
Caroline Asker and Caroline Ferguson - Output Producers
Keith Peries - Director

The main presenters are Wesley Smith and Mary Green (with Hannah Shellswell co-presenting with Wesley on Fridays). Chris Maughan, Victoria Bennett and David Reilly present the Sports News, either in the studio or from the newsroom. While the newsgathering arm of the operation is based at the old Central South location at Abingdon in Oxfordshire, the presentation studio (formerly used for Meridian West) is based at ITV Meridian's headquarters in Whiteley, Hampshire. Bureaux offices are located at Swindon, Reading and Westminster. The view projected on to the screen behind the newsreaders is of the Oracle Shopping Centre in Reading, chosen presumably as the town now lies in the heart of the new region - previously it sat in an overlap of the now replaced Central South and Meridian West sub-regions - therefore avoiding accusations of favouritism towards one side or the other.

[edit] On Air

Thames Valley Tonight is the flagship programme for the ITV Thames Valley region, it's transmitted weekdays at 18:00 on ITV1. Alongside the main programme sits the service's news bulletins, Thames Valley Today which run in the morning, lunchtime, late evening after the main ITV network news and at weekends.

Note that during GMTV, the bulletins at approx. 6.35am, 7.05am and 8.05am are branded GMTV News and cover both the Thames Valley area and the rest of the Meridian franchise. Non-news programming is still split between the franchisees meaning that viewers in the north of the Thames Valley still receive Central programming and those in the south receive Meridian.