Frost had originally considered applying for the new Yorkshire region franchise, but the expected high number of applicants led to a change of plans.

[4] The authority had been worried by criticism of the network's output, which was seen as downmarket and the LTC plans were viewed by the ITA as being serious contenders to the quality educational programming of the BBC.

This led to threats of industrial action, and, with the dispute still unresolved, fifteen seconds into their opening night of 2 August 1968, technicians went on strike and the screens went blank.

ATV, now the seven-day Midlands franchise holder after losing their London contract to LWT, refused to transmit any of their programmes in peak time; elsewhere, the powerful sales department at Thames Television, who provided London with a Monday to Friday service, took advantage of LWT's ratings crisis by adopting a "beggar thy neighbour" strategy, encouraging advertisers to use Thames during the week by heavily discounting their airtime.

ATV dropped Frost's major Saturday night slot altogether and replaced him with comedian Dave Allen, while Yorkshire and Granada relegated the show to the late evening.

By December 1970, Murdoch become a part-time executive and injected £500,000 of new capital, increasing his share to 30% as part of the deal,[10] also insisting on terminating Frost and his Paradine Productions, an action that was carried out at once.

In time the station became regarded as a populist, conservative counterpart to the more highbrow and liberal Thames; hardly the BBC2-like ideal that Frost and Peacock had envisioned.

In 1972, Weekend World was launched; a weekly current affairs programme broadcast on Sundays at noon, presented by journalist Peter Jay.

Cyril Bennett died later that year, and Tesler doubled as the company's Director of Programmes until he appointed Michael Grade to that role in February 1977.

Three decades later the official history of ITV, Independent Television in Britain, observed "Under Brian Tesler's Managing Directorship LWT was to become the success for which its founders (almost all of whom had by that time left the company) had so earnestly striven.

Instead, the new Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) had elected to extend all franchise contracts to 1981, owing to the enormous costs of introducing colour television.

In January 1982, John Birt became LWT's new Director of Programmes when Michael Grade left to accept the post of Company President at Tandem Productions in the US, while Barry Cox became Head of Current Affairs.

He started overhauling the schedules, to maximise audience numbers: his measures to achieve this included moving some niche shows back out of peak time, and putting Cilla Black under contract.

[28] John Birt also started reviewing spending budgets for all departments to provide the best returns which resulted in The Stanley Baxter Show being cancelled.

LWT also postponed and shelved a number of other productions during the early 1980s, due to cost and frustration with other ITV companies' ideas for the weekend schedules.

In 1983, Birt published a document with proposals for an additional £50 million to be spent every year on peak time programmes: shows concerning religion, the arts and current affairs would be pruned to free up cash.

The deal helped LWT to fill its schedules with appropriate, domestically-produced programming while not having to increase its budget, while TVS was able to get more of its programmes onto the ITV network slots.

As part of the cost-cutting review, the idea was floated that LWT could become a "commissioning" organisation – similar to Channel 4 – with its programme production operations being sold off to a new company, in a bid to "sharpen up its competitiveness".

[33] The plan was halted in early 1988, as LWT chairman Christopher Bland, along with Greg Dyke, started to streamline operations; over four years, more than 690 people were made redundant, whole layers of management were scrapped and working practices were overhauled.

Gerry Robinson, the Chairman of Granada plc, was also surprised if LWT went ahead with a bid for YTV, especially since it had made £10 million losses that week and was already paying much of its revenue to the government.

[40] By 7 January 1994, the merger talks between Yorkshire-Tyne Tees Television had collapsed because it had proved impossible to reach an agreement on a suitable structure for the new company.

Granada's Chief Executive, Gerry Robinson, said: "We are obviously disappointed that having evidently accepted the commercial argument in favour of scale, the board of LWT has not been able to recommend what is a generous offer."

Ruth Anders, Sue Peacock, Trish Bertram, Keith Harrison, Robin Houston, Pam Royle, Alec Taylor, Glen Thompsett, Annie St John and Peter Lewis served as continuity announcers for LWT.

LWT's most recognisable identity – the 'River' – was introduced on Friday 18 September 1970, featuring a stripe made up of blue, white and red moving across the black background in the shape of an 'L' and 'W'; the 'Television' part of the name remained absent.

On 30 August 1996,[47] an updated ident and logo was introduced, splitting the river colours of red, white and blue on the individual respective letters, L, W and T, with six different versions.

This ident was altered from July 2000, reducing the red colour scheme and featuring a significantly remixed soundtrack, and another revision on 11 August 2001 included the new ITV1 logo and, from November that year, the itv.com website as well.

The channel also created the comedy-clips format with It'll Be Alright on the Night, Clive James on Television and Game for a Laugh; the latter in turn spawned Beadle's About and You've Been Framed!.

Although as a weekend station, LWT tended to concentrate on lighter material than its weekday neighbours Thames and Carlton, it did produce a number of successful drama series too.

Major programmes on LWT included most of ITV's weekend line-up, which included gameshows and comedies like Friday- and Saturday-night favourites Play Your Cards Right, The Two of Us, Square Deal, Close to Home, The Piglet Files, Second Thoughts, Faith in the Future, Popstars: The Rivals, Surprise Surprise, You Bet!, The Moment of Truth, Blind Date, Gladiators, Barrymore, My Kind of Music and Don't Try This at Home, and long-running Sunday night drama series Agatha Christie's Poirot, Forever Green, The Knock and London's Burning.

Nigel Lythgoe, who won infamy as a judge on ITV's pop talent show Popstars and now appears on the BBC's So You Think You Can Dance, is a former controller of entertainment at the company, working as an executive producer on many of the station's top-rating programmes during the 1990s and early 2000s.