[Neil Jones]

IIRC LWT didn't do a proper news bulletin themselves (or at least without Thames' involvement) until well into the 80s, and up to that point it was the absolute minimum they could get away with - something like 16 minutes I read somewhere and it was all shoved into the first hour or so of transmission after the handover.

But the whole Friday night news thing on LWT was almost certainly an outside source, due to transmitter switch, and Thames probably had no right to be on air after 5:15 on a Friday - if they were it was probably as a producer/outside source, not as a broadcaster. Probably one of the better revenue streams going for Thames - LWT gave them something like half a million quid for what worked out to about 14hrs of material a year.