Double Your Money clips from ITV's most popular game show of the 1960s. The show was hosted by Hughie Green who was ably assisted by his wonderful cockney foil Monica Rose.
Sadly, when the production company Rediffusion TV lost its ITV licence in the 1968 franchise renewal round, Double Your Money disappeared from our screens.
Rediffusion had been the weekday franchise holder for the London area since the beginning of ITV, meanwhile weekend commercial TV in London was the responsibility of ATV.
Newcomer TV station, London Weekend Television made such a strong pitch in 1968 that the Independent Television Authority awarded it the weekend franchise. ATV's consolation prize was that it was given an all-week franchise in the Midlands. But this left ABC without a Midlands base and worse still ABC had also lost its weekend Northern franchise to Granada and Yorkshire Television.
What to do then with ABC and Rediffusion? The ITA's compromise solution was to merge the two rival companies to form Thames Television and award the new company the weekday London franchise. Sadly only a few ABC and Rediffusion shows survived the merger, and Thames Television never really had the same punch or pizazz as its predecessors.
In the 1980s the once-great ATV morphed into the rather dull Central Television, in the 1990s Thames merged with Carlton, and nowadays ITV is just a boring homogenous monolith with almost none of its former regional identities.
Only a couple of examples of Double Your Money appear to have survived in the archives as kinescopes but otherwise the show is lost forever. Other shows such as The Sky's The Limit and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire have picked up the same sort of format, ie prize money escalator quiz shows.
Hughie Green died in 1997 whilst his wonderful plucky Cockney sidekick Monica Rose tragically died three years earlier at the tender age of 45.

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