Be Excellent To Each Other

20 years ago this very day marked the beginning of the end of ITV. As a result of the 1990 broadcasting act, a number of established franchises lost their licences to broadcast and new companies came in that started to merge what was a loose collective of different regional companies into one national broadcaster.

Goodbye from Thames.



Thames was lucky in that it was a major contributor to the ITV network. Shows like The Bill continued while This Is Your Life and Men Behaving Badly were sold to the BBC instead.

Thames was taken over a couple of times and is now part of Freemantle but retains its name. It now produces The X-Factor.

The Thames studios at Teddington survive to this day and are now part of the Pinewood Group. The studios on Euston Road which also housed Capital Radio in the same building have long since been demolished.

Thames were replaced by Carlton on the network who built no studios of their own (they bought in everything) and then started aggressively buying up other ITV companies. In fact they'd tried to buy Thames a few years before but the Thames management knew exactly how Carlton wanted to run things and resisted.

Meanwhile down on the South coast, after 10 years TVS were waving goodbye.



Replaced by Meridian they at least took over the Southampton studios (which were previously occupied by Southern). The Maidstone facility which had been home to shows such as Catchphrase and Number 73 was sold off and survives to this day. The Southampton studios were later vacated and were demolished a few years back. Last time I went past the entire site was just waste ground.

Meanwhile down at TSW in Plymouth, Gus Honeybun was preparing for his final edition of Magic Birthdays.



TSW was succeeded by Westcountry TV who were quickly taken over by Carlton who pretty much killed off the proud tradition of local broadcasting in the Southwest overnight.

Three companies who lost their licences through a rather crooked blind bidding process. A couple of years later Carlton succeeded in having their annual licence fees reduced so they were pretty much in line with what Thames had bid. Pretty disgusting but then Carlton was run by people very close to the Tory party including one David Cameron.

Finally it was goodbye to TVAM. Their formula for breakfast TV is still copied today. When GMTV launched in 1993 it flopped and ratings only picked up when they went back to the TVAM style format. And remember the Daybreak fiasco a couple of years back? Poor ratings and then suddenly they flip back to something resembling TVAM?

I used to have Gus Honeybun's autograph somewhere.

Out of interest Chinny, who profits now from something like Downton Abbey being an international success? As far as I can tell the BBC rakes in the mega bucks from things like Doctor Who and Top Gear, but presumably the profits from successful ITV shows go elsewhere if they're not being developed in-house.

The only job he has ever had outside politics and it paid him £90,000 a year.

IIRC, Top Gear profits are split 50/50 between the BBC and the production company owned by Andy Wilman and Jeremy Clarkson.

Depends on the deal they strike with the production company. ITV may get nothing or they may get a share. May depend on how much ITV are paying.

Obviously ITV still have some production capacity in house. You'll see an "ITV Studios" caption at the end of a show produced internally. They still have studios at the former LWT building, and in Manchester. I think Yorkshire is being wound down aside from Emmerdale Farm. But the days of Birmingham having both a proper BBC and ITV studios are over which is a fucking disgrace. Also all the regional facilities are now just tiny. In the case of Meridian News its just a industrial unit off of the M27.

The good thing about the old days was the network was made up of lots of different companies and they competed against each other furiously which upped the quality of output.

Although this competition could sometimes work against it. In the case of Robin Of Sherwood it was produced by HTV and Goldcrest Films (the people who made Chariots Of Fire) + funding from the A&E Network in the USA. Sherwood was a hugely expensive show. With inflation it would put Doctor Who/Merlin/the new Robin Hood to shame. But Goldcrest was rolling in the cash of their huge film successes and knew a massive international hit when they saw it. It was also a show destined for the A-Team Saturday night slot which in those days meant huge ratings.

And indeed Sherwood was a huge hit for ITV and internationally. However Goldcrest had some massive film flops that caused the company to collapse and there was no money to continue after series 3. All the profits had been swallowed up. What to do? HTV were a tiny ITV company and even with the A&E money they simply couldn't to make it.

HTV then asked around other ITV companies and nobody would touch it with a bargepole. Odd given it was a huge Saturday night hit for the network and was surely good for another couple of years.

Years later the series creator was at a party with an ex-LWT exec and he asked why nobody wanted Sherwood when it was such a huge hit. The answer was that LWT would never contemplate co-producing with another ITV company under any circumstances and that in anycase there was huge resentment that some tiny company had a huge international hit on their hands. Better to turn their backs on it.

There's never been any doubt in my mind that he was employed for his contacts to help Carlton push for de-regulation so they could swallow up as much as possible.

A senior Tory politician working at the behest of a large media group? Surely some mistake!

I swear when I was in sweden you'd see ITV on the end of channel 4 and bbc programs sometimes. Maybe ITV bought the rights to them and sold them abroad?

ITV do make programs for BBC.

How long before the last (tiny) vestigial remains of the ITV regions finally get abolished?

Me too. And then when I was 14 or thereabouts we met him in his retirement compund in Cornwall's famous(-ly shit) 'Flambards' theme park. Even got to hold him! Still got the photos somewhere.

Grade was on his way to doing this but the new head of ITV reversed some of what he had intended. However the former viewers of Border Television now have no local studio and get their news from Newcastle instead which is madness (I think they get a separate 15 minutes at the end of the news recorded separately).. What does Carlisle have in common with Sunderland, etc?

All local programming was stopped during Grade's tenure barring local news and (I think) a political show shown at the weekends. This is except for HTW Wales viewers, Channel TV viewers, and of course viewers in Ulster and STV.

The full Gus song:



At about 1:20 be on standby for a 1980's snack overload.

[edit] SHOCK! There's a Magnifico on the Walls Ice Cream board. I KNEW I hadn't imagined the king of the ice cream cones!