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The best and worst digital TV channels in the UK of all time

(June 2016)

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JO
Johnr
This may divide people but remember when there was a huge market for the premium rate TV quiz shows?

I thought the ITV Play channel was an excellent crack at actually getting it right with varied shows that even linked into ITV brands (This Morning Puzzle Book, Rover Return Pub Quiz etc) and excellent presenter choices too.

If you were stupid enough to lose your money calling in then obviously it was a ripoff but I made around £20,000 - £30,000 back in the day simply by using the free web entry and until recently still had the letters to prove it! Don't get me wrong it was hard work and required a lot of commitment but the £50 here and there soon started adding up! (I only ever got through to when ITV1 started to screen them once and won an easy £2000 anagram puzzle on Make Your Play)

I did actually 'call in' to the pub quiz element of Rover's Return as there was no web entry for that as I started to notice I was getting put through to the studio a lot, presumably the winner was chosen by the number of correct answers and then time to answer, I had a laptop next to the tele frantically Googling back then which may have given me a slight advantage Wink

Don't get me wrong I couldn't stand the other quiz channels with their absolutely impossible number puzzles etc but ITV I felt gave it a good go and it was sad, though probably inevitable that it only lasted a year due to the bigger picture regarding premium rate competitions. Plus, as much as I enjoyed Quizmania they were right to get their wrists slapped over the whole 'rawlplug' debacle!
RI
Riaz
But CITV's audience fully turns over every few years. The kids grow up, grow out of CITV, find the more mainstream channels, have kids of their own who eventually find CITV, then later grow out of it, and the cycle repeats.


The audience for CITV turns over every few years but the channel still has to compete with children's programmes from other sources. Therefore from a kid's perspective the comparison is not made with CITV of the past but what else is available to them.

There are quite a lot of kids that watch children's programmes from yesteryear if their parents or friends also watch them.
AE
AlexEdohHD13
Nostalgia ain't what it used to be Wink

I myself do sometimes watch classic TV (ITV3) shows and Classic Kids Shows. (CBBC and CITV).
NJ
Neil Jones Founding member
Riaz posted:
But CITV's audience fully turns over every few years. The kids grow up, grow out of CITV, find the more mainstream channels, have kids of their own who eventually find CITV, then later grow out of it, and the cycle repeats.


The audience for CITV turns over every few years but the channel still has to compete with children's programmes from other sources. Therefore from a kid's perspective the comparison is not made with CITV of the past but what else is available to them.

There are quite a lot of kids that watch children's programmes from yesteryear if their parents or friends also watch them.


But that's nothing new.
I dare say if enough people still watched Muffin the Mule, many others would too. That's peer pressure. Not as a result of what any particular channel is doing apart from offering the source in the first place.

Any decent offering will still have appeal many years later, it's often the difference between why the likes of Art Attack, Woof!, Zzapp etc are still remembered and often wheeled out fondly, and now horribly out-dated things like the Telebugs (how the hell that managed to rack up three series I'll never know, in hindsight) are thankfully hard to find.

As to your original point, I was referring to the kids today in a few years time. They'll do what we do today - decree how poor the then current offerings are in light of what they had. Okay we who grew up with kids TV in the 1980s and 1990s only had access for the most part to two offerings and limited imports (though one could say it was potentially higher quality as CBBC and CITV would cherry-pick the offerings and save us the dross), whereas today they have 50 channels and can grow up on mostly American sourced programming of varying quality with some home grown programmes in between.
AE
AlexEdohHD13
Riaz posted:
But CITV's audience fully turns over every few years. The kids grow up, grow out of CITV, find the more mainstream channels, have kids of their own who eventually find CITV, then later grow out of it, and the cycle repeats.


The audience for CITV turns over every few years but the channel still has to compete with children's programmes from other sources. Therefore from a kid's perspective the comparison is not made with CITV of the past but what else is available to them.

There are quite a lot of kids that watch children's programmes from yesteryear if their parents or friends also watch them.


But that's nothing new.
I dare say if enough people still watched Muffin the Mule, many others would too. That's peer pressure. Not as a result of what any particular channel is doing apart from offering the source in the first place.

Any decent offering will still have appeal many years later, it's often the difference between why the likes of Art Attack, Woof!, Zzapp etc are still remembered and often wheeled out fondly, and now horribly out-dated things like the Telebugs (how the hell that managed to rack up three series I'll never know, in hindsight) are thankfully hard to find.

As to your original point, I was referring to the kids today in a few years time. They'll do what we do today - decree how poor the then current offerings are in light of what they had. Okay we who grew up with kids TV in the 1980s and 1990s only had access for the most part to two offerings and limited imports (though one could say it was potentially higher quality as CBBC and CITV would cherry-pick the offerings and save us the dross), whereas today they have 50 channels and can grow up on mostly American sourced programming of varying quality with some home grown programmes in between.


I remember Art Attack. I watched a lot when I was younger.
NJ
Neil Jones Founding member
Just some friendly advice Alex, but please don't quote everything I've just written and then write something that's got nothing to do with what you've quoted, it's quite irritating if truth be told. The whole point of the quote system on a forum is for you to highlight certain areas of somebody else's post that you want to respond to. As you haven't responded to anything I've written, choosing instead to express two memories, it wasn't really worth quoting 16 lines of text was it?
AE
AlexEdohHD13
Just some friendly advice Alex, but please don't quote everything I've just written and then write something that's got nothing to do with what you've quoted, it's quite irritating if truth be told. The whole point of the quote system on a forum is for you to highlight certain areas of somebody else's post that you want to respond to. As you haven't responded to anything I've written, choosing instead to express two memories, it wasn't really worth quoting 16 lines of text was it?

No. Okay. Thanks.
AE
AlexEdohHD13
I am a fan of classics (as someone who was born in the 90s). Some are better than what's on TV nowadays.
OR
orange
Quote:
Disney Channel (modern)
Nickelodeon (modern)


The entire thing about these channels is that they change and adjust to children's tastes as they change quite a lot... It seems silly to complain about them when you're not the target audience and the 90's/Early 00's don't last forever...
VM
VMPhil
It's funny you should mention Disney Channel, they're actually repeating a couple of older shows at the moment, including That's So Raven.
AE
AlexEdohHD13
It's funny you should mention Disney Channel, they're actually repeating a couple of older shows at the moment, including That's So Raven.

I myself actually remember watching 'That's so Raven', 'The emperor's new groove', and 'Phineas and Ferb' to name a few. I remember when Disney Channel was good.
RI
Riaz
Some ITV companies were very committed to children's programmes in the past but ITV of today appears to treat children's programmes as an afterthought - probably to comply with public service requirements.

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