The 1980 ITV franchise auction

Not quite. Imagine that LWT became a weekend franchise for England and the south of Scotland as a London based company but with regional opt-outs and features provided by the weekday ITV companies. It would be vaguely similar to TV-AM as a London based but national TV channel.

Doesn't solve the problem of the mount of regional output required and its costs, as someone else said on this thread all the regional sport output. Agian the south of scotland took STV scotsport every so often..

I'm sorry if this sounds abrupt, but I think Tony, as a former Director of Programmes at the Cable Authority and employee of an ITV company at the time, would know a little bit more about the IBA's thinking.

I've never heard that about LWT, they had a huge heritage in programme making, and most of the people in senior positions in the organisation were programme makers as well. The company was certainly streamlined in the run-up to the franchise auction to make it more efficient, but that was to free up money for programme making. As for why nobody wanted to bid against LWT apart from the hapless LIB, presumably if they looked at the two London companies in 1991, Thames appeared the most likely to suffer because they seemed less well equipped to challenge - EMI wanted to sell it, for a start.

I don't understand this obsession with not getting the Big Five involved in things. It wasn't as if companies like TSW and Border were desperate to get things onto primetime and were continually thwarted, they simply didn't have the resources to do so. Their priorities were to produce local programming. I know TVS had issues but the other small regions didn't. Only the Big Five had the ability to make these shows and, no, it wasn't because they were stopping the other companies doing them. A station based in London or Manchester is so obviously better equipped to do these things than a company based in Carlisle. Just as the London Palladium has a more impressive programme than the Grimsby Auditorium.

If you wanted to make glossy Saturday night telly you wouldn't be working for TSW and Border in the first place.

The big 5 covered huge metropolitan areas, such as Merseyside and Manchester (Granada), and thus had vast swathes of population, which advertisers loved. As they covered these huge areas, it was only right that they should be involved in things. That didn't stop the other firms specialising in niche markets. Anglia produced Survival, which lasted for several years. STV made the successful Taggart detective series. It was just that the big 5 were literally that, the five biggest, whose resources and turnover combined probably exceeded the other firms compbined.

I think the point that the smaller ITV companies would have made is that there is more to ITV than shiny floor shows. Documentaries, drama and other genres could be well-served by being made by smaller, less obvious companies.

Yes - there is a critical mass required for big, long-running studio and OB entertainment shows and soaps, but smaller, in some cases more interesting shows, can (and were) made by smaller companies. I think there was a feeling that these shows were sometimes slightly frozen out.

Anglia, Scottish and TVS all made decent drama, Anglia made decent natural history etc.

Well, yes - and they did make them. But they didn't have the facilities or resources to churn them out.

In one of the IBA Yearbooks from the eighties there's a bit about Ulster's drama output, in that they didn't have the studio facilities or the permanent staff to have a full-time drama department, but they employed a drama consultant who worked on a part-time basis to identify suitable scripts that they could produce with their budgets and their facilities, and this way they made about one or two dramas a year. But obviously, the network required several hundred dramas a year.

Was STV and tvs the only medium companies to have a full time drama department? The amount of dramas it pushout to the network is alot more than just taggart.

LWT did consider becoming a publisher broadcaster in 1987, and later span off LWT Productions as a separate entity with the possibility of selling it, but it never happened.

Anglia also had a drama department and made numerous series like The Chief, Tales of the Unexpected and so on. Tyne Tees were responsible for the Catherine Cookson programmes, although they were an independent production so I don't know how much they had to do with them in City Road. They did make other one-off dramas as well, though. HTV had one as well, making Wycliffe, Robin of Sherwood and so on.

Of course, TSW did make a drama early on in the shape of Where There's A Will with Patrick McNee, but they lost money on it and decided it wasn't worth the bother doing any others.



They did lots of restructuring around the time of the franchise auction, for a while Christopher Bland was floating the idea of a management buy-out, though it didn't happen in the end. But it was all to provide more money to make programmes. I can't imagine the likes of Greg Dyke would be happy to see its long heritage in programme making summarily dismissed.

In Greg Dyke's autobiography he says his accountant at LWT used to move his mortgage to a different bank several times a week based on whoever had the best interest rate, and who apparently was amazed everyone didn't do that.

Anglia made a reasonable amount - the PD James Inspector Dalgliesh adaptations, The Chief, Tales of the Unexpected, and a few other shorter run dramas. They were usually pretty well made, and not 'lowest common denominator' stuff.

To clarify what I said (for Riaz's benefit): The IBA had a legal obligation to ensure that their commercial television system was properly funded and was organised in such a way that it could reliably be provided for the duration of the contract period at no cost to the taxpayer, and that programmes should be produced to a high standard. To do this required them to ensure that commercial contractors were sufficiently attracted by the prospects of profits that they would participate and play according to the IBA rules. The idea of locking the majors out of weekend transmission would clearly play against that brief, and risk not only major players walking away from the system, but also risk the quality of the programmes at weekends. As already pointed out, although STV, TVS, Anglia and TTT made some drama, none were sufficiently funded to produce the quantity of high quality drama, LE, documentary and current affairs programmes that the national audience expected at weekends. And with all due respect, Puffin's Pla(i)ce doesn't really hack it as a network children's programme.

Although, BBC South's cheap as chips regional children's programme, Hey Look That's Me, ended up being nationally shown.

http://missingepisodes.proboards.com/thread/4695

Yes, that really is South Today's desk and set with a Hey Look That's Me graphic slapped on the front, and various artefacts strewn around.