26th Anniversary of the biggest shake up in ITV

No doubt the Express has often shown strong traditionalist leanings, but on this issue it was taking a pure Thatcherite line - that the changes didn't go far enough. Actually, I might get their editorial off UK Press Online and upload it somewhere else ...

I can't remember the last US import I've seen on ITV either...

Unlike the 80s when there were lots

Lethal weapon? Pushing Daisy? Dexter?

Actually, the Express editorial is not really worth uploading - it's a whole page, most of which is taken up by Bernard Ingham being Bernard Ingham, basically - but it's essentially the sort of populist working-class Toryism, against the entire "do-gooding" middle-class "elite", including both the left-liberal and paternalistic "noblesse oblige" conservative element within it, which the Mail & Express have always been about and which came out very strongly in Thatcherism and most recently in UKIP and much (although not all) of the Leave vote. They say sarcastically "no doubt much profound and subtle reasoning lay behind the choices made by the committee of the Great and the Good entrusted with the task" and conclude:

"The Government set out with the best of intentions, trying to be fair to the companies, viewers, taxpayers (who gain indirectly from the annual yield to the treasury) and its own free market lights.

Alas, a messy compromise has resulted. The market has not spoken, the same old voices have - cloaking their tastes and prejudices under the 'quality threshold'.

This experience should demonstrate beyond doubt that regulation of broadcasting is an idea the demise of which is well overdue."

The Mirror (also available on UK Press Online) takes the complete opposite stance of course - "politicians know nothing about TV. They never watch it ... they don't particularly care that companies on the way out will now be pumping out trash to save money. They don't particularly care that companies on the way in have spent so much time, energy and money in fighting for the franchises they've little left for anything else. The government has simply picked up the cash, created chaos, and left the rest of us to watch it."

They also say of ITC members: "not one is a professional broadcaster. Instead, they include an astronomer and a psychotherapist" - as the Mirror has always been a Left-wing populist paper, this is little different really from the derisory comments about successive regulators in Right-wing populist papers.

I also have some material (which I remember reading at the time) from the Telegraph at the end of 1992 which is very sad and mournful for Thames - possibly romanticising the old order a bit, but very much taking a noblesse oblige Hurd/Mellor position rather than the pure market one you would have associated with their principal rival paper by that time. Tory backbenchers are indeed even today sometimes less pro-deregulated-market than the leading figures in the party - only recently they were partially responsible for keeping the six-hour limit on large shops' Sunday opening.

One article I found which amused me was a November 1993 piece by Bruce Gyngell in the Guardian where he said that the lifting of ownership limits didn't go far enough and there had to be a single ITV to compete globally. Oddly enough, when he was back in the UK and actually running a company that was about to be taken over he changed his tune. Funny that.

Did he change his tune? I think he remained keen on a single ITV?

As you can see, the Graun article I mentioned is up now. But in the Indy on 1st May 1997 (!) we have this:

"Gyngell attacks TV takeover tycoons

Bruce Gyngell, the outspoken managing director of Yorkshire Tyne Tees Television, launched a scathing attack last night on the 'takeover tycoons' who are threatening the quality of British television.

Mr Gyngell, who was addressing the Cambridge Union last night, said: 'In recent years we have attracted a new breed, businessmen who are only interested in television for the money they can make'.

'Instead of television being a cultural asset, there is a danger that it will be crushed by the bean-counters. Corporate accountants, takeover tycoons and here-today-gone-tomorrow managers who care nothing about quality'.

Mr Gyngell, former head of TV-am, is fighting a rearguard action to prevent the takeover of YTTV by Granada."

Gyngell, of all people, saying those things! Seemingly, he was quick to attack "inefficient feudal baronies" "stuck in a fifties timewarp" when he had returned to what had always been a much more nakedly commercial market, but found that he rather liked running such a thing, pandering to the hypocrisy of the Mail and its ilk, once he actually had one.

The Gameshows and soaps bit is still true though!

I take from both articles that he was still in favour of a single ITV, just not the people that were winning the race.

Well yes, that's arguable. Not sure he was really much different from them though.

His beef might very well have been that the people winning the race supported the *practice* of the market economy as much as the *theory* - which the censorious, Mailite Gyngell clearly did not.

Apart from films, I’m only aware of the late night Murder She Wrote repeats. BBC1 and ITV are no longer the home of US/Aus dramas.