26th Anniversary of the biggest shake up in ITV

I agree with you.

What I find intriguing is that ITV companies from 1993 could be publisher broadcasters. Was this option deliberately created in order to make Thames more open to competition? In the 1980 franchise round Thames was unopposed until the 11th hour by the same company that was also standing in against LWT. The lack of opposition to Thames in what was then the most lucrative and prestigious ITV region was almost certainly a result of knowledge that Thames is undefeatable because it was such a large production factory that produced many popular programmes. Could anybody do better?

Did the ITC in 1991 specifically want more of a publisher broadcaster and less of a large production factory for London weekdays or did they just want rid of Thames?

Well Remeber 25% of all itv programmes from 1993 had to be from independent companies. So there was no need for lots and lots of its studios around the UK...

I believe that Thames lost due to its apathetic owners who long wanted rid of the station.

Most of the successful bids appeared to have a more dynamic way of playing the game. Either involving shareholders that had their fingers in more franchise pies to work out what was being bid elsewhere, or deliberately sabotaging bids by offering stakes or production deals.

Rather than play the game dynamically, Thames and TV-am focused on what it could afford and programme quality. TVS looked across the Atlantic for an investor with deep pockets thinking it could overbid and still pass the quality threshold.

TSW is the only one that attempted to play the game properly and lost. They found out a lot of detail about their two competitors and incorrectly guessed they would be bidding higher than they did. They suspected Westcountry had bid £12m and TeleWest Broadcasting had bid £14m. As it happened, both bid around £7m, less than half what TSW bid.

Surely the ITC would have had to re-award Thames the London weekday franchise if it had bid more than Carlton - regardless which model it planned to use?

It passed the quality threshold, it had a realistic business plan - and I doubt that it would have been unable to sustain its annual licence payments...

You have to remember that before 1982 the indie sector in the UK was tiny, because ITV was a closed shop and nearly all programmes came from the Five (Thames, LWT, ATV/Central, Granada, and Yorkshire). Even the Ten bearly got a look in. Channel 4 created the indie sector, as it exists today, because it was the first to adopt the “publisher broadcaster” model. And once the indies were up and running they wanted into ITV, and lobbied heavily on that front. And they had support from the larger ITV companies, particularly TVS who had the most lucrative region advertising wise but struggled to get network commissions because the Five kept nearly everything to themselves.

However I don’t think there was anything in the earlier legislation that prohibited being a publisher broadcaster. More that the in-house model was all that was known pre-C4 arriving.

No, that was just the way the industry had gone and Channel 4 had been a big success so why shouldn't they allow it for ITV companies?


I don't think they cared what model won as long as the winning companies could afford the payments and didn't crash and burn

There's no link between indies and studios. Just as many independently-produced programmes use studios as broadcaster-produced ones.


The decline in studios is mainly a technological thing, it's made production possible anywhere to as good a quality.

The logic of this policy has always baffled me. By 1990 C4 was already established as an outlet for indies and the fledgling satellite and cable channels would provide further outlets in the near future. I am aware that there was plenty of lobbying and pressure from the indies to open up ITV but whether the ITC should have enacted a policy that a certain minimum percentage of ITV programmes have to come from indies is a questionable move to say the least. Instead the ITC should have waited to see if any of the two scenarios emerged:

1. The uptake of satellite, cable, and DTT channels during the 1990s results in indies losing interest in ITV as an outlet.
2. ITV companies naturally scale back production in-house and increasingly source programmes from indies to the point where at least 25% of ITV programmes come from indies by the late 1990s.

Can anybody confirm if Thames was unhappy about scaling back production and increasingly sourcing programmes from indies after 1992?

But neither of these were high-budget outlets.

The BBC and ITV had the big budgets that would allow for larger scale, higher budget programmes that Indies really wanted to make (as they make a lot more profit on them)

The Indies saw the in-house producers as unfairly subsidised - and so a guaranteed commission percentage helped level the playing field for them.

Satellite and Cable were never going to be a significant revenue stream for Indies during the 90s - it wasn't until the 00s that stuff really took off. (Sky analogue was still movies and sport driven with not much for Indies to produce)

If I was at the ITC in the early 1990s then I would have been concerned that satellite and cable channels could end up being dominated by repeats, films, sports events, and American programmes with only a limited amount of new British programmes - either produced by the channels themselves or from indies – or low quality programmes.

Therefore imposing a requirement that a certain minimum percentage of ITV programmes have to come from indies could end up jeopardising satellite and cable broadcasting.

This idea of the ITV companies having personas does irk me sometimes. Thames being an old, reliable pair of hands afraid of change. Carlton being greedy and money grabbing. It just doesn't sit well with me.

As it happens, I think Thames embraced independents more than any other ITV company. Mr Bean and Men Behaving Badly are two examples of shows that Thames commissioned from indies before they lost their franchise. Not many examples immediately come to mind from other companies (apart from Inspector Morse, but Zenith started as a subsidiary of Central, and TV-am's children's output which again started in a similar way)

I think overall the network was self aware enough to work out that the indies would need to use their existing facilities and there was money to be made there.

Do ITV companies win or do they lose?

IMO 1991 was a bad year to hold another franchise round due to both the economic climate and the fact that satellite and cable were only in their infancy unless the ITC had a strong desire to get rid of a particular company sooner rather than later. TV-AM also hadn't been on air 10 years at the time.

If the franchise round had been deferred until 1995 then would the same losers from 1991 have lost or would the outcome have been significantly different?

Well, arguably 1991 was a better time if the goal was to open up the market. Had they waited another 5 years the existing ITV establishment might have had a bit more time/funds to dominate the satellite/cable market, which is not something the government wanted to encourage.

By the way, TV-am's initial franchise was only granted for 8 years, but it got extended to accommodate the changes in the system.

Generally about 5 years was the IBA's preferred time before reviewing licences. The only reason there were no changes in the 1970s was due to the investment required for colour television.