26 years ago today...

I thought it was hacked afterwards after NDS (i think), who provided encryption for Sky, cracked and released the codes/instructions as a way to deny On Digital money and aid Sky on the path to superiority. That was what Panorama once claimed.

Reality TV as we have known it in recent years didn't really exist in the days of Thames, plus LWT had the responsibility of providing the weekend entertainment. No broadcaster today is making the same shows as they were in the early 90s. TV has evolved and every genre has been affected, whether for better or worse. In most cases it is undoubtedly for better once you take off the rose tinted spectacles.

All that said I do think ITV is suffering from a lack of competition for slots on the network and also only being answerable to themselves, rather than other franchises, when it comes to underperforming shows. I guess with the old network franchises could just target a handful of slots with their own programming, while ITV has the whole schedule to worry about but probably only concentrates on a handful of key slots each week.

Yet Catchphrase was dealt with Central staff, studios etc .

Not the first series of Carlton Catchphrase, that was still made at Maidstone.

Was there really a gap left by Thames? If you think about the programmes made around the time it lost its franchise, many of them continued beyond 1992.

Carlton's aim was to be a publisher broadcaster, which would have put Thames in an ideal position to produce programmes for the incumbent. I suspect Thames' tantrums with Carlton didn't help much though.

And it didn't since all of Thames programmes went via other ITV companies. The other big problem was ITV central that has alot answer for, sence it commission half the crap.

Here the thing as since as Carlton took 100% of Central is stopped being a publisher broadcaster overall, with only a small number of publisher content for the London local market, which some actually done via the programme maker London news network.

Catchphrase had been a co-production with Action Time since day one, which was actually owned by Carlton until 1993 when most of its shares were sold to make it count as an independent production company.

I don't understand your dislike for Central (in this context) as they continued to produce decent quality programmes throughout the period. In fact they were one of the few companies that could afford to, having bid just £2000 a year for their franchise (the greatest scandal of the whole saga if you ask me!)

Scottish also got away with a £2000 bid due to a lack of opposition too. When you think of the amount of money that some other companies put up, which crippled them, and in the case of TVS and TSW lost them their franchise for being too high, it really is a scandal. The fact some of the higher bidding franchisees had their payments reduced a couple of years down the line (especially GMTV who had theirs reduced to less than TV-am bid) was just as scandalous really.

NOT ITV "Central Independent Television" ITV Centre, that awful London office that commission all ITV programme instead of the companies themselves.

That's one story, if you want to believe it was a News International conspiracy (it's hardly a squeaky clean corp I admit !) but ISTR ahead of any of that was the fact that Canal+ subs cards in France were being cloned etc ? (Canal+ used the same encryption system)

Hi, all.

I felt moved to respond in this thread because the Wikipedia entry quoted here is (largely) my work.

I'm not particularly proud of it, for the reasons you'd expect: it is, by its nature, written in the deathly, sitting-on-fence style that Wikipedia requires ("widely felt to be", "both its supporters and its critics", "many people believe", "it has been claimed", etc). But I felt it needed to be there - in its own context, the claims which have been disputed here are the usual Wikipedia criteria of expressing opinions felt by a considerable number of people, not opinions which are being pushed or accelerated by the article itself.

The idea that, *with the same politics dominating the country as have done so in recent times*, an ITV dominated even by Thames - let alone LWT - would have been any different is errant nonsense. Granada had the most public-service, the least proto-Murdochian and quasi-American (in the sense that the latter term was used in the UK before HBO and modern US drama arrived), culture of any leading ITV company, and its journalism was the least uncritically pro-establishment in the way Tonight et al have generally been. But look at how profound and how total the culture change there was, even before its new franchise period had begun (David Plowright was forced out in February 1992 and Charles Allen in place by the end of that year). If a company as rooted in the "old" UK broadcasting values as Granada could transform itself for gain in the way it did, any company could have done (to some extent, you could say the same about the BBC as well). In all likelihood, a Thames which secured its new franchise term would have undergone a similar cultural shift within a matter of months. There would have been a total change of management and general priorities, and an overriding alteration of values and beliefs. As a company based in London, it would have had an overriding advantage in the first place, and consolidation might even have happened quicker. By the end of the 1990s, it would have been as unrecognisable from the company of old as Granada was. The name would have remained, but nothing else to speak of whatsoever. No doubt it would eventually have taken over production of Coronation Street from what had become its Northern base, a la the BBC's presence in Manchester - and that wouldn't have been much of a shift either, because Coronation Street in its latterday form is also wholly unconnected to the old Granada culture.

The idea that ITV would have been any different with LWT in control cannot even be sustained to that extent; that company was at the opposite end from Granada under the old system, far and away the most proto-Cowellite, the crassest, the most populist and market-led (at least by the 1980s, i.e. after the old establishment had finally seen off Lew Grade). The cultural shift required for an LWT-dominated ITV to become what ITV broadly did become would have been miniscule and tiny compared to the shift required for the Granada-led ITV - and if the latter could manage it, who on earth could possibly dispute that the former could have pulled off what would have been a remarkably quick and easy process by comparison? LWT unashamedly did all the stuff that you weren't supposed to do under the old order, but which became embedded and took root after deregulation - they took *pleasure* (see the great 'Running the Show' here) out of being the anti-Granada. (And the idea that Granada post-1992 had any meaningful connection left to the old company in terms of dourness and fear of pleasure, and that this was why latterday ITV supposedly didn't do light-ent properly, is even more bogus and nonsensical.)

The one thing that would have been required for a different broadcasting culture post-1990 is different politics post-1980, which depressingly and frustratingly rarely get discussed here (or in similar places). If you had had those politics, I don't at all rule out the belief that the expansion of technology and communications could have been harnessed and managed in a different way. But even attempting to invoke a different post-1991 ITV without also invoking a world where British and world politics did not take the turn they did is as pointless and naive as attempting to invoke, say, the continuation of European communism (or, perhaps, its becoming more liberal while western Europe became more socialist) without also invoking such a political difference.

Neither a TV Forum thread nor a Wikipedia entry - which, by its nature, is a disinterested description - get close to the heart of it all.