26 years ago today...

Hi Araminta,
Welcome to TV Forum

While you make excellent points, I would argue that regardless of who was in power in the 1980s, there would have no doubt come a point where something would have had to change in the regulatory landscape. The rise of cable and satellite television meant the old style hands-on approach wouldn't be practical, as every man and his dog could (and did) launch satellite and cable channels that were receivable by anybody with the right hardware.

Whether this happened in 1989 or 2014, it would have been inevitable. As things panned out it happened in 1990 but it could easily have happened as early as 1986 or as late as 2012. This is all in the realms of fantasy and speculation, as is what could have panned out if Ruper Murdoch won what BSB won in 1986. What could have panned out if Thames and TV-AM kept their franchises (both would still have still become part of ITV plc IMO). I wouldn't say it was "pointless", more curious fascination.

I think the only point where the mergers could have been stopped realistically was at the very end with Carlton and Granada, though even if it had been stopped back in 2002/3 on the grounds of competition within the network it would almost certainly have happened since - and by 2002 to the viewers the ITV regions had already been rebranded as ITV1 too, with only the news and last remaining scraps of regional programming being a nod to the separate ownership.

It might have been interesting had Granada and Carlton remaining in competition on the same network a bit longer though I think it's quite clear despite it being easy to position them as the good guys and the bad guys, Granada were ultimately the most ruthless franchise of the lot, and that's how they ended up taking control of the network.

That would have only had happened if ITV digital was not a complete waste of money. Of course if the franchise where to highest bid, Granada, LWT and even Thames would have all lost.

One thing that has always bug me about that franchise, is why all the loses in the south of England. Every single company on the bottom half of ITV were kicked out bar LWT.

Poundland at the moment have stocks of Phil Redmond's autobiography - well worth £1 if only for the chapter on the MerseyTV/Yorkshire bid for the North West.

Neil,

"curious fascination" can only take you so far when it ignores the wider context. This is what I fear some people (not everyone) on this and other forums have been guilty of.

Generally speaking this is my frustration with a lot of what alternative history comes out as - it *can* be something extraordinary, but all too often it's just historians playing parlour games (not my words originally), moving about objects on maps. This seems to happen in pretty much any field where it might be studied - a lot of what you can do with it isn't done (broadcasting isn't alone in this by any means).

And I do think it is "pointless" to speculate on broadcasting matters without bringing different politics into the counterfactual, because the change in the broadcasting culture was a byproduct of the change in the political culture (and the two main instigating forces of the political change have both, in succession, found themselves marginalised by the very changes they brought on). I think "pointless" is a perfectly accurate word for alternative history which takes one aspect of a very complex story in isolation.

Remember that Jeremy Corbyn is an open admirer of the Venezuelan Chavez/Maduro regime, which has closed down channels it finds politically inconvenient. That may be an extreme example in every sense, but it shows what would have been required in one field for another field to have been different.

Simply because they are the most lucrative ITV regions which have usually had the most competition during franchise rounds.

EDIT: The South West is a slightly different story. Westward had a very stubborn director that rubbed the IBA up the wrong way, then TSW stupidly overbid.

Yeah. The IBA wanted to get rid of Westward TV, and the 1980 was a very good way of doing it.
Chairman Sir Peter Cadbury was mouthing off left right and centre, splitting the Westward board - which given the IBA liked the franchises to have a harmonious boardrooms - was a great convenient reason for the IBA to have the galleon scuttled.

Southern were plain arrogant, and were failing to spot the potential of both the money rich retired types, and how the London commuter belt was slowly moving towards the south coast. A demographic that with the right programmes, advertisers would be lining up to show their commercials to. TVS (and other bidders) based the whole business plan on tapping into that duel viewing market.

It also didn't help Southern that the IBA had to write to them after receiving the franchise bid documents, saying theirs (which basically read as 'more of the same, and we've found a nice plot of land to make more shows in Kent than Southampton) at around 32 odd pages, was compared to the others, way too light on details, and maybe they'd like to flesh it out a to bring it up to the 100 page documents, other fellow bidders were submitting?

Of course, we know how that ended, and the belligerent last few hours on air, where Southern inexplicably blamed TVS on air for it's demise, just backed up the IBA's decision to pull the trigger and put the Southern star out of it's misery.

Southern's final show was basically just the TV version of a child's sulk. Of course, they weren't the first ones, TWW sulked off air back in 1968, even bowing out several months early.

I wrote at length in another place recently of how Southern were happy for their region to remain an advertising backwater - which it was, by modern standards, in the 1970s. Of course there are social reasons for this; the Northern English working class was at its peak in terms of both real wealth and influence on government policy, whereas there was still an 'haute bourgeois' wariness of commercialism in Southern's patch which has now almost completely disappeared, and parts of the Southern broadcast area which have now become huge centres of wealth for the nouveau riche (who make their money in London but don't want to live there) then still contained patches of rural poverty which you'd probably now have to go to Cornwall to find. There is still an ingrained underclass mentality in Kent which is worse than in most places, but you can (mostly) blame the maintenance of a 1950s education system there for that. But TVS' masterstroke was to realise that social and cultural attitudes were changing, and they had the good fortune that the North - historically ITV's heartland - was rapidly growing poorer and poorer. Certainly the reasons why ITV plc can now charge twice as much for advertising in the Meridian area than in the Yorkshire area, when in 1974 Yorkshire could charge far more than Southern and Southern could only charge slightly more than HTV (the Welsh part of which would obviously suffer the same 1980s contraction as the core of the YTV area), are the story of our modern history.

(A few examples of the long-term demographic shift in the region: Bournemouth becoming a huge student/clubbing town to the extent that it is one of only two places in the UK where the median age of the population is lowering, Brockenhurst becoming highly sought-after among London high earners because of its rail connections when I should imagine that in 1974 it wasn't *that* much more affluent than an equivalent Cornish town, Winchester also becoming much more student-orientated and feeling much less rural and less of a market town - all on the main line best known to me.)

Peter Cadbury represented the same thing that the Grades did (although on a much smaller and more restricted scale within ITV, obviously): a much more blatant and unashamed capitalism than was considered acceptable or "respectable" in the time in which he operated. As with Freddie Laker, his only real sin was being ahead of his time. But he had constantly attacked the post-war order of "managed capitalism" within which he had to work, and that was why he had to go. In modern times he would have been applauded. I can never remember the broader context, but Auberon Waugh - definitely in his odd sojourn at the New Statesman, probably in one of his broader attacks on trade union power representing the rise of stupidity (although he felt the same way about the deunionised Essex working class - he was no keener on the results of Thatcherism than on what it had kicked against) - once made a reference to "Peter Cadbury's extraordinary Westward Television" (although his own BBC regional work was for the Bristol region; he lived on the border).

But that's all it is - playing. It's not real, it's pure speculation, that's all it can be. It's a bit of fun, its not possible to cover all the bases of alternative history and most if not all of what we have now with regards to ITV has come about because of past decisions. If those decisions went the other way, it's speculation as to where we would be today. The consensus is that we would have still ended up here via a different route but there are far too many variables involved, an infinite number to accurately consider the alternative histories and all their potential impacts on ITV.



Your opinion, to which you are entitled. This is primarily a forum for TV presentation and occasionally we go down this route which is not rooted in realism.

Yet grade managed to create a number of programmes to keep the IBA happy like "The south bank show"

Anyways it still strange how TVS cash rich was never allowed to get stuff out onto the network, and only managed after doing a deal with LWT. TVS were no saints either

The first ITV station to be taken over, actually happened in June 1992.