There has been a lot more adverts on ITV1 recently to recover the loss of revenue from the September 11th attacks when there was more news and no advert breaks inbetween certain programmes.
The ITC agreed that at a later date, ITV1 could increase the amonut of minutes per hour that they could show adverts and this is probably happening now.
No channel is safe from long advert breaks. SKY One and UK Gold have extremly long breaks. At least were not like the US- advert breaks every 5 minutes.