Battle of Northern ITV V Southern ITV

Over the years many people will have know there was an on going battle over the direction of ITV, this come to a head during the 80s, Not so much for the 90s since everyone was getting into the same bed.

If you get a chance I would read a few books on the subject including " Running the show" LWT first 21 years. Back to the post. I think also the Day the dream died ( cheap as chips on Amazon)

The battle was certain ITV stations weren't happy with some of the content, ie TVS, LWT and Anglia wanted to attract middle class viewers, but ended up with Working class shows. Ivory is LWT ended up making alot of working class type shows, yet complained how it wanted middle class viewers. Blind date did very well outside London and the south east but no so great within it.

This is part of the reason why LWT took Anglia and TVS shows to appease its viewers, while also saving alot of money since it needed to cuts costs. It was win win, since it was always complaining how other Big stations would never put good stuff on at the weekends.

LWT did its self no favors, the amount of Drama LWT produce nose drive during John Birt, and never recovered until 1987. It was Catch 22, it had to save money somehow. But I wonder why northern ITV stations disliked putting out the big dramas for LWT.

John Birt was right, ITV needed to streamline and spend more money on other things. He also complained about the 7pm slot and how it was need for more top end shows. Maybe LWT should done what STV did have broadcast lots of "Now you see it". Albion Market was crap, and LWT ended up moving its Friday episode to Sunday afternoons.

I think he neglected to understand the northern ITV stations had the same problem there needed to make sure it keep its viewers happy aswell.

It ended where some of the schedules were strange, or clear North/ South Split at peak time. What I never understood why did it matter more once the three Southern ITV station got together? STV and TSW had been doing this type of things for years even on a Friday and Saturday night. There would move stuff around and even drop dramas to allow local stuff to go out. And now on STV instead of this drama Hes Shindig.

I have to wonder has something been lost with ITV, since it believes it can have its cake and eat it? Or maybe there should rethank how ITV works and maybe have spilt service? On for North and one for the south?

Or does it no longer matter is its one screen fits all is the name of the game. Or does anyone have great mind about this back in the day?

The notion that the Northern ITV stations were churning out lots of working-class material was already very much out of date even by the early 1980s.

And indeed history demonstrated that it was Southern and Anglia which were hopelessly out of date when it came to their estimations of what their viewers wanted.

I think the basic problem was that ITV had far too much backward-looking, historical stuff on-air during this time. North and South. It was hardly surprising that viewers didn't take to some of this, which was by definition parochial.

It's a vaguely interesting idea, but one with no merit when you consider Granada produced shows like Jewel In The Crown, Sherlock Holmes and World In Action, and LWT's biggest star was a scouser.

If you're talking about the TVS/LWT alliance, that wasn't much to do with geography. Both companies were of a similar size, TVS were desperate to make more network programmes and had the funds to do so. LWT were trying to keep budgets down and so bit their hand off.

Wasn't Thames also hopelessly out of date aswell? If you look at some of the content there were pushing out its meh and crap.

"Meh and crap" which may or may not be an industry term, is a little different to being hopelessy out of date. I think if you look at some of any station's content it would fit into that criteria.

I dare say if it was Officially, of it would be no, Unofficially I dare say stronger wording would be used

If you look back on almost all content from the period now it looks out of date and crap, but that's not to say it was at the time.

Not sure about the debate you've started but do think in a way it's a shame things didn't pan out slightly differently and rather than merging we ended up with Carlton and Granada competing on a national basis.

Some of the Thames show back then didn't really stand up to be fair. Central was no goody two shows during daytime either filling it up with mainly oz soaps

Debate here had wider ranging affect across all of ITV. Its a what if question, but John Birt went around the ITV meetings with pie charts etc to fully say ITV should be pushing out alot high end shows between 7-10pm. It was all about bums on seats and making ALOT MORE money to get in the advertiser especial for the middle classes.

He then suggested pushing out everything like documentaries or local programmes out of the way during these times, while also spending less money, on the arts, Highway, docs, kids. STV looked at that said bugger off and there did there own thing, you should see the amount of stuff there created, I dare say there were happy either about when the english networks were pushing out to them.

One has to wonder why there had to have schedule everyone had to agreed to at peak time.

A subject of interest to me, but not really in the same way it is discussed in the original post here.

'Running the Show' has been a personal favourite book of mine ever since I first came across a copy just about 23 years ago (it helps, of course, that it has such an incredibly fertile subject matter, the company that both Rupert Murdoch and Jean-Luc Godard worked for in the late 1960s / early 1970s, so you can bring into it both putative Marxism / Trotskyism and the converse revolution we actually got, whereas if you were writing about, say, Yorkshire the style would of necessity have to be more stolid and more confined to TV on its own terms, even if their horse-orientated series are far more Left-wing than their reputation suggests).

The first reply gets the historical context wrong. Nothing described in the OP happened in Southern's time. By the time of the battles being discussed here, Southern were long gone, and had been replaced with a company fully in tune with the Thatcher-led changes to their region and the destruction of "gentlemanly capitalism" (although Knights of God - a programme umbilically linked to D*wnt*n Abb*y of course - managed to critique the full implications of Thatcherism and the North/South split in a way which seems more and more prescient, and a remarkable act of subversion). Anglia had also changed considerably, and it's not as if LWT ever showed Bygones.

The elephant in the room here is that it now mattered much more than it had once done whether or not ITV appealed to the middle class partially because the working class - having been so strong so shortly beforehand - were clearly on the retreat socially and declining in numbers, and their purchasing power was slipping away badly. Meanwhile, the middle class in the southern counties, and I suppose the parts of Greater London which secured the Johnson mayoralty, were undergoing a revolution in their attitudes towards commercialism, and were accepting and embracing things which they had previously seen as vulgar and beneath them. Anyone who knows the slightest thing about the Thatcher era knows that these were parallel phenomena. Socially and financially, it mattered a lot more whether or not you had these people on your side; now that a lot of former BBC loyalists - or their children and grandchildren - were loosening the ties and sailing new ships (literally, in some cases), they were up for grabs and it was a natural response to try to win them over.

Commerce was becoming more upmarket because the socially upmarket were losing their resistance to commerce, and were relishing their victory so soon after they'd seemed in serious trouble; their youth, the market and generation LWT, TVS and Anglia wanted ITV to move towards, included people with the surnames Cameron, Johnson and (putatively, in that he's a good few years younger) Osborne. I yield to no-one in my distaste for these people's politics, but they were newly up for grabs and highly lucrative, and represented the ambitions and aspirations of the day. If your traditional audience is dwindling in number and purchasing power, *of course* you would want to move beyond and away from it. I know that the social and political situation was different in the North, but I (along with the Northern working class as they found themselves by that time) was given this world; none of us made it. Obviously this still hurts a lot of people, and as I wish very passionately that we still had a meaningful industrial base, it should be clear from that alone that I'm not praising, simply describing and acknowledging.

We know that certain dramas (Central's 'Pictures' and Granada's 'Shades of Darkness' for two) were moved after News at Ten by LWT, who tended to replace them with reruns of The Professionals or The Gentle Touch; we know that the 1990-91 series of Bullseye was shown by LWT several months behind the rest of the network, dragging on well into the summer when figures were lower, and the 1992-93 series was shown at 2pm rather than 5.30 or so (although in my Home Counties childhood home, with its constant backdrop of Radio 4 and visits to children's concerts on the South Bank, Bullseye was also always on, every Sunday without fail, and there are many people like me in that respect, throughout the UK - for a start, my mum knew a very genteel, quintessential Telegraph reader who also read the News of the World); we know that the Grumbleweeds were at 5.05 pm on Saturdays on LWT and all the other southern regions but 6.30 pm on Central and points north; we know that old British film comedies networked by ITV on Tuesday evenings in early 1988 were, after Thames & TVS did show some Carry Ons (some of which turn up in the desperate final months of the Kenneth Williams diaries), subsequently dropped by those regions by the time they'd got to the On the Buses films and Our Miss Fred, and replaced with Minder & Shelley. None of this is news. All of this is worth talking about, just not like this.

I don't really understand the latter part of the OP, and what I do understand I think is wholly irrelevant and unnecessary. Popular culture transcends these sorts of social and political divides (which obviously are still very strong), arguably more so than it ever has. Think of the vast differences, infinitely beyond anything found within what is still just about the United Kingdom, between "us" - all of "us" - and the huge numbers of people in countries with deep and profound historical resentments against the United States, and strict and unbending institutional loyalties to Islam, or (in some cases; less so now obviously) Marxism, or neo-Tsarism, or bits of all three, who are captivated by the USA's mass culture. If that can happen - and it does, obviously - then ITV in the Cameron era squaring circles which seemed hard to square in the Thatcher era is the easiest and simplest thing in the world.

30 years on from the changes described, however fumblingly, in the OP, huge numbers of people watch both mass entertainment with its roots in old-school ITV *and* the D*wnt*ns of this world in a way that maybe they didn't do so much before. It is natural and easy for people throughout the UK in a way that I don't think it used to be (just as no quiz or game show in the 1980s could have flitted straight from the poppiest of the pop to the highest of the high, and back, as effortlessly as Pointless does). The Cowell shows and their contemporaries have combined an atavistic working-classness with the modern Daily Mail (not quite the same paper, in this respect, that it was in Nigel Dempster's day) in a way that was hard to conceive of in the 1980s but had become a simple and straightforward task, by comparison, 20 years later. The latter has combined heritage values with aspects of latterday popular culture and soap - as Dominic Sandbrook (and I hold no brief whatsoever for him either; just describing, again, not praising) has argued, the latter has flowed into the former rather than disrupting it, and that too has helped ITV to do what it could not do so easily when it was fragmented 30 years ago, and probably helped it to be seen as the "right" channel to show Royal Ascot from next year. The two Northern behemoth soaps have become disconnected from their roots in, respectively, kitchen-sink drama and the associated post-war progressive politics which went with that (and even the more folksy small-c conservatism it had slipped into by the 1980s) and a now largely lost ruralism, and - in line with the places in which they are set - become rootless and globalised in a way which has helped them to win a new audience which knows and cares little for their origins. There are countless examples, and all of them confirm that a "northern" and "southern" dual ITV would not be necessary in the present circumstances; politically divided and riven within itself though even England clearly is, that is on a different level and in a different sense. In terms of multichannel it might be reflected more, but even there, if people (such as myself) want to watch grime videos in Dorset, there are the channels on the EPG to get them there. People know how to flit between multiple identities in ways in which they did not previously to the same extent.

In short, it is far, far easier for an institution such as ITV to "have its cake and eat it" in this respect than it would have been in the 1980s.

I have an article which is about to appear on Transdiffusion which sets in line some of the context here apropos how the former TVS region has changed with time; I can also recommend, with provisos, Julian Baggini's article about Bournemouth (football club and town) which appeared in the Independent last summer. I agree that a lot of Thames' 1980s sitcoms were at the back end of a style and way of life rather than the front of one ("gentlemanly capitalism", basically), in the same way that Terry & June was - as a company, they had (at least until they were floated) been closer to that model than LWT and their output reflected that. But I am always struck by the way that people in the main population centres, brainwashed by the tourist industry, have a conception of Dorset which has as little to do with how its people actually live today as a conception of the Yorkshire, Tyne Tees & HTV Wales regions where mining was assumed still to be thriving would have. Brush that from your eyes and a lot becomes clearer ...

(xpost while I was writing the above epic) I'm not disputing that the high-end shows have always been less popular in central Scotland; Pride & Prejudice in 1995 got half the share there that it did in south-west England (and as it was up against London's Burning, that would presumably have been another example of an LWT show rating better outside its region of origin). But the vast majority of the peaktime schedule on STV in the era being discussed here was the same as that in London (I assume, by the way, that "they were happy" should be "they weren't happy").

I don't dispute that there were, and are, profound social and political tensions within the United Kingdom (how could anyone with meaningful knowledge of either the 1980s or now question that?); I just don't think this is the area where they apply most. It may be a cliché, in some circles, to say "think of the Coca-Cola drinkers in Iran" but sometimes it seems necessary.

With that being the case, what context exactly are we talking about?

Anglia didn't make any significant changes until the very late 1980s (when they finally worked out that it wasn't 1959 any more). TVS lived under the shadow of Southern for their first few years, and pre-1985 were little different to their predecessor. TSW were pretty much a carbon copy of Westward.

Meanwhile Granada and Yorkshire had moved on, much more than the like of Anglia. The working class stuff had all but disappeared. And Tyne Tees had burst out of their staid YTV-owned period of the late 1970s with new-found vigour, getting heavily involved in programming for Channel 4 which served very much as a pre-cursor to the early 90s style of youth programming, which was classless by definition.

First off the OP never said Southern I think you may have mist understood what I was getting at

There was another series which LWT also moved, I cant remember what that was, but again did LWT really get better viewer figures with repeats? Albion market can be let off



Ive spotted many times when STV would happily move series arounds. IE the Grumbleweeds, the same Happened with Cannon and ball series in its early years. STV also moved blockbusters in 87/88 on Saturdays to a Sunday to broadcast The Campbells.

WE could go further back to the 70s STV moved New faces to a mid week spot meaning said vote never counted, There moved Sale of the century to be broadcast at the same time everyone else got Plant of the apes -TV series ( STV screened it)

During the 80s Yes STV would take the Vast majority ( thankful STV were smarter and know when to try and move stuff around) but there really would move stuff around if there could get away with it. ON Friday nights in 86 and 87 there were pushing out Shingdig. Its its own gameshows etc. If we head into the 90s well the still moved content around Emmerdale still at 17.10, while dropping other series all together, and stv have continued with this Patrices to this very day of dropping ITV shows.

This is getting us off the main subject matter.

How do you know its the same mass audiences watch both mass entertainment and Downtons? both series are getting around 6-8 million there plenty of scope for different level of people. Tourist industry, Try ITV there sometimes never helped its self in this matter ether.

Point is this, during the 80s ALL of ITV was being overhauled and this was before that stupid 1991 franchise round come about, companies where being streamlined. Audiences were changing, and ITV of course had to better match it market but it just felt like shoe horn one size fits all.

Same has happened in Radio today: Heart took over Real radio. Heart Scotland has diver bombed and have the worse figures since Scot FM days, that is some going, A few other have gone the same.