Brand New Regional ITV1 Idents

Well the ident at 11.30pm just then didn't go according to plan. It ran clean for ages until the announcer chimed up in the last second and was then cut off one second into the ITV Sport sting!

There's a whisper doing the rounds that Mr Thompsett's been drafted in on Wednesday evening this week, as well as his planned Tuesday and Friday.

It seems that Network Centre just can't get enough of his professional presentation.

He'll be installed by this time next year. None of the people in the top jobs 'at ITV' ever last long. You don't have conversations with people about jobs you don't want.

That'd be nice - the man's a distaster. He must be living off his reputation at Sky, because he didn't bring anything useful to Five either, just his one-trick-pony idea of having celebs on idents.

So is having Glen prove that regional continuity coming from London can actually be done well a good thing or a bad thing for the future of regional continuity?

Good, in my view, but I WOULD say that, wouldn't I?

Regardless of the arguments about whether Mr Punter even notices the announcer or not, we DO seem to be identifying the key issue as whether the announcer is good at his/her job or not.

Something Banksey mentioned about fourteen months ago, if I remember correctly.

Ah yes, Channel 5's late 1999 celebrity idents, borrowing almost all the same concepts that the ITV1 idents have and equaly tacky. And a year after their introduction they even got refresh with a new set of celebrity idents being introduced.

Hopefully the third part of the C5 celebrity story - that they were cut back and eventually removed alltogether as soon as he left, will come true on ITV too,

Yes it doesn't sound right some how. The ITV2 bloke was on ITV1 last night (do we have a name for him) and he sounded like he should have been saying that Judge Judy was next rather than GMTV!.

I was right when I said we would probably never hear whatshisname, the former overnight announcer anymore when they decided to start recording overnights. I wonder why that bloke never did daytime freelancing. Night time was much better with regular time checks. The weekend recorded announcements were a novelty for the 3 weekend days as well

As usual I agree with cwathen on this.

However, one point to remember is that ITV was only designed as a regional network to allow some element of competition on a channel which would otherwise have been a total commercial television monopoly.

The idea was to have four (later five) big network companies competing against each other for advertising and also competing to get their programmes on the national schedule.

A regional carve-up wasn't the only option considered by the ITA when it was devising ITV in the early 1950s.

They also investigated the ideas of

1) awarding the main contracts by time of day (a lunchtime programme contractor, early evening contractor, prime time contractor, and late night contractor). <Remember that broadcasting hours were far fewer, then with most stations broadcasting just a couple of hours at lunchtime and then from the later afternoon until closedown>.

2) awarding the main contracts by programming genre (i.e., one contractor for drama/arts/music, another for light entertainment, another for documentaries/public affairs, et al).

There were obvious problems with these ideas and they weren't developed, but the regional pattern was adopted and developed mainly because the ITA assumed it would be granted a second channel a few years after the main ITV channel. Its plan was to introduce much more competition by having two contractors in each of the big regions, competing head to head against each other as well as against the other contractors on their 'own' channel.

The additional channel, of course, went to the BBC for BBC2 and the ITA/IBA has to wait almost 30 years to get its second channel - by then it was clear from the financial performance of ITV was such that a cost-heavy regional structure could not be replicated on a second ITV channel - the drive at that time was also to encourage more minority television from the independent sector and hence channel four was born.

I suppose the point is that if a body such as the ITA was asked to set up ITV in today's climate, they wouldn't need to worry about introducing artificial competition because there's plenty of competition already.

They would almost certainly set up a centralised, national network with one national contractor!

(Saying all this, I still badly miss the regional stations!!)

Well, imagine there was no digital TV, we only had the five terrestrial channels. They gave Channel 5 a national licence - they'd almost certainly give ITV plc a national licence if they applied now. So what's changed between now and the 50s?