Branding Carlton

I wonder, if it were for a different throw of the dice, the ITV brand would have ultimately been ditched and Carlton would have emerged as the Channel 3 brand everywhere except Scotland.

That certainly seems to be what Carlton were originally hoping for, given the rebranding of Central and Westcountry.

Once UN&M withdrew from the consolidation race and Granada ended up owning the majority of stuff, Carlton's dream was over.

I assume that it must've been the then-current rules regarding how much of ITV any one company could own, which lead to the rather odd situation of HTV being split up.

The publisher-broadcaster & regional news aspects of HTV became Carlton-owned after the UN&M withdrawal, hence the Carlton-ised style HTV idents. It must've been so clear by that point that it was now ultimately gonna all become just "ITV(1)", hence not rebranding Wales & the West as "Carlton" as they'd now only be called that for too short a period to be worth it.

Granada acquired the network programme production side of HTV from UN&M. The same style of generic purple production encaps that were introduced by Granada to Anglia/Border/Granada/LWT/Meridian/Tyne Tees/Yorkshire were used for anything produced by ex-HTV. Whereas those regions' versions featured entirely purple-and-white versions of their usual regional logo (e.g. Yorkshire's chevron, Meridian's sun/moon, etc), the Bristol/Cardiff variant substituted this for the stylised "A" from within the then Granada Media Group logo (which resembled north-pointing arrows, i.e. GR^N^D^). The text said something like "A Granada Bristol Production". Dunno whether the other version said Granada Wales or Granada Cardiff, as I never saw it used.

Border of course had abanonded its chopsticks-in-a-bowl logo, when it adopted the hearts dual-branding, leaving only Border text with an "ITV(1)" logo beneath. The Granada style purple endcap for Border saw the on-screen return of the chopsticks-in-a-bowl logo after a few years' absence. It did not return to the main station idents though. Consistency, anyone?

I do remember a certain amount of speculation around the time of the Carlton/Granada merger as to what the new company would be called. Some had dubbed it jokingly as ‘Granalton’.

There were also suggestions that the Granada name could have been retained for the whole company, given its history and reputation.

Also SMG (now STV Group) were initially unhappy about the ITV name being used: https://tvforum.uk/tvhome/smg-prepared-fight-itv-7677/

Of course, Tyne Tees changed it's logo in 2000 and it's heart ident was never updated, even when they added the ITV1 logo. If they use only the completed logo with no form-up, it wouldn't have been hard to update both Tyne Tees and Border when the ITV1 change was done.

Would have been fascinating to see Carlton get their hands on Border. A region that had little interest in branding and was stuck 10 years behind everywhere else, suddenly becoming up-to-date.

Those purple encaps were ultimately nicer than the idents! I wonder if GMG entertained going down that route rebranding their part of the network Granada. That would have been interesting.

Clearly later on both companies got their ducks in a row as both agreed to take on the ITV1 name and ditch regional names by 2002, and it's interesting by that point Carlton didn't resist.

ITV could of course have gone with the name 'Channel 3' instead, especially as that was the legal name of the network in the Broadcasting Act 1996.

That had of course been tried before in Yorkshire and TyneTees, but failed miserably because of the perception that the regional names were being downgraded.

Since that's what Granada/Carlton had in mind for the future of the network, it may have been worth another shot at using that name again rather than ITV.

Of course, everything became a Granada production in November 2004 ("Granada Manchester" for Corrie, "Granada Yorkshire" for Emmerdale, etc), and all the logos were retired - including the GR^N^D^ logo.

This is Tyne Tees Television broadcasting on Channel 3 North East, with a tongue twister of an announcement like this, it was doomed to failure.

Nobody really knew it as Channel 3 and arguably it was only when remote controls came in that it became associated with that number.

I suspect if merging into ITV Plc hadn't been the goal that the Granada brand would have returned across much of the North, though as "Granada Border", "Granada Yorkshire" etc. I doubt they'd have used it for LWT.

It was claimed at this point in time the company had to make ref to Tyne tees because that was its name ( If YTV had its choice it would have just been Channel 3) yet go forward three years and the ITC were like we dont care what the stations are called.

Some truth to that. That's why Central News and Westcountry Live and other associated brands lived on into the Carlton era - that rule was still in place by 1999, it's just Carlton had a different way of getting around it.