CITV 30th Anniversary

They are making British shows, looking at the CBBC schedule for today there's ninety minutes of imports at the most, out of twelve hours of broadcasting. In the seventies and eighties you'd get more than that in a week, when they were only on for ninety minutes a day.

Yeah, and it's no surprise that the closure of Granada Kids and the cancellation of My Parents Are Aliens happened when the ad revenue dried up. Everything is either reruns, made by a third party, or imported now. The junk food ad ban gave them an excuse to remove most of the kids shows from ITV1 as well.

My cousin's children had the channel on when I was visiting the other day, and I noticed what appeared to be a new version of Tricky TV, in which Stephen Mulhern presented & narrated, but the tricks were done by kids. I'm not sure if it was new, but it seemed different.

It's made by The Foundation (i.e. not in house) and there were three series, in 2005, 2006 and 2010. What you saw was a series 3 episode.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricky_TV

I see. They did commit to a few new series in 2011, Sooty & Fort Boyard: Ultimate Challenge, was Phone Genie an import or co-production?

I expect that CITV found that the imported programmes they did used to show in the early 00s rated just as well if not better than the british programmes which will also have helped their decision. (No doubt something like Sabrina the Teenage Witch was 1st or 2nd in the CITV ratings back then). Plus you had channels like Nickelodeon that was 99% imports, rated well and was seen as much cooler and trendier than Stephen Mulhern's shows).

I do wonder how long they are going to keep showing My Parents are Aliens though, I hope the cast get repeat fees.

Even back in the 90s Tiny toons and Animaniacs were rated 1st I think you have to go back to the 80s to get British cartoons that highly rated, Didn't Avenger penguins get that slot once?

Does it matter who makes it? Surely what matters is who commissions and funds it? And CITV have in the past couple of years commissioned more, particularly pre-school programming

Though they do repeat the same programmes a lot. The same 26 episodes of Sooty have been shown on a loop twice a day every weekday in term time and the school summer holidays since last September. Plus they had a weekend 'run' as well. Now recommissioning Sooty was fantastic for me as someone who grew up with Sooty, but surely even 4 year olds must be getting bored of seeing the same episodes by now?

It's cheaper to outsource, isn't it?

Probably not cheaper, but for ITV's sake its easier than producing in-house. They used to have Granada Kids, most notable for making My Parents Are Aliens but ITV closed it in 2006. Don't forget CITV has pretty much inherited the GMTV/ITV Breakfast obligation which used to show Toonattik, but I think that was outsourced to an indie.

It is of course cheaper to commission from an independent than it is from an in house department. The broadcaster doesn't have to have people on their payroll or have facilities lying around not being used between productions.

That is why broadcasters like Carlton and Channel 5 didn't have any in house production and why the big ITV companies and the BBC have spun off production and facilities into separate companies. It's not just because it's 'easier'

The original 26 episodes of 'Andy Pandy' were repeated continuously from 1950 until 1970!