The end of CITV...?

It's probably not a fair comparison with the World Cup airing on the BBC at the same time, but how well has ITV's afternoon line up of films and detective dramas been doing without CITV.


The trouble with ITV is they always like to try and fight fire with fire and seem to be commissioning any quiz show going in order to fight of Deal or No Deal - which IMO won't work. They need to fight it with something different.


One thing I think could work - and perhaps kill a couple of birds with one stone, is from 4.30pm-5.30pm they have an SM:tv Live style programme on, following on from CITV and leading into something like The Price is Right at 5.30pm.

It's different - the kids could get control of the remote and we all know that Saturday morning style programme can be very effective in getting the parents watching too.

The original article also said that this could be a move to all Children's programming being removed from ITV, especially if junk food advert bans are forthcoming. And of course there's a question mark in the topic title to emphasise that it's only a possibility.

I think it's a shame the situation has got to this, but I can see where they're coming from. Last week an article on MediaGuardian was published showing how much advertising would drop if Junk Food commericals were banned, the most damaging would be GMTV as they'd lose something like 70%, then ITV would follow suit, though as unethical as Junk Food advertising is, if you take it off, it could very well damage every Commerical service for Children.

I can't see this being the end for CITV just yet, but the closure of 'ITV Productions Kids' doesn't surprise me at all, I can't see it drastically changing the output of CITV due to the fact they got most of their shows from Independents now anyway, the only real hit for ITVPK is Yorkshire's 'My Parents Are Aliens', I can't think of anything else that comes to mind.

It's a shame it's got to this, but times change, most kids these days have access to Digital television, the afternoon slot isn't the pot of gold it once was, and unfortunately from a business point of view, ITV really need to address it.

I never realised how many channels ITV have been involved in that have now died:

UTV2
S2
ITV News
ITV Sport
ITV Select
Granada Plus
Granada Breeze
Granada Talk TV
Carlton Cinema
Carlton Food
Carlton Select
Carlton World
Carlton Kids
Sky Scottish

personally i've always preferred the bbc children's output and rarely watched citv or it's predocessor 'watch it' as a child, the only exception to this was tiswas which outranked swap shop by a long shot

after tizwas finished we (sibling and myself) watched bbc saturday morning tv, well saturday superstore, by the time live and kicking came along we were in our late teens

To be fair, ITV were not involved in the death of Sky Scottish. SMG and BSkyB are to blame.

WOW I DONT REMEMBER THOSE CHANNELS!

Wow indeed.

S2 and Sky Scottish failed because they showed nothing of worth on them.

Sky Scottish was a very good idea, a channel to give Scots living in England or elsewhere within the UK to see the best available from Scottish Television, though the channel was never given long enough. It ceased broadcasting 18 months after it started, and it only ever broadcast from 6.00pm until 8.00pm, pre-Sky Digital, they should have stuck with it, though it never would have been able to get mega ratings, it could have been a success. It was a bit ahead of it's time really, a bit like S4C Digidol.

CBBC is much better than CITV.

Very sad, but times change. I remember some great shows produced by the ITV Network.

Woof
Mike and Angelo
Splatz
Sooty & Co
Fun House

Granada Plus was a quality archive television channel, which most of the content was promised to be moved onto ITV 3 but that hasn't happened really.