To be honest I won't miss the ITC, many people won't for the simple reason of The 1991 Franchise Awards / 1990 Broadcasting Act and what effect it has had on ITV.
Plus they make some stupid statements, the most recent was the advert for the Champions League on ITV where the kid throws some mash potato at his gran, LWT who made the advert said it was just humour alá Just William. But they didn't reject it, when it was a joke and probably made many people laugh including myself.
Note though that none of the dynamic URLs (those with the question marks in the address) work, which renders the majority of the archive inaccessible. Also, some of the other standard links don't work either. All in all, a pretty useless archive. So unless the Wayback Machine's picked it up...
Mixed views from me. I personally hope OFCOM are stricter. There were some things the ITC did that weren't harsh enough. However, I hope OFCOM carry on the tongue-in-cheek style in their statements. Read for example, the statement they issued about the Coronation Street gay kiss... it practically said, "Shut up, get a life, deal with it." Great stuff.
So the ITC are gone, after just under 11 years holding the reigns. Aswell as being the shortest lived commercial TV regulator, they've also done the most to ruin it (particularly ITV) too.
Sadly, I'm not expecting any radical departure from the ITC's light touch style from OFCOM.
Iron hand IBA style regulation is unlikely ever to return - which I think is a bad thing. Commercial TV stations are businesses, quality is never going to be persued for it's own sake, only as a tool to make more money. That means the broadcasters (understandably) have a vested interest in delivering service of the bare minimum quality to make them money. Therefore, if you want truly high quality TV, you need the market to be tightly and firmly controlled by a strong regulator with the teeth to hold the broadcasters up to standard - and come down on them like a ton of bricks if they tried not to.
It's not unfair for competition if every UK commercial broadcaster is subject to the same standards, and if it means that only the stronger businesses get to become broadcasters and tinpot ventures like Friendly TV never get off the ground, then that is surely only a good thing, ditto the proliferation of countless other cheap digital channels that have appeared in recent years - i'm definately not of the opinion that more channels is better.
What British TV badly needs is a strong regulator to keep the standards up, not some light touch outfit which talks but delivers no action, and responds to broadcaster pressure to clear obstacles out of the way of plunging more and more downmarket. Sadly, I don't think OFCOM is going to be any better than the ITC.
Don't forget that Ofcom is also replacing the Broadcasting
Standards Commission as well as the Independent Television Commission, Oftel, the Radio Authority and the Radiocommunications Agency.
A lot to take under the wing, certainly - but it's just the ITC and RA in new clothing really. Will never live up to the standards of the IBA.
To be honest I won't miss the ITC, many people won't for the simple reason of The 1991 Franchise Awards / 1990 Broadcasting Act and what effect it has had on ITV.
Even though it was the Broadcasting *Act*, therefore decided upon by parliament and not actually any fault of the ITC at all.
They were only obeying the law.
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Even though it was the Broadcasting *Act*, therefore decided upon by parliament and not actually any fault of the ITC at all.
They were only obeying the law.
There was nothing in Law about the bizarre and laughable bidding rules the ITC operated - which allowed them to change the rules almost daily to put whoever the hell they wanted in the regions.
