When Granada bought LWT

Indeed, don't forget tonight's special edition Continuity Street - when the pilot of that 747 catches up with Maggie...

I still need to write the second episode of that soap... >.>

Took me a while to find this thread, but an interesting documentary there. Interesting to note that even in 1994 Charles Allen had allready clearly starting writing his ITV plc speaches. Best line of the programme has to be from Greg Dyke:

"I think there is a danger in the world as it's emerging where the lawyers, the accountants [and] the business affairs...have so much influence, who takes a flyer, who takes a wild decision, who goes for something when it's only got a 10% chance of success? I'm not sure that those sort of people are around any more"

If creatives are cut out of television, and no one is prepared to take a risk for fear of upsetting the bean counters, then it's doomed to a downward spiral.

My main concern with ITV for several years now has been the lack of effective regulation. The ITC introduced 'light touch' regulation which became positively feather-touch but it's end, and OFCOM , as well as clearly having it's fingers in more pies than it's able to effectively manage, appears totally disinterested in regulating ITV at all.

My concern was always that deregulation would reach the point of no regulation at all and ITV would no longer have to answer to anyone. The situation in the last few weeks with the new Thames Valley service has confirmed that we have finally got there - ITV were able, completely at will, to re-allocate transmitters from Central to HTV West,, dispand the Central South operation and retrograde Central back to a two way news service even though it's a specific requirement of it's operating licence that it provides a three way service, and create an entireley new region which operates without a franchise!

OFCOM have clearly lost control of their own franchisees, and I fail to see how this can be a good thing.

The usual argument made against trying to rule TV by anything other than market forces is that Sky changed the ball game - they don't use any UK owned or controlled broadcast infrastructure and so it would be unfair to tie other platforms or broadcasters down when Sky could always find a way around it. But with DTT finally getting a good selection of channels together, offering for free more and more channels that previously could not be imagined outside of subscription, and with Sky having lost it's crown of being the main provider of digital TV to the UK, the argument and the possibility of effectively tying broadcasting back down is raising it's head in a more credible way than it has done for a few years.

TV in this country is getting worse and worse in both technical and quality standards, fuelled by a culture of there being more channels than the market can really stand to support, and the company taking the lion's share of advertising revenue is out of control. Regardless of personal opinions on whether ITV should have 15 different names or not, or whether more soaps in favour of documentaries is a good idea, surely we must all agree that it cannot go on like this, but for it to change the regulator has to bite the bullet and start growing some teeth - if that doesn't happen and idealistic visions of market forces acting as self regulation alongside a regulator which merely rubber stamps the whims of the broadcasters rather than regulates them continues for much longer, I seriously fear for the future of television in this country.

[/soap box]

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Coronation Street
World In Action
Busman's Holiday
The Krypton Factor
Connections
Runway
Hold Tight (Children's)
Children's Ward (Children's)
Families
Bullman
Medics
A&E
Disappearing World
Compass
OSM
Watching
Up The Garden Path (although not too sure if this was an indie for Granada!)
You've Been Framed
Stars In Their Eyes
This Morning
El CID
Coasting (which deserved to be more than a one series wonder)
Cold Feet
plus many many more different genre type programmes shown on the network

If anything this tries to show that Granada did a bit of eveything from Gameshows to serious documentaries, but they were all done with quality and not primarily aimed at a mass audience. GRanada was, in the main, a high-brow programme producer and didn't really aim at the mass market. You just need to look at some of the drama's to see the same as well...

Brideshead Revisited
Jewel in the Crown
Cribb
Sherlock Holmes
Crown Court
First Among Equals
just to name a few!!!

If anything its just by chance that quite a lot of Granada programmes were hits - or is it British taste that does enjoy watching both mass-audience produced shows and watching high quality programmes on the same network!!! ?

To Inspector Sands: You seem to think competition in the media is a good thing. You defend the right for multiple companies to operate and for the good ones to prosper and the bad ones to wither and die. Why, then, are you so ideologically opposed to this happening on 'Channel 3'? That's exactly what ITV was - a set of competing stations. They just happened to share content at certain times.

A federal ITV wouldn't be re-invented by simply re-introducing regional idents. It's NOT about the brands. It's about having just over a dozen DIFFERENT financial and creative teams, with different outlooks and different priorities, doing their jobs in their way and in a way that reflects the size and style of their region. It's about those teams making product either for their local audience, and therefore pitching for local advertising to fund, and also making programmes to pitch to the network initially using local funding, but if commissioned for 'syndication', receiving advertising revenue from outside their region too.

It is only this type of framework that allows true competition - how does the presence of More 4 and Babecast TV complement one another? How does what one does impact on the other? It doesn't.

There are many shows that are now shared between not only different channels, but different COMPANIES' channels. A show may move from five to ftn to Sky Three, almost in the same way that a programme may have moved around ITV regions. The difference is, the shows in this category will not be ones made by/for five, ftn or Sky Three that were so good that RTL/Flextech/BSkyB want to pool their resources and simulcast the shows, and take an equal share of the advertising revenue from all three channels (which would be a great business move in terms of profiting from viewer loyalty to a rival broadcaster). The programmes will be imports or 'content' drawn from the archives of the BBC and ITV/C4 when they meant something.

A single ITV has to live with a 'make or break' market force because they operate controlled by a single commercial team, a single legal team and a single marketing team. They are such a huge organisation it becomes increasingly untenable to try and 'direct' such an organisation from such a small core central team, and one which has such a single-minded agenda at any one time. The BBC are also like this, but they don't have to make money. A federal ITV has the freedom to be pro-active, rather than responsive, as one company in the framework having troubles does not impede the rest.

Federal ITV was a commercial nirvana - totally separate, private enterprises, perfectly at liberty to undertake their commercial activities according to their own wishes AND YET they had the guarantee of being able to share in the success of other companies in the network, simply by playing a clever balancing game of paying fees for network programming against specialised local advertising which, may not amount to much for sporadic showings (such as they get now) but would roll in slowly but surely enough to cover those costs, when booked by the advertisers with the region.

There are many ways, with today's technology and today's thinking, to come up with for handling a mixture of national and local advertising sales and accounting. There are many inventive ways that local and network commissions could be managed, using a mixture of regional teams and network centre. There are many solutions to programmes that are seen to have an uncertain footing with regard to being a national success - most basically by trying it out in one region first and seeing what ratings it gets, and viewers in overlapping areas or neighbouring companies wanting to pick it up - or a programme that starts off popular but then experiences a dip in ratings - then regions can reschedule and push programmes with more lucrative advertising potential in its place.

This 'brownian motion' effect of scheduling and internal self-promotion of unexpectedly popular programmes (and self-obscuring of latterly unexpectedly unpopular programmes) kept a natural even balance on the balance sheet, and on the viewer's screens.

So, it mattered not one jot if 'Prisoner: Cell Block H' and 'The Equaliser' were being shown by four different companies on the same 'channel space' in different parts of the country. What is important is that all of those screenings will have been funded and accounted for in TOTALLY different ways, and this commercial freedom allowed each station to build up 'pin money' to spend on what are now seen as 'non-essentials' such as a human presence (as ABC so aptly called them, 'Station Hosts'). 'Non-essentials' which, if re-introduced today, would give the Channel 3 network an immediately identifiable feel and character, which no amount of branding, marketing, and fast-cut/over-compressed V/O trailers could ever give.

I'm not ideologically opposed, because that's exactly what did happen. the restrictions were lifted and market forces allowed the ITV companies did what they had all wanted to do since the start - consolodate. This is exactly what happens in any market driven economy.

If it was advantageous for ITV to stay as totally seperate companies, without all the synergies and cost savings that they have now.... they[d have stayed like that. If they'd been forced to stay like that they'd be in even more trouble than they are now.




That's very idealistic though. 15 or so years ago when each region had a monopoly on advertising and a duopoly on viewing that was feasible



No they don't, but More 4 does compete with ITV, BBC, Sky One, Sky Movies, Discovery and many others. Babecast has many competing channels too. Each channel has it's own competitors, however because of its broad demographc ITV does compete with more channels than most.



But the federal ITV of old didn't do that - there were 15 of everything each with their own ideas all actiing their own interest.. Absolutely no joint strategy or co-ordination. Just look at the old ITVs activity on the internet. You can't be pro-active when you've got to get agreement from 14 other companies



Yes it was a commercial nirvana - it was a monopoly!

Wasn't that only ATV though & not the rest, I'm sure I read somewhere that Lew Grade wanted to take over one of the original companies (Not sure now if it was ABC, Rediffusion, or the franchise that never was, whose name escapes me)

Well I think TV will go the way Inspector Sands wants, and all we'll have is as I've said before loads of channels all showing very cheap programmes hardly worth watching, and if thats what people want, I guess DVDs and archive programmes will thrive.

I think Carlton were a bit boring and not very productive but Granada are worse.They tricked Carlton into merging then denied the existence of Carlton.

and then denied the existence of regional ITV all together. I still can't understand why people really have it in for Carlton when Granada have done far worse to ITV.

Granada produce better (and more) programmes than Carlton.

Granada are worse, yes Carlton is disliked, even by staff at Central. But Granada have done some terrible things.

The ATV, Central and Carlton photo library was ordered to be binned by Granada. So thats photographs going back to 1955 that were to be thrown out. A Central staff member told me it was only the fact someone within Carlton had the foresight to give the photos to Rex Features that they survive at all.

Granada seem to have some very odd ideas at times. On the other hand they have staff at YTV that go out of their way to care for the archive programmes of ATV and such.