ITV's 60th Birthday

Not really. This is the problem with Granada and Carlton becoming ITV plc, it muddies the waters.

TV-am absolutely was an ITV company, under the traditional definition of ITV being Channel 3. To argue that it wasn't is to suggest that neither was Thames, which would be ludicrous.

I thought it was a good little programme, although the framing of the side-on shot was a bit distracting.

TV-am was never a member of the ITCA which was the industry organisation that represented the regional franchisees. In my experience the regional franchisees kept TV-am very much at arms length and didn't really want anything to do with it. TV-am had their own working agreements with the various unions involved too and didn't follow the ITCA model at all.

People can reasonably argue that TV-am was part of what the general public think 'ITV' was because it was on the same place on the tuning dial if you like, but it was really quite a separate animal. What is ITV? Independent Television- independent of what exactly?

Independent of the BBC, oddly enough.

TV-am was associated heavily in the public eye as being 'ITV' - as it was on the same button on their TVs, definitely. Most people would have thought of it just as being the ITV version of Breakfast Time - i.e. a programme on ITV for a couple of hours in the morning.

Of course the reality was very different - it was incredibly separate to the 'ITV' we think of, technically it bypassed the regional franchise holders to reach the transmitters, didn't use ITV regional advertising playout (arguably it was more separate to the core of ITV than C4 was then...) and TV-am weren't really part of the ITV Network operation or the ITCA. Of course most viewers were oblivious to this...

Indeed - I remember some viewers would send birthday cards to Tyne Tees, asking them to read them out on TVam! The announcers would of course read these out at lunchtime, apologising for the greeting being 'a little late'.

If you look on TV Ark their page on TV-am page has various examples of trails for TV-am "on ITV" so they certainly presented themselves to the public as part of ITV, and the regions were apparently happy to play out such trails. TV-am also took part in ITV initiatives such as Telethon.

Apart from the internal politics of the ITCA, it's no different to the Thames/LWT or Granada/ABC scenarios - different ITV licencees broadcasting at different times.

I don't think they were trails as such. They were either paid for ads, or 'Quid Pro Quo' in exchange for
regional ITV trails shown by TV-am. There were similar promotional arrangements between some ITV companies and ILR stations in their patches.

I remember David Frost's early promos for TVam stating 'on the ITV1 button'. Very random use of that phrase when ITV was never known as 'ITV1' until the 2000s!

I've read that sets manufactured in the late 70s to early 80s had labels for "ITV1" and "ITV2", or "IBA1" and "IBA2", before the Channel 4 name was chosen. Maybe he was referring to that?

The 'ITV2' labelling on TV set tuners occurred very much earlier than that, even in the late 1960's. Significantly often used for dual region operations where available rather than left fallow.

Ah, the days when multi-channel TV meant being able to get a second (or even third) ITV region - and even as late as the end of the nineties that often meant more choice, especially outside of primetime.

Indeed they did !! ITA 1, ITA 2, were common too from late 60s/early 70s sets. It wasn't that irrelevant,
many areas had a choice of ITV region, our ITV 1 button was tuned to Southern, ITV 2 to London. Quite logical

Frost was quite right to refer to an ITV 1 button.