ITV plc launches Granada as production brand

Yeah but Granada is a more known name then Carlton and been around for years. Also if they lost the name they would have to rename all the region like "Granada Reports"etc.

Even if the Granada name was not used as a production brand, Granada Television would still be the franchise holder for the North West of England.

John

Rubbish. When did Carlton first come into existence? I don't know the exact date but I can't imagine it was much more than 10 years ago. Whereas Granada have been making programmes (a lot of them high-profile) for 50 years. Stop being so biased towards what is probably your local region!!

Yes, ATV or even Central had a great programme making reputation... they're some of the names that we should still have around...

Carlton beginnings actually dates back over 30 years; when Michael Green bought out a photography and graphic design company in the early 70's, and everything which eventually became the Carlton that existed until a few weeks ago sprang from this. Interesting little tidbit here: the company he bought was indeed called Carlton, but rather than build his brand from here Green actually ditched the name in favour of establishing a new brand (Tangerine or something?), before renaming it back to Carlton in the early 80's.

The modern Carlton that we used to know and love was formed in 1983 when the graphic design businesses absorbed a couple of other companies, was renamed Carlton Communications and floated on the stock market.

It tried to get into ITV as early as 1985 when it attempted a takeover of Thames. The IBA blocked it. Carlton then got in in a smaller way a couple of years later when they bought a stake (albeit not a controlling one) in Central.

Throughout the rest of the 80's they bought a number of other companies, some of which were TV production companies and many of which did make programmes for ITV - Carlton programmes were on ITV in the 80's even if they weren't branded as such.

Carlton Television was formed in 1990 to bid for the London Weekday ITV franchise which they subsequently won, and because they'd never been heard of before, it was widely assumed that Carlton is a 90's company which came out of thin air.

But it wasn't, Carlton had been lurking in the background for 20 years before Carlton London launched.

It doesn't mean that I don't agree that Granada Productions is a better name with Carlton Productions because it does have more history and command more respect, but it's simply not true to say that Carlton waltzed in and out of nowhere in 1993; indeed of all of the new franchise holders, Carlton was the only one with any history behind it, and infact all of the outgoing franchise holders except Thames (TSW, TVS, TV-am) were actually YOUNGER than Carlton.

The issue of whether Carlton or Granada was better is a totally separate one to what the new production brand should be called. I personally think that Carlton stations were better. Whilst I may have been amongst the top of the complainents against Carlton's renaming of Westcountry and Central (and I still believe it was a mistake), hindsight is a wonderful thing and has shown that in spite of 2 of them operating under a different name, they were actually a hell of a lot more regionally focused and autonomous than Granada's stations; in the South West we might have had 'Carlton' on the screen instead of 'Westcountry', but we still had a focused, local ITV station. In contrast in the North East it might have still said 'Tyne Tees' on the screen, but the station behind it was all but dead. Yes YTV did start it all off, but inspite of Granada being seen as having been good for the station by scrapping the C3NE brand, all they actually did was make it even more centralised and dismantle even more of the station.

Carlton were very clear about what they wanted to do: they just wanted their brand name everywhere. It was Granada who were truly focused on merging everything together, but instead of being up front about it, they kept all the old brands up on screen, but behind the scenes they were removing everything behind them, until finally those damn annoying regional spinning blue heart idents were one of the few things the local station had left.

IMO, Granada have been a lot worse than Carlton, and when it emerged that Granada would get the better end of the deal in the merger with Carlton, then I knew that regional ITV was truly dead.

Well said cwathen!

Carlton TV in their original aplication for London weekday were to be a Publisher broadcaster - i.e. not actually producing programmes - just assembling programmes for transmission. They were only supposed under the terms of their application to have a small production unit for News programming.

If you think back an awful lot of Carlton's output actually was still produced by Thames after carlton took over - The Bill, Wish you were Here etc. I consider that their lack of interest in production gifts the ITV production company name to Granada - a company that never had any doubts about producing and publishing programming.

It simply has to be Granada.

And of course if Thames or even TVS survived into the time when they could merge with other ITV companies, they would have been just as predatory towards their colleagues

I've no doubt that it would. Despite Central and LWT both being cast as unfortunate victims cast aside at the evil hands of Carlton and Granada, in actual fact if things were just a little bit different ITV could easily have come down to a Central/LWT duopoly and they would act in an identical way to the way Carlton and Granada have.

But what I was saying is that to look at the pre-Oct 2002 days, Carlton seemed to allow their stations to be a lot more regionally focused (only HTV West didn't have it's own, local, live continuity, and that only came about through a legacy arrangement which UNM had put into place) than Granada did, where regional names may have had pride of place but the regional focus of the station was being curtailed more and more.

Carlton had every opportunity and every excuse to make serious regional cutbacks, and the situation where they had 3 stations all called Carlton made it even easier for them to do it - but they didn't. On Granada's stations, they were keen to be seen to being regional - even to the point of giving YTV and TTTV their own unique regional idents and retaining regionally branded trailers, but behind the scenes they were doing a lot more to destroy regional ITV than Carlton were.

That is what I meant when I saw the end of regional ITV; the one side of the duopoly which was slightly less hell bent on destroying the ITV infrastructure has got the raw end of the merger.


What do you mean under the terms of their licence? Their application said that they intended to be a publisher broadcaster with only minimal production facilities for local output, but that didn't mean they were limited to that. They stated this in their application because the 1990 awards were the first time an applicant could apply without having full blown studio facilities, and Carlton were acknowledging that they were excersing their right to do that.

Remember that although Carlton Television didn't have any proper production facilities and said they wouldn't have any in their application, other parts of Carlton (even though they didn't operate under the Carlton name) DID have those facilities, so at the top end Carlton Communications may have envisaged that Carlton Television could use those facilities for it's programmes.

And in any case, for years after they bought Central (which is basically what gave Carlton proper studios), there wasn't a link between programmes made there and the London weekday franchise holder; although they bought out Central between 1993 and 1994, the structure of the company remained the same and so all productions still came under Central Independent Television plc until towards the end of 1995. After that, they split the company into Central Broadcasting and Carlton UK Productions, and that is the first time that the Carlton name was applied to a network production. But Carlton UK Productions and Carlton Television were two separate entities.

AFAIK, not until 1999 when the Central brand was retired did they actually make programmes directly under the banner of Carlton Television, and only then is their a direct link between the midlands studio operation and the London weekday franchise holder - but in any case there is nothing at all in their franchise which stopped them from doing this.


Those programmes have never been part of Carlton's output. It was just that until 1998 when 'direct access' to the network was allowed, programme producers couldn't directly broadcast on the network, but instead must be making a programme 'for' one of the franchise holders, which would then 'present' that to the network. Agreed presentation rules of the time (which dated back to 1989) required that this fact be notified on screen, hence two endcaps were used. It just so happened that in time Carlton settled on being the 'presenter' for many of these programmes, but they were never part of their output (and indeed at first Thames' hatred of Carlton led to them avoiding Carlton - indeed for a while immediately after they lost their franchise The Bill was actually presented by Yorkshire Television!).

Note, this is the same reason why in the mid 90's so many programmes were depicted as being 'A Carlton UK Production' and then 'A Central Programme for ITV' - because Carlton UK Productions was not the same Carlton which held the London weekday franchise, underpinning the point I made above.

Anyway, this is not a reason why Granada is more deserving of the brand name. Yes they did have proper production facilities, but Granada entered ITV in a different era - right at the start as one of the main contractors and so were compelled to construct substantial facilities which they still had, so obviously they were going to use them. This does not mean that they cared about having them. This does not mean that if the boot was on the other foot and Granada was a new contracter in 1993 that they would not have gone down Carlton's route of being a producer-broadcaster.

And in any case, there has been a trend (whatever the endcap says - just because a programme proclaims that it's 'A Granada Television Production' it doesn't means it's come out of Manchester) at Granada to make much of their output via LWT now; the whole reason they are letting of Quay street is because Granada just don't make very much any more; it's no different to the way Carlton make most of their output via Central.

Indeed, for what Granada (as in Granada Television in Manchester) genuinely make themselves now, they *don't* deserve the production name any more than Carlton do; if they are really interested in doing what's fair then it should be LWT Productions being launched as their production brand.

Yes, and remember that 3 out of 4 (all except GMTV) of the new franchisees took the publisher-broadcaster model

Simon Shaps (chief exec of the Granada production division of ITV plc) has just said on LBC that they will retain "most" of the regional production sub-brands for network productions for the foreseeable future although they may "take a [different] view in the future"

(Matt Wells had asked him "what about all the other names, like LWT?")

For some reason earlier there was a motor programme on ITV1 which had the ITV Central endcap, normally for Midlands use only.