ITV What If?

Theory:

Instead of potential companies fighting it out to win the franchises. What would ITV have looked like if each franchise had been given a fixed 10 year licence to broadcast and successors were privately chosen by the ITA under a strict series of criteria e.g Financial and quality thresholds.

Under the system, successful programs made by one company would be offered to their successor so the Men Behaving Badly sage would have been different.

EXAMPLE:

1968 to 1978: Yorkshire Television
1978 to 1988: Ridings Television
1988 to 1998: White Rose Television
1998 to 2008: ITV1 Yorkshire

Not a fan of these fantasy threads.

I just don't see the point of it.

I respect your view. Not everyone does see the point. Just a thought.

Seems a pointless question really - you're basically saying they'd have been forced to change hands every 10 years but programming would have been passed on, so essentially every 10 years your just wiping out a decade worth of goodwill built up in the region for no reason at all.

So I think the answer to your question would probably be that every 10 years the management of the one company sets up a "new" company and bids again, probably only changing their name as a technicality (so Yorkshire to Yorkshire TV to Yorkshire Independent Television etc).

Yes, and I think if the ITV franchises has changed every 10 years. ITV would largely be the same now.

We could have hundreds of these hypothetical questions.

What if the BBC never existed?

TV Forum isn't really a fantasy forum.

Never thought of that. The restructuring would have to be pretty widespread though so the ITA didn't feel they were "re-appointing" a company.

I do think this is a "What if?" which is so specific to a random idea you've had for no obvious reason at all it probably should be a question you're asking yourself.

There are other "What ifs?" though which might be worthy of more discussion.

What If ITV had been set up on an affiliate basis?
What if ITV had been set up on a more local basis?
What if ITV had been purely a national channel?

One less speculative question might be "What if Carlton and Granada hadn't been allowed to merge?" Would they have happily co-operated with each other to maintain the ITV brand or could we have ultimately seen the ITV as we know it split into two competing channels. Alternatively of course the realisation neither would get full control of the network could have led to them selling off regions once more and seen ITV return to a more regionalised structure.

Others also included,

* What if Weekday/weekend were kept for Midlands and North of England, and also expanded?
* What if Carlton were allowed to buy Thames in 1985....

On reflection you're all right, So what I'll do is this:

I'll borrow the ideas of the Weekday/weekend split and the affiliates. There are two excellent articles on Transdiffusion website about these.

AFFILIATES-http://www.transdiffusion.org/tv/intertel/features/multicasting
SPLIT-http://www.transdiffusion.org/tv/geohistory/affiliations

With those in mind my rethought question is this:

Imagine ITV from 1968 as a 2 channel network with Granada and ABC on ITV 1 and Rediffusion and ATV on ITV 2

These would be pan-national channels with local stations allying themselves with either of the national networks.

As others have said, there are probably an infinite number of "What if" questions but only one answer that applies to all of them, "No one knows". It can lead to interesting discussion though. Here are my questions if anyone wants to speculate on them.

What if TVS had bid more than Meridian for the South and South East ITV franchise?
What if John Logie Baird had not been born in England?
What if Greg Dyke had not brought in Timmy Mallet to save TV-AM in the 1980s?

TVS did outbid Meridian, they failed on their business plan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_ITV#The_Broadcasting_Act_of_1990