ITV1 Carlton --------> ITV Central!!!

I think you are getting unnecessarily excited. It's not returning as the name of the station, the station is and will still be called ITV1. I doubt you will be seeing the word 'Central' any more than you do now, it's not the company name just the ITV equivalent of the word 'Midlands' used on BBC1.

'Carlton' will be removed from everywhere because it ceases to exsist on Monday. All programmes will be 'Granada Productions' so you won't see 'A Central Production'

at the copyright of the programmes will it be (c) 2004 Independent Televison Plc ??

The company is called ITV PLC, it will never be referred to as Independent Television PLC.

Anyone, I doubt anything in the short term will change - and yes I'm sure we'll still have Carlton Television productions too.

How long that will last I don't know, it could well be that before the end of this year we do have 'an ITV Production' and that such programmes will carry (c)ITV 2004 at the end.

I doubt that ITV PLC itself will directly own copyright on anything (just like Carlton programmes are owned by Carlton Television Ltd, and not Carlton Communications plc), they will probably create a subsidiary, or maybe transfer production to ITV Network Ltd?

The money's on "Granada Productions" given that they've usurped Carlton from their respective ITV regions.

About bloody time they got rid of all that Cartlon and England nonsense.

So what does this mean for productions made at HTV West in Bristol?

They were originally HTV West productions, then HTV productions, then UNM productions, then broken down into numerous subsiduaries like Patridge etc, then Granada bought HTV for a month and only sold the broadcast franchise onto Carlton, so all HTV West productions then became Granada Bristol productions.

Has it gone a full circle and now Bristol productions will be called ITV west productions, ITV productions, or Granada productions?

Whereas Carlton seem not to bother about their name and brand anymore Granada still appear stubborn and want all this multi-branding to continue?

It seems a total waste of money between Granada and Carlton to buy certain itv companies, only to sell them to each other and then eventually merge! What a waste!

Granada had to sell HTV as a condition of buying out UNM. Rather than sell it to another company (or even risk a management buyout which would cause it to regain it's independence), they sold it to Carlton, in order to 'keep it in the family' ahead of their eventual marriage (once UNM was out of the picture, it was clear that it would come down to Carlton and Granada). AFAIK, HTV is the only station to have been swapped directly between Carlton and Granada.

I think personally that they should have had to sell the whole lot as one unit, and not be allowed to hold onto the production side - they basically ate the cornflakes and sold the box. This isn't what I would call selling one of the stations off as a condition of the purchase from UNM.

Partridge Films was an independent producer bought by HTV before HTV became part of UNM. Once Anglia was in Granada's hands, Partridge Films was merged with Survival Anglia (Survival Anglia was transferred to Bristol from its natural habitat of Norwich). Result - Bristol based Granada Wildlife, and apparantly, no more Survivals, only repeats.

Well...the day has finally come!!!

Could today be the final ever day in which we hear the words Carlton, Central and England mentioned in the same sentence???

Will tomorrow bring Central branded endcaps, Centext, new Central branded idents, a new Central newsroom, the birmingham, nottingham and abingdon HG's stripped of their Carlton names on the buildings, the name "Central television" being used by Bob on the news when promoting other programmes on the station????

AND...just like Border brought back its Big Capital "B" back to the screens after an absence on screen of about 3 years or so, will endcaps on Central have a Central cake logo in a purple box just like the other GMG stations???

If someone could do a mock of this, that would be nice.

I suppose we will have to wait to find out!!!

Well...the day has finally come!!!

Could today be the final ever day in which we hear the words Carlton, Central and England mentioned in the same sentence???

Will tomorrow bring Central branded endcaps, Centext, new Central branded idents, a new Central newsroom, the birmingham, nottingham and abingdon HG's stripped of their Carlton names on the buildings, the name "Central television" being used by Bob on the news when promoting other programmes on the station????

AND...just like Border brought back its Big Capital "B" back to the screens after an absence on screen of about 3 years or so, will endcaps on Central have a Central cake logo in a purple box just like the other GMG stations???

If someone could do a mock of this, that would be nice.

I suppose we will have to wait to find out!!!

At one point the whole story was going to be very different as Carlton were going to merge with UMN but bizzarely enough they called the merger off for some reason. But if they did merge CarltonUMN would have had to sold off Meridian, thus means that the likliest bidder for them would be Granada. But the outcome of it anyway is that Carlton would have had HTV and Granada would have had Meridian. If Granada would have had it their way they would have kept HTV but the government told them to sell it off as it was still the rules then, but it was really weird to think that for one point HTV was owned by Granada, but that only lasted a matter of months. It would have been very weird if Carlton did merge with UMN, for a start Anglia TV would have probably been Carltonised.

Well good riddance to the Carlton name anyway, shame to see Granada go, as their corporation isn't that bad, at least they kept their regional names except for LWT.

There is a very, very, slight possibility. But it's also very unlikely.


In time they probably will rename 'Carlton Plus' to 'Central Text', but it'll still be the same thing. And it's very likely that they might take the opportunity to just rename it it ITV1 Text.


Bob Warman said that the station's official name will change to 'ITV Central'. With that in mind, the Carltonless but not quite Central idents introduced a couple of months ago are as good as it will get, the Carlton name will probably disappear from the buildings, but they'll only be replaced with a giant ITV logo with 'Central' underneath it.

Again, I can't believe how excited some people are getting just because the website has 'Central' at the top of it. Central Television is not making a big come back, it's just a simple rename from Carlton Central (or is it 'ITV1 Carlton for Central England' now?) to 'ITV Central' or 'ITV1 Central'. 'Central' will just be a suffix, ITV will be the brand.

I wish it wasn't that way, but that's how it is - tomorrow ITV will hit the second to last milestone to being one company (the last being when the remaining 4 stations are under ITV PLC control), if anything onscreen regional identity will dwindle even further, not suddenly see a rebirth.


I don't believe it would have been, it would just have inherited Carlton formups to the hearts idents (which IMO gave HTV's idents a new lease of life). A lot of things changed between 1999 and 2000. Carlton's motivation for renaming Central (and later incorporating Westcountry into the plans too - at first it was only going to be Central that got the rebrand) hinged around two points:

1) Carlton wanted to make themselves appear bigger than they were. It was believed that if more of Carlton's assets were actually branded as such (and that all of their output came under Carlton Television Ltd), then that would make them appear bigger and therefore make them more money, when it fact all they were doing is some internal shunting around and on the surface rebrands.

2) When all this was conceived, we were at the height of the dotcom boom. Every company and organisation was obsessed with being seen to promote the internet at every opportunity (for a short while between 1999 and 2000, Iceland even renamed themselves to 'Iceland.co.uk' - and stores which got a refit during that time even had it on the sign outside). Carlton wanted more of an excuse to promote the carlton.com URL and to transfer content away from westcountry.co.uk and centraltv.co.uk (although Westcountry continued to use the domain for email, and indeed still do to this day) thus promoting Carlton's URL and therefore Carlton's name at all times, which would give them a much bigger internet presence, which was seen as the key to everything back in 1999. Renaming the stations gave them the perfect opportunity to do this.

Just over a year later, things had changed. It transpired that the rebranded Central and Westcountry were not bringing in the big money payoffs they had expected, so there was less motivation to rename HTV (or indeed anyone else they happened to aquire). Why not do it anyway? you might ask. Well, they did carry out complete blanket revamps of Central and Westcountry, it wasn't just a matter of changing the idents, the buildings got new paint jobs and signs (Westcountry's Carlton sign even lights up, so presumably they had to install the electric for this as I'm fairly sure that Westcountry never had a sign directly on the building, but instead had it on a wall in front of it), and I don't know what they did in the midlands, but down here they even paid to get the roadsigns changed to 'Carlton TV'), there was internal restructuring to bring the business affairs under Carlton Television Ltd, basically, they spent money doing this. And they didn't make it back. There was no point going down this road with another station, so they just gave HTV a little presentation refresh (which imo made it look much better) but otherwise left it alone.

Aswell as that, the dotcom boom had well and truly ended, having a huge Carlton presence on the internet was no longer such a priority, becoming even more less of a priority when Carlton and Granada started to sit down about the possibility of replacing itv.co.uk with a big ITV portal site, which would see carlton.com just become a corporate site.

Of course they didn't change Central and Westcountry back because that would be admitting they were wrong (or at least, there was no point) in renaming them in the first place, but they didn't rename HTV and despite their press release of being 'unable to do it because it's a Welsh national broadcaster' (they could have renamed just HTV West, and it didn't stop 'ITV1 Wales' from appearing a year later either), they wouldn't have renamed any other station they bought out.


You know what, I don't think Carlton are all bad. At least Westcountry and Central continued to operate as local autonomous stations after the rebrand (which they did for what were thought to be sound commercial reasons - even if the excercise did turn out to be a complete waste of time), once generic London based ITV1 took over I very quickly realised how good Westcountry had had it up until that point.

Granada might have kept all the names alive, but they gradually removed everything behind them. Only LWT didn't have shared continuity in contrast the only Carlton station to have it was the West side of the HTV empire - and that's only because of a legacy decision they inherited from UNM, and I could cite many more reasons of things Carlton did better than Granada with a view to protecting the stations.

And away from ITV, Carlton over the last few years have done a much better job at releasing their back catalogue (and preserving archived material - thanks to Carlton, episodes of Crossroads long considered 'missing' but really uncatalogued are being catalogued so they can work out what they have left) than Granada have.

Despite the hatred for what they did (or rather what I perceived they did) to Westcountry in 1999, I'm going to miss Carlton a lot more than Granada.