ITV3 - Granada Plus is sacrificed

ITV3 launches on 1st November with a focus on quality / classic drama, movies and themed nights.

Looks like the Bill will get a repeat showing on another ITV channel for the first time, this taken from the press release :

3rd August 2004: Nigel Pickard, ITV’s Director of Programmes, today announced the launch of ITV3, the latest addition to the ITV channel portfolio, building on the success of ITV2 and the ITV News Channel. ITV3 will be on air from Monday 1st November – 24 hours a day.

ITV3 will show the best of ITV drama with programmes complementing the schedules of both ITV1 and ITV2.

Key genres include:

Detective and Contemporary dramas - Inspector Morse, Midsomer Murders, Touch Of Frost, Prime Suspect, Foyle’s War and Cold Feet along with UK premieres, such as the feature length drama Rebus with John Hannah and drama series Blue Dove with Paul Nicholls.

ITV Classics - Maigret (starring Michael Gambon), Cadfael (starring Derek Jacobi), Jeeves & Wooster (starring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie) and Mapp & Lucia (starring the new Miss Marple, Geraldine McEwan).

Top US Crime Dramas including Hack and LA Dragnet.

Movies – Big Hollywood hits including A Fish Called Wanda (John Cleese), The Color of Money (Paul Newman), Rain Man (Tom Cruise), Prizzi’s Honour (Jack Nicholson), A Fistful of Dollars (Clint Eastwood) and What About Bob? (Bill Murray).

Catch-ups of popular ITV1 programmes including The Bill, which is repeated on the same evening as the prime time ITV1 show.

Themed nights and new commissions – including behind the scenes shows from ITV1’s major dramas.

ITV3 will be the home of quality drama and movies, with a line up of programmes that will appeal to a wide ranging audience. For the first time ever, viewers will also be able to catch up on popular shows like The Bill, The Royal, Where The Heart Is, Heartbeat and ITV’s new star signing Parkinson.

Viewers can also treat themselves with a second chance to see one and two-part dramas in their entirety on Saturday nights, with titles such as Henry VIII (Ray Winstone), Donovan (Tom Conti), Wall of Silence (James Nesbitt) and My Beautiful Son (Julie Walters).

ITV3 will also showcase movies twice weekly, kicking off with a ‘Movie Western Season’ showing classics including The Magnificent Seven and The Good, The Bad & The Ugly.

“With an impressive line up of classic and contemporary dramas, major Hollywood hits, top US dramas and new commissions, ITV3 should quickly become a firm favourite with the multi channel viewer and join ITV2 as a top rating entertainment channel.” said Steve Arnell, Channel Editor, ITV3.

Will this channel replace (Granada) Plus?

I don't think it will be, as the channel will be FTA, it will be available on Freeview and nothing is mentioned of Sky, so it looks like Plus is going to stay.

Though it doesn't look too bad, at least they're digging into their archive.

Have they said yet if they're going to try and get a place on DTT?

EDIT - Well, I knew this place was good, but I wasn't expecting an answer before I even posted the question. Thanks nwtv2003.

Here's what ITV plc have said...



Soucre Media Guardian

Let's hope the idents follow the high-brow nature of the programming. Nice idea of the catchups in the same evening - a kind of 'select' ITV1 +1hr. Shame they won't be dipping too far into the archives though, at least by the sound of it. Plus has nothing to worry about.

All sounds quite promising, and rather reminiscent of Carlton Select to me. Although I'm not sure how its remit of 'quality drama' fits in with repeats of The Bill.

I see the logo's changed more to ITV2's style at ITV Sales website

Here it is > ITV3 Logo

Now the ITV bit looks even more like the BBC logo than on the ITV2 one!

It really is pretty poor on ITV's part not to put a stop to this - sure, okay if it only looked slightly like it (I suppose the ITV2 logo can just about get away with it - together with the fact that on-screen most of the time the squares aren't next to each other) - but this one and the ITVi one are blatently extremely similar. There's not a chance in hell that the people at ITV haven't noticed this.

Aah, I'd forgotten all about that logo. Someone posted it on here a few months ago.

It certainly doesn't give the channel an up-market image, which (as Asa said) the programmes themselves seem to do. Hopefully they'll see sense and change it between now and the launch.

I don't see why ITV can't just use the same logo style for all of their channels. It makes so much more sense, especially with the corporate 'united' image they're trying so hard to create across ITV Plc. Having a different logo for ITV News, ITV1, 2 and 3 is just ridiculous and IMO confusing to new viewers..

The Logo for ITV3 is a bag of S*hit!. I hope it gets changed. So with this new channel launching I wonder what UTV/SMG will have to say. Well SMG did that deal with ITV PLC a bit back to start promoting ITV2/ITV News Channel on their channels so it looks like they will big up ITV3. Wonder what about UTV???

Also if ITV3 is going to show repeats of stuff during the day (Like Corrie it mentions somewhere I think), What about ITV2?? If that shows Corrie repeats its pointless for ITV3. It will only be good if they show Classic Corrie repeats, but PLUS do that so ITV3 wont be then??? So what Corrie will ITV3 be showing then???

Overall this channel looks quite good, and BTW where will this be put on Freeview?? ITV have 3 channels on their MUX allready?...and channel 4 have their 3 slots filled with C4, E4, More 4.

So is Plus not being closed down afterall then? Or will it just become “Crime Plus”

Will the Corrie repeats from 1993 be transferred to ITV3 or will they be showing older episodes than the 1990s?