I have to say it would have on the whole be a recipe for disaster with the exception of a Welsh "fourth channel" run by both ITV and BBC in the 70's instead of waiting for S4C.
I have to say it would have on the whole be a recipe for disaster with the exception of a Welsh "fourth channel" run by both ITV and BBC in the 70's instead of waiting for S4C.
Any thoughts?
Would have been impossible to engineer, not least different ITV companies north and south of the Thames !
Sean Day-Lewis used to write some excellent articles in the 70s and 80s in the Telegraph, but he must have been drinking just before writing that one !
The Welsh Fourth Channel idea is what very broadly did actually happen to all intents and purposes !
Any problems within ITV at the time were not due to its regional structure, and I fail to see what could have been achieved by the recommendations in that article except a lesser service for the advertiser and viewer. Yes, there were some odd geographical “regions”, eg. Border, Wales and West, but this was due to transmitter coverage and couldn’t be easily corrected (there was merit in the idea of taking the “West” region from Harlech so they could concentrate on Wales, I guess). On the whole, if it weren’t broken, why try to fix it?
When S4C came along, it showed Welsh language BBC Wales programmes from the outset, though it wasn’t really a JV between the IBA and BBC. Was it always the plan to move all Welsh language programming to the new channel, even that from BBC Wales?
Any problems within ITV at the time were not due to its regional structure, and I fail to see what could have been achieved by the recommendations in that article except a lesser service for the advertiser and viewer. Yes, there were some odd geographical “regions”, eg. Border, Wales and West, but this was due to transmitter coverage and couldn’t be easily corrected (there was merit in the idea of taking the “West” region from Harlech so they could concentrate on Wales, I guess). On the whole, if it weren’t broken, why try to fix it?
When S4C came along, it showed Welsh language BBC Wales programmes from the outset, though it wasn’t really a JV between the IBA and BBC. Was it always the plan to move all Welsh language programming to the new channel, even that from BBC Wales?
Yes. From the outset all Welsh language programming was perged from BBC 1, 2 and HTV in Wales. Much of HTV’s Welsh language progs were transferred to S4C. The only distinction were that BBC progs were provided FOC and there wer no ad breaks within them ( not sure whether they had ads bordering them ?)
HTV had to have a foot in the West and Wales, because the VHF transmitter that served both the populated SE Wales, and Somerset and Avon was at St Hilary, so the English version of TWW was the default channel in much of Cardiff and Newport. When Mendip came along for UHF in 1970, it didn’t really help, because that served the Welsh side of the Bristol Channel too ( in fact better than St Hillary!)
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It is ironic that in a piece where well-defined regions are combined, Wales is siphoned off.
Would a Welsh ITV service even have been viable? On its own Wales has around 3 million people, reducing the new HTV very much to the level of a minor ITV region from what was its current status of a mid-sized company.
But Wales was (and still is) a unique area with heavy regional commitments, and at the time of writing this piece it was less than a decade since a Welsh company had hit the wall. Did he really want that to happen again?
Its not just the transmitters that made the article daft it was the total lack of feeling that Day-Lewis had. Back then there was still a huge amount of loyalty and affinity to ITV stations. Without being disrespectful to Tyne-Tees and Border South viewers a "pan Northeast" region would suck some of the locality out of it.
As regards a combined LWT-Southern region. The mind boggles!
As regards a combined LWT-Southern region. The mind boggles!
There is a tiny bit of logic in the splitting of the London region into neighbouring franchises. The Home Counties and outer London have suffered from poor news coverage by the Zone 1 centric regional news bulletins currently. Anything that comes from outside the M25 seems to be tick box tokenism or as filler to pad out the bulletins,
If you live south of the river for example, a franchise that has South London with the neighbouring counties ensures which region you'd tune into for local news, so you don't have to have news from Hampstead, Enfield, Romford etc which seem as foreign to us South Londoners as Birmingham or Sheffield.
On the other hand, all Londoners look towards the centre of town, alas why the current editorial situation is to concentrate on stories that unite as all, such as transport, crime and health.