TV Times and other magazines

Anyone still buy TV Times? Sadly for me it's kind of TV Choice at Radio Times prices. Much prefer the Total TV Guide.

Just the Radio Times at Christmas for me. I'm sure TV Times and What's on TV are owned by the same company these days.

The last time I bought a copy of the TV Times was in 2010. I prefer the TV and Satellite Week and RadioTimes though.

Time Inc, yeah.

When it comes to the articles they are more in depth and less trashy in the TV Times than they are in TV Choice/What's on TV. There are no full double page spread articles at all in either of those mags.

I know prior to TV Times becoming effectively the ITV equivalent of Radio Times that some regions had their own magazine, but did the ITV regions ever have any ownership of TV Times? I know they would freely promote it in the same way the BBC used to promote the Radio Times.

It was originally owned by a company called Independent Television Publications that was owned by the ITV companies. It was sold to IPC at some point in the late 1980s/early 1990s.

And IPC got absorbed into Time pretty recently. ITP also published Look-In, the "junior TV Times".

When I was a sprog (I was born in 1980), we always had both Radio Times and TV Times in our house.

The former only featured listings for BBC1 & BBC2 and the latter only covered ITV & Channel 4, hence us having both.

When & why this eventually changed (and why it was ever the case to begin with), is something that I know nothing about.

I remember there being TV adverts promoting the fact that Radio Times would now start including ITV & Channel 4, and that TV Times would now start including the BBC listings.

The TV Times advert featured magician Geoffrey Durham, magically adding the BBC listings to the magazine!

Our family stopped buying the TV Times weeks after the deregulation of the tv listings magazines and stuck with the Radio Times as the information was more detailed in the RT for ITV/C4 shows.

Deregulation came in March 1991, opening it up to competition and also allowing newspapers to publish weekly guides too.

In Radio Telefis Eireann v. European Commission the ECJ ruled that the refusal by RTE and ITP (the BBC wasn't a party to the particular case) to allow a third party publisher (Magill TV Guide) access to their listings was contrary to EU law.

While that case was (very slowly) ongoing, the U.K. deregulated TV listings when the Broadcasting Act 1990 was commenced, so that the outcome was moot from that perspective.