Westcountry TV to close

Surprised there hasn't been a thread relating to this yet, but the aftermath of ITV's announced cuts in regional programming (with full OFCOM approval, of course) has rather severe implications for Westcountry - it won't be scaled back, it will simply be scrapped.

As of Spring 2009, the langage headquarters will be closed, all regional production from Plymouth will cease and the old HTV West region will take over Westcountry's patch, creating a gigantic 'region' running from Lands End up to Bristol and (on analogue at least) stretching into an area which until recently was part of Central South. A

Although some sort of separate short Westcountry bulletin will be retained (apparently broadcast through satellite trucks) and small newsrooms will be maintained, there will now be only a single main news programme for the entire area produced from Bristol, with only 15 minutes of editorial remit to cover the existing Westcountry region.

As always, this apparently is a great day for regional broadcasting because loosing the burden of maintaining Westcountry as a separate station apparently will leave ITV free to create 'a really strong programme' for the region.

Can't say its surprising. The writing for Westcountry has been on the wall ever since ITV managed to redraw the franchise map and create the fictional Thames Valley region off it's own back, and was more or less confirmed last year when it was announced that Westcountry's 4:3 facilities would not be upgraded to widescreen as all the other regions were. I'm actually surprised its taken them this long to do it.

So now it looks like ITV are moving into the endgame: not content with centralising everything in London and moving non-news regional programming down to BBC levels, they are now closing stations and simply extending the patch of the remaining ones.

Anyone who thinks this merger is an isolated case is IMO deluding themselves. If Westcountry's closure is necessary to create 'a really strong programme' then it won't be long before it 'doesn't make sense' for YTV and TTTV to continue to be two separate regions or 'there would be greater editorial syngery' if Meridian and Anglia merged.

Now ITV plc can apparently redraw the franchise map, and still OFCOM either endorses or at worse 'expresses regret' at their actions. Just what do they have to do to be reigned in?

I though if franchises went against the "rules" then they could have their licence revoked, or am I thinking wrong?

Either way, in some respects it's a sad state of affairs, the original whole point of ITV was that the franchises competed against each for which programme would be networked (am I thinking correctly) and so you had the big 5/6 (Thames, LWT, Yorkshire, Granada, Central and to a lesser extent TVS) they would compete to create the best programming and spend money (again am I thinking correctly here)

Nowadays, TBH, the only channel with ITV as in their name that's on in our house is ITV 3

Because we all knew this news was in the pipeline then perhaps we shouldn't be shocked. The fact that Ofcom agreed so readily is more worrying. ITV plc got more concessions than they expected, which is maybe why Grade is now hinting that national news is in doubt in the future. He’s testing the water.

I can accept, reluctantly, that ITV needed to make some cuts, but they've almost completely abrogated their PSB responsibilities in some regions, but kept the most lucrative or politically sensitive (Granada, Wales and London) almost untouched.

At the very least, in the regions they have virtually abandoned (Westcountry & Border), ITV plc should lose the premier DSat/DCab/IPTV EPG slots and gifted DTT spectrum.

As a bouquet of channels, ITV plc broadcast some good programmes (generally from their archives), but they are barely different to any other commercial broadcaster now and shouldn’t receive any privileges.

Politically sensitive they maybe, the reason they've been left untouched is that these are the only ITV plc regions that don't have sub-regional bulletins, just one across their whole broadcast areas.

I could understand moving presentation for Westcountry News being moved from Plymouth to Bristol, but I don't agree with axing the whole Region, like the new Border Tyne Tees region, they're ridiculously large in size, although their population may not be as large as London, Central, Granada or Yorkshire it's still a large Region to serve.

But saying that the writing has been on the wall from the day they announced that ITV Wales and ITV West would become seperate and that ITV West and ITV Westcountry would tie-up.

As far as I'm concerned, this is the end of ITV. Tragic and a disgrace, but we've all seen it coming for a long time. Quite apart from the gradual reduction of regional programming slots, ITV Westcountry viewers have been regularly offered 'regional' programmes in those slots which were purely ITV West or Meridian in the past couple of years. I have even seen a Westcountry News bulletin (sometime over Easter, if I recall correctly) which consisted of a single report, clearly derived from ITV West, about a part of Somerset barely within the Westcountry transmission area.

This evening's Westcountry Live was, needless to say, a somewhat awkward affair. A couple of interesting points, though. A behind-the-scenes shot clearly showed the Westward galleon on one of the gallery monitors (stock footage from one of the anniversary programmes, perhaps?) and when Richard Bath signed off he thanked viewers for joining them on "a tricky day for us here at Westcountry Television ".

As far as I'm concerned, this is the end of ITV. Tragic and a disgrace, but we've all seen it coming for a long time. Quite apart from the gradual reduction of regional programming slots, ITV Westcountry viewers have been regularly offered 'regional' programmes in those slots which were purely ITV West or Meridian in the past couple of years. I have even seen a Westcountry News bulletin (sometime over Easter, if I recall correctly) which consisted of a single report, clearly derived from ITV West, about a part of Somerset barely within the Westcountry transmission area.

This evening's Westcountry Live was, needless to say, a somewhat awkward affair. A couple of interesting points, though. A behind-the-scenes shot clearly showed the Westward galleon on one of the gallery monitors (stock footage from one of the anniversary programmes, perhaps?) and when Richard Bath signed off he thanked viewers for joining them on "a tricky day for us here at Westcountry Television ".

Have to agree with everything that has been said. A disgraceful betrayal of loyal staff who, particularly in the case of Border Television, have consistently provided an excellent service to their viewers.

As StuartPlymouth indicated, how can ITV now claim to be in compliance with their contracts for the South West and Borders areas (or indeed the North East and the West)? These areas now have fifteen minutes of local news in the evening. It doesn't matter how you dress it up, that is a fact.

Ofcom have to go down as the most ineffectual 'regulator' this country has seen in the last 100 years. If ITV can't comply with the requirements of a contract they signed, they should either have that contract torn up, or be forced to comply and if they fail, they fail.

The reason their advertising revenue is declining is that they are not commissioning competitive programming across the board. That is a matter for ITV -- PSB requirements should not be sacrificed just because ITV are too incompetent to run their business effectively.

Precisely. I am far from being Border TV's greatest fan, not because of their local news service, which is good. But because, for decades, the station largely ignored the wider needs of its South of Scotland viewers. That anomaly was largely dealt with when the Border Scotland services began, offering local news opts within Loookaround and at other times, access to Scotland-wide interest programming, mainly sport. OFCOM suggest that, after DSO is complete UK-wide, the most likely scenario for the South of Scotland will be for it to be included in a Scotland-wide "channel 3" service. If Border is being shut, why wait until then. I think viewers would rather be overlooked by a Scottish-based station than ignored by an English one. And if six minutes a day, in the main "local" news bulletin, is to be provided for the South of Scotland, surely that would be better included in a programme dealing with proceedings in the Scottish Parliament or traffic issues in Edinburgh and the Lothians,. rather than industrial unrest on Teesside or a drugs-bust in Byker. After all, increasing numbers of people in the Scottish Borders work in and around the capital and our police and fire services are provided by a joint Lothian and Borders operation.

As far as I am concerned, ITV in the South West died on 1st January 1993. TSW wouldn't have stood for any of ITV's shenannigans and would still be called TSW today, that's for sure.

Whilst I have every sympathy for the staff affected by the closure, I have to say Good Riddance to bad rubbish!

Sadly, no they wouldn't. It's probably better that TSW did loose its licence and will be remembered for what it was, rather than suffer the humiliation of being gradually wound down and debranded as many other stations were.

TSW's fierce protection of it's independent regional nature was well known and would have been seen by bigger forces within ITV as a threat to be squashed. They also, as a 'traditional' ITV station, had a lot of lucrative facilities - prime city centre location, full studio production capabilities, transmisison capabilities of their own, etc, etc - all ready and waiting to be asset stripped away.

Westcountry, as a 'new' station, has only a shed on an industrial estate 9 miles from the city centre (technically not in Plymouth at all in fact) with very limited facilities that were often masked by a regional face (eg we might have had a local announcer in Plymouth, but transmission itself was being done by HTV Wales in Cardiff). And whilst their staff and management was still comitted to providing a proper regional service, their directors were not.

As a somewhat less dangerous animal to ITV's bigger fish, Westcountry was still locally owned until 1997 and (rebrand aside) survived relatively intact until 2002, allowing us south west viewers to cheat what had allready happened elsewhere in the country for a few more years. Were TSW to have survived, I doubt very much that they would have survived much beyond 1993/4 as an independent operation, and certainly the effects of dismantling the regional structure would have hit us sooner.


I'll miss Westcountry's news service. It is arguably the only thing which they did better than their predecessor. Granted, Westward and early TSW were constrained by the technology of the time, but in it's later days TSW could have started to move things on.

They could have comitted to a daily hour long news programme now that more material could be made ready for transmisison more quickly, they could have provided proper short bulletins rather than copy read by the duty announcer, they could have introduced subopts - but they didn't. Despite having the resources and technical expertise (TSW had full scale ENG going on by the end) needed to improve the news service (or at least comit to doing so from 1993) - and apart from anything else the freedom to do so - it all just stayed the same.

Whatever we lost when Westcountry took over, they did give us the best regional news service that we've ever had. They also tried their hardest to preserve it for as long as possible until they lost all ability to do so and it became a drab watered down corporate affair just like everyone else. And to their credit, the subopts are still there to this day as a reminder of how good their news service used to be.

I think in order to see just how hard TSW might have fallen, you only have to look at what TTTV became. It too was a traditionalist regional operator. Slightly larger in terms of revenue than TSW, and somewhat more ambitious than the Plymouth company in terms of its network production, nevertheless the two companies had more in common than distinct differences, and both overbid in 1991 by at least 75%. Indeed I think the only reason TTTV didn't go the same way as TSW was that YTV were waiting in the wings to buy them up -- a betrayal by the ITC of NE viewers if you ask me.

Within a year of being taken over, TTTV had lost half its staff, outside executives had ousted most of the incumbents and the regional presentation, as fiercely protected by TTTV as TSWs had been (if not as well funded -- TT had, rightly in restrospect, chosen to invest (a bit) in news infrastructure rather than presentation, and had proper local news broadcasts rather than ones read by announcers, had made inroads to having sub-regional opts etc), had been wound down. In restrospect, YTV were saints compared with ITV PLC, but I believe that whoever had bought TSW (and it would have happened, the company would have been too weak with that level of payment to the treasury) would have treated Plymouth in much the same way as Leeds hacked up Newcastle.

Obviously I'm not going mad after all at recalling a different structure for the opt-outs from the new 'ITV South West' in one of the proposals:

Cornwall and Plymouth
Devon / West Dorset / West Somerset
Current West Region.

I don't mind that too much, as the Plymouth/Cornwall version will be very Plymouth-centric! (we keep the cornish trolls at bay with cattle prods at the Plymouth end of the Tamar Bridge!) *

However, I don't watch ITV for local news anyway, but I like to have an alternative to the BBC; especially if they're claiming to provide a PSB remit and taking all the benefits from such!

*Curtain call for Mr "cwathen"!