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Happy fiftieth for ITV?
147/Granville Williams
ITV began broadcasting in the London region only on 22 September 1955. As the fiftieth anniversary approaches Granville Williams notes a painful contrast between past and present performance.
15/8/05: ITV has had some very good business news in recent years. The creation of a single ITV was allowed as a result of a Competition Commission report and the 2003 Communications Act. Ofcom has also delivered two birthday presents: it has cleared the cuts in regional programming, saving £100 million, and also exceeded expectations by slashing the payments for ITV’s twelve licences. In 2004 the payment was £215 million; now the company will pay less than £80 million. ITV shares leapt 6 percent after this news.ITV chief executive, Charles Allen, was fulsome in his praise: ‘The regulator has done a very thorough and a very good job. It is a very good regulator and they are very bright people who really understand business.’ He said it was ‘the second part in a ten-part journey’ in getting regulations eased. ITV still reckons it spends £250 million on its public service broadcasting obligations, and would like to shed these. It also wants advertising rules relaxed.
But all is not bright as ITV 50th birthday approaches. Audiences for ITV have shrunk, and ITV executives are at pains to explain this in terms of the squeeze on audiences when people have a range of channels to choose from. This is partly true, but ITV has also made some terrible commercial decisions - ITV Digital was a disaster and lost £1 billion at least. The deal struck with the Football League was just incompetent.
ITV could have retrieved the situation if it had put money into programming but this has been characterized in recent years by a succession of low-budget, down-market programmes. As viewing figures fell, advertising revenues did too.
Melvyn Bragg’s five-part history, The Story of ITV: The People’s Channel, unintentionally highlighted some of these problems. Each of the five programmes was arranged chronologically around different programme strands. Bragg is absolutely right that ITV’s achievement was outstanding. No other commercial network has produced so much great television across so many genres. Different ITV franchises had distinctive strengths: Central for documentaries, Anglia for wildlife, Granada for the development of hypotheticals, drama documentary and current affairs with World in Action. ITV’s strengths - the history series, dramas (single plays and series), children’s programmes and news and current affairs - were all there in The Story of ITV.
In the last of the series, covering news, current affairs and documentaries, the commentary said ITV ‘supported inquisitive, awkward programmes that challenged establishments worldwide, and placed investigative journalism and documentaries squarely on ITV’. It then continued, ‘They are still there’ followed by a clip from John Pilger’s powerful Stealing the Nation (2004).
As David Herman points out in Prospect, July 2005: ‘The implication is clear: that a great ITV tradition of investigative journalism and documentary-making is still alive and kicking. Is it? John Pilger made 21 programmes for ITV in six years in the early and mid-1970s. In the last six years, ITV has shown six Pilger documentaries.
Other current affairs programmes fared less well. This Week stopped in 1992;World in Action in 1998…Are Tonight with Trevor McDonald or Dimbleby a substitute for these?’
Herman is spot on when he writes, ‘The collapse of ITV, both in terms of its ratings and its creative output, is the biggest story in British television in the past ten years. It haunts The Story of ITV but no one addresses it directly.’
Last modified: Monday, August 15, 2005
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World Press Freedom Day
More reporters are currently imprisoned in Turkey than in any other country in the world. Only a matter of weeks ago lawyers failed to persuade a Turkish court to release a 76-year-old journalist from a Turkish internet news station.
World Press Freedom Day on Friday May 3, 2013 is being marked in Britain by a rally to highlight the dangers facing journalists in Turkey and in this podcast, Nicholas Jones speaks to Barry White, Organiser at the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, and Sam Bamford, the TUC's policy officer for Eastern Europe and Africa about the importance of a campaign to highlight international press freedom.
The World Press Freedom Day rally is being staged by the National Union of Journalists at the NUJ head office, Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1 on Thursday May 2, 6pm-8pm.
DATELINE: 27/4/13
UK launch of EU media campaign
DATELINE: 13/3/13
The UK launch of a 'European Citizens' Initiative' calling for EU rules against concentration of media power will take place on Thursday March 21 from 11:00am – 12:30pm in Committee Room 4A at the House of Lords, London. Guest speakers will include actor and activist Hugh Grant (pictured), media consultant Claire Enders, Professor Steven Barnett, Barry McCall (President of the NUJ) and Marc Gruber (Director of the European Federation of Journalists).
A European Citizens' Initiative is an official petition, like a Downing Street petition. If it succeeds in gathering a million signatures across the EU, the Commission is obliged to respond.
This petition calls for the EU to act to protect media pluralism and press freedom.
CPBF Annual General Meeting
DATELINE: 1/3/13
Make a note in your diary
Saturday 13 July 2013 from 10.00am
NUJ HQ, 308/312 Gray's Inn Road, London WC1.
Leveson, media ownership, CPBF future work.
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Download Freepress in PDF, ePub or mobi format. Issue 194 now available.
MEDIA FOR ALL CONFERENCE
DATELINE: 26/3/10
Papers from the Media for All Conference
MEDIA MANIFESTO
DATELINE: 26/3/10
The media’s job is to inform and entertain us but we rely on them too to tell us what our rulers and representatives are up to. In the run-up to the Iraq war the government used spin and disinformation in the media to create panic and mislead people. The truth is coming out now, but we need stronger, more independent media to be able to scrutinise governments and make informed choices.
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Previous stories
Public Service Broadcasting
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CPBF Response to Green Paper
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BBC Cuts
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EU Commission gets tough
Latest from BBC Charter Review team
What the CPBF told the Lords and the DCMS
NUJ to oppose job cut plans at divisional level negotiations
BBC proposes framework for detailed negotiations
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