Independent Television

I

Introduction

Independent Television, commercial television in the United Kingdom, especially ITV, Channel 4, and Channel 5.

II

Origins

The development of independent television (ITV) was prompted by political concerns at the end of the 1940s about the power of the monopoly of broadcasting then held by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). As early as 1945, a series of articles in The Economist had attacked the broadcasting monopoly as having the faults of “timidity, conservativeness, greyness, dullness”. In 1949 the Labour government set up a committee of inquiry into the future of broadcasting, under Lord Beveridge.

The Beveridge committee, in 1951, rejected the breaking of the BBC’s broadcasting monopoly, but one of its members, the Conservative Selwyn Lloyd, produced a minority report advocating competition from commercial radio (see Independent Radio) and television stations. This report became a rallying point for like-minded Conservative figures. The lobbying force for a commercial alternative to the BBC mostly consisted of vested interests. Foremost among these were companies such as Marconi and Pye who made transmitters, studio equipment, and receivers for radio and television. Interests that wanted to have a stake in the competing media included newspapers, film companies, and cinema owners, and, of course, the advertising industry.

It was advertising, however, that was to cause problems for the initiative. There was particular concern about sponsored programmes. The only commercial television of which British politicians had knowledge was the US model with its almost universal sponsorship; this aroused deep antipathy, particularly within the Conservative Party. Then, in October 1950, Norman Collins, who had run the BBC’s most popular radio service (the Light Programme) before taking over as controller of the infant BBC Television in 1947, resigned from the BBC over a controversial appointment and became the standard-bearer of the lobby behind the minority report. He was able to convince sceptics that there could be a British form of commercial television in which the programmes would be like the BBC’s, only more popular, and would be carefully separated from the advertisements.

A parliamentary White Paper in May 1952 had proposed “some element of competition” in broadcasting. The following year, a further White Paper, much influenced by the lobby group led by Collins, proposed a system of private enterprise under public control in which direct sponsorship of programmes would not be allowed. Even this aroused strong opposition and the National Television Council was set up to oppose the introduction of commercial broadcasting. The commercial television lobby in turn formalized itself as the Popular Television Association. The postmaster general, Earl de la Warr, at this time responsible for broadcasting, steered the legislation through the House of Lords (see United Kingdom: Government), while his deputy David Gammans handled the debates in the House of Commons. After much debate, the first Television Act became law on July 30, 1954.

The Act laid down that there should be an Independent Television Authority (ITA) both to organize the setting up of the new television channel and subsequently to control all its activities. The ITA was required not only to set out codes of practice for programming and advertising, but also to own the transmitters and control all the signals to them, to ensure that improper material was not broadcast. De la Warr appointed Sir Kenneth Clark as chairman of the new nine-member Authority, who in turn recruited Sir Robert Fraser and Bernard Sendall as the ITA’s first director-general and deputy director-general respectively. These three designed a federal system in which regionally based television companies would each be contracted by the ITA to provide a complete schedule of programmes to the relevant regional ITA transmitter. The Television Act, however, required that there be an element of competition between the programme contractors. Franchises were therefore split between weekday and weekend, and four companies would serve three regions.

On October 26, 1954, the Authority members approved the first ITV contract awards. The London weekday contract went to Broadcast Relay Services and Associated Newspapers (later renamed Associated-Rediffusion); the contracts for the London weekend service and the Midlands weekday service were awarded to the Associated Broadcasting Development Company (later shortened to Associated Television and then to ATV); the Midlands and the North of England weekends were provided for by the Associated Broadcasting Development Company (later ABC Television); the North of England weekday contract went to Granada Theatres.

III

On the Air

ITV went on the air on September 22, 1955, broadcast at first only in the London area. Commercial broadcasting in the Midlands and the North was delayed by the failure of a Post Office proposal that ITA transmitter aerials could be placed on BBC masts, on the grounds that the new ITA aerials would be impossible to accommodate structurally. The ITA was already building its own transmitter for London, but now had to re-plan to accommodate the construction of its own transmitters all over the country. Stations for the Midlands, the western part of the North (Lancashire), and the eastern half (Yorkshire) opened in 1956. Other parts of Britain came to be served by commercial television over the years up until 1962.

The expertise that ITV companies had among their own backers, or had lured away from the BBC, was not immediately evident on screen and the initial response to ITV programmes was somewhat muted. But within a year distinctive ITV programme characteristics were beginning to emerge. ITV’s “show business” links began to show in such entertainment series as ATV’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium, which claimed over 80 per cent of the audience at its peak. ATV management was dominated by the Grade family of theatrical agents and impresarios. ITV’s popular touch extended to television drama, where Granada initially scored with powerful productions of scripts by the American television writers Paddy Chayefsky, Arthur Miller, and Reginald Rose. By their second year, equally strong drama by such British writers as John Osborne and Alun Owen began to emerge from Granada. Meanwhile, in July 1956 ABC Television started a series called Armchair Theatre, which was to become both a success with viewers and a showcase for new British drama writers. However, ITV had also imported the game show from America and it was this genre that tended to colour the general view of ITV in its early years.

The most far-reaching impact made by the new channel was in the area of news programmes (see News and Current Affairs). It was eventually agreed that the four original contracting companies should set up an independent subsidiary for providing ITV’s news. It was to be supervised by the ITA at the highest level. Independent Television News Limited (ITN) was incorporated on May 4, 1955. In five months, ITN’s editor-in-chief, Aidan Crawley, set up an organization for national and international news coverage, which changed the face of television news in Britain. BBC Television, still dominated by a radio hierarchy, was forced to change its nightly out-of-vision news-reading and weekly newsreel formula to match the challenge of ITN’s in-vision “newscasters” and fiercely competitive journalistic enterprise.

The news operations were not cheap to run, and ITN was one of the causes of the prospective financial collapse of ITV in its first year. Another was the slowness of the advertising industry to accept the cost of television as a medium. In addition, the rental paid by each company for the use of the ITA’s transmitters had escalated after the collapse of the mast-sharing scheme. Competition with the BBC for talent was another inflationary factor. As the first four companies struggled for survival, they arrived at an agreement as to which company would make which particular programmes to be shown by them all, or “networked”. Arrangements were to be a source of increasing friction as new contracts were granted by the ITA, initially for Scotland, Wales, the West of England, and the South of England, and later for the rest of the United Kingdom. The four “major” companies (later five) kept an iron grip on their networking role and accusations of a “cartel” grew.

The networking arrangements, combined with a growth in demand for television advertising, ensured not just evolution from a threat of financial failure but a degree of financial success for the companies. The accusations of cartel and advertising monopoly increased and helped motivate aggressive government legislation at the end of the 1980s that sought to introduce more competition into broadcasting and to transform ITV into more of an open market.

The financial success of ITV was not the only aspect that attracted criticism. When the government set up a Committee on Broadcasting in 1960 to consider the performance of the BBC and ITV, and how broadcasting might be expanded in the future, the chairman, Sir Harry Pilkington, left much of the writing of the Committee’s report to a left-wing academic, Richard Hoggart. When the Pilkington Committee's report was published in 1962, it emphasized ITV's popular success (in 1960, seven out of every ten households watched ITV rather than the BBC) as one factor, another being popular newspapers, that was eroding cultural values associated with the social systems in the poorer and less well educated “working class” communities of Britain. The report was highly critical of ITV and proposed an overhaul of its structure, in which the ITA would take over the direct planning of programmes and the selling of airtime. It recommended that the BBC should have a second television channel. The government rejected the restructuring proposals for ITV, but it did strengthen the ITA’s role in the supervision of scheduling and ensuring high programme standards.

The first real overhaul of Independent Television came with the re-advertising of ITV contracts to run from July 1968. The ITA decided to offer a new franchise area: Yorkshire was finally to break free of its coupling with Lancashire. The split weekday/weekend franchises were dropped except for London. The new programme contractors were Thames Television (an enforced merger of Rediffusion and ABC) and London Weekend Television (LWT) in the London area, Harlech Television (HTV) taking over from Television Wales and West (TWW) in Wales and the West of England, and Yorkshire Television (YTV). Meanwhile, under the new contracts that, among other stipulations, required them to broadcast in colour from 1969, some of the ITV companies were facing financial problems. One shareholder of LWT, the emerging Australian media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, owner in Britain of The Sun and News of the World newspapers, injected further capital and took control of the company. He devised a successful schedule for LWT. However, after a number of the original creative team that had founded LWT were sacked by Murdoch, the ITA warned the LWT board that the company was failing to keep to the terms of its contract and could lose it. Murdoch responded by appointing John Freeman as chairman and chief executive, who set about hiring a talented new team and attracting new capital. LWT went on to become one of the more inventive and successful of the ITV companies.

IV

New Problems, New Proposals, New Interests

The vulnerability of commercial television to strikes that could cause an instant blank screen meant that industrial relations became major factors for the ITV companies during the 1970s. The culmination was a disastrous 11-week stoppage from August 10 to October 24, 1979, which resulted in a loss of revenue estimated at £90-100 million.

A further committee was set up on the Future of Broadcasting under the chairmanship of Lord Annan in 1974, and finally published its report in 1977. The length of the committee’s considerations was largely due to new interest groups that had sprung up in relation to television, including the trade unions, religious interests, groups seeking to “clean up” television, the broadcasting organizations, and the programme-makers. Annan had been preceded by a technical committee, which had recommended that the new colour transmission system be extended to provide a new fourth channel.

ITV was pressing for parity with the BBC and wanted the fourth channel to be an ITV 2. The programme-makers had other ideas. Many saw a business opportunity in the making of programmes and wanted a new British broadcast outlet that would buy programmes rather than make them itself. Anthony Smith came up with a wholly new idea for the fourth channel: a National Television Foundation. The Foundation would be an electronic publishing house with a pluralist approach to the programmes it commissioned, and would be financed by subscription and sponsorship. Smith’s idea found favour intellectually, but its weakness was the financial plan. The Annan Committee came up with its own variant: an Open Broadcasting Authority. This would control the programmes on the fourth channel, which would be paid for by a combination of sponsorship, advertising, subscription, and government grant. The Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA, formerly the ITA) would effectively be demoted to be the regulator of local broadcasting. The Labour government (1976-1979) was against doubling the number and cost of regulators and, while a number of compromises were discussed, the plan to start a fourth channel remained unfulfilled.

When the Conservatives returned to power in 1979, the new Home Secretary, William Whitelaw, challenged the IBA to come up with a plan that would combine the best of the Smith/Annan proposals with a viable system of finance. The IBA would then have responsibility for setting up and controlling the new channel. Within weeks the IBA, led by Director-General Sir Brian Young, had arrived at the concept of a channel that would buy its programmes; would have a responsibility to embrace minority interests; and would be required to be innovative, educational, and not to duplicate the type of programmes broadcast on ITV. Importantly, the channel was also required to commission “a substantial proportion” of its programmes from independent producers. The new channel would be financed by a “subscription” from the ITV companies, who in return would be allowed to sell the channel’s advertising airtime. The proposal was accepted by the Home Office.