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.

V.

New Channels and New Regulation

Channel 4 started broadcasting on November 2, 1982. Initially it reached some 73 per cent of the audience in England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland; a fierce political campaign had won Wales use of the transmitters there for a separate Welsh language channel, Sianel Pedwar Cymru (S4C). Initial audiences for Channel 4 were low, but the channel and the producers it commissioned were wholehearted in their interpretation of the channel’s remit: new approaches were tried and new directors, artists, and writers were employed. This brought powerful results in fiction. The film dramas commissioned under the banner Film on 4 are widely regarded as having been the start of the revival of the British cinema industry. In the factual programme area, some minorities in British society were heard on television for the first time. With IBA support, the founding chief executive, Jeremy Isaacs, steered the new channel to a position five years later where it had become a highly regarded contributor to British culture. The channel’s programme commissions had also helped to create a British independent production industry, which was to have a significant voice in broadcasting matters in the future. Under successive managements from 1988 onwards, the channel largely retained its distinctive character, even when, in 1990, it was granted the right to sell its own airtime in competition with ITV.

For ITV there had been turmoil with the awards of the new contracts that were to start in 1981. The contracts of ATV, Southern Television, and Westward Television were terminated and their franchises awarded to Central Independent Television, Television South (TVS), and Television South West (TSW) respectively. A new breakfast-time (see Daytime Television) broadcasting franchise was created and given to TV-AM. The IBA processes that had led to these changes were criticized in the press and within the industry as unnecessarily secretive and apparently arbitrary. The report of a further committee on broadcasting, the Committee on the Financing of the BBC, chaired by Sir Alan Peacock in the mid-1980s, pointed to a new approach to ITV franchise awards. The committee recommended that groups or companies aspiring to be or to continue to be ITV contractors should bid money for the privilege of having a franchise and that, subject to programme quality, the highest bidder should win. Under intense lobbying from the new independent producers, who were no longer content just to serve Channel 4, Peacock also recommended that the BBC and ITV should commission 40 per cent of their programmes from independent producers.

When the government White Paper Broadcasting in the ‘90s was published in November 1988 it did contain a requirement that ITV franchises would, subject to safeguards, go to the highest bidder. It also proposed to abolish the IBA and replace it with a “lighter touch” licensing body rather than a broadcasting authority. This was to be called the Independent Television Commission (ITC). The subsequent Broadcasting Act of November 1, 1990, also offered the opportunity for a fifth channel, also to be a commercial one.

On October 16, 1991, the ITC, composed of the old IBA staff under a new chairman, George Russell, announced that it had awarded licences to 12 of the 15 existing regional ITV companies but the other 3 and the breakfast franchise changed hands. Thames was replaced by Carlton Television for the London weekday licence, Meridian Broadcasting replaced TVS in the South, and Westcountry Television took over from TSW in the South-West. TV-AM was replaced by Sunrise Television (later to call itself GMTV) for breakfast-time programming. The new companies were set up in 1992 to start broadcasting on January 1, 1993. Meanwhile, a new independent ITV Network Centre was set up, which would commission programmes for networking throughout the United Kingdom from ITV companies and independents, thus ridding ITV of the system that had been accused of being an inter-company cartel. In 1995 the ITC awarded the licence for Channel 5 to a consortium consisting of United News and Media (owners of Meridian Broadcasting), Pearson Television, CLT (the Luxembourg-based owners of commercial radio and television interests in Europe), and Warburg Pincus (venture capitalists). Channel 5 began broadcasting on March 30, 1997.

Independent television as a whole was to see even greater, and more radical change over the next seven years. A loosening by the government of the ownership rules in 1993 allowed the London weekday company, Carlton Television, to take over the Midlands seven-day franchise-holder, Central Television. Granada, the Manchester-based station, which had provided programmes for ITV since the network's inception, launched a hostile bid for London Weekend Television and, amid much acrimony, was successful, taking it over in February 1994.

Further takeovers and mergers in the following years meant that by the end of the millennium the ITV network was, in effect, under the control of just Carlton and Granada. They started a multi-channel terrestrial digital service called On Digital in head-to-head competition with Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB satellite service. By April 2001 On Digital was struggling for survival and was relaunched as ITV Digital. However, it still failed to gain sufficient audience to make it viable and went out of business on May 1, 2002. Its transmission system was later acquired by the BBC, who used it to set up a service called Freeview to carry its own digital channels and some from other sources, including ITV.

A government White Paper in December 2000 prepared the ground for an entirely new regulator to deal with the increasingly convergent communications industry. After much debate—primarily about whether foreign owners should be allowed to take over independent television stations in the UK—the Communications Act 2003 brought into being a new regulator, called OFCOM, to take over the supervision of radio, television, telecommunications, and some other related areas of use of the electro-magnetic spectrum. The foreign ownership issue was resolved by requiring foreign investors to apply to OFCOM before attempting to take over a station. If OFCOM has any concerns about the application, it can refer it to the minister responsible at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).

In general, OFCOM's remit shifted the emphasis of UK broadcasting regulation away from content towards competition and the economic aspects of the industry. The broadcasters had always sought to take responsibility for the content of their programmes. Now they were able to. However, any flagrant breach of the more relaxed content rules could still result in a major financial penalty or, if repeated, a loss of licence.

OFCOM took over from its predecessors on January 1, 2004. One of its first actions was to agree the final consolidation of ITV into one company. That company, ITV plc, assumed all ITV network responsibilities on February 2, 2004.

See also Satellite Television and Digital Broadcasting.