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.