ITV — Independent Television — went on air on 22 September 1955, ending nearly twenty years of BBC monopoly. It is funded by advertising, and it has been the BBC’s principal rival and occasional partner ever since.
The regional federation
ITV was not created as a single company. It was set up as a network of regional franchises, each awarded a licence for a particular area and each producing programmes for the whole network:
- Granada — the North West, and one of the great production companies of British television.
- Thames and London Weekend Television — London, split between weekdays and weekends.
- Yorkshire, Anglia, Tyne Tees, Central, HTV, Scottish, Ulster and others.
Each had its own on-screen identity, and viewers of a certain age remember their regional ident with real affection. The franchises were periodically re-auctioned, most brutally in 1991 under a system that awarded them largely on cash bids and cost TV-am and Thames their licences.
Consolidation from the 1990s merged almost all of them into a single ITV plc. STV in Scotland and UTV in Northern Ireland retain separate identities.
What ITV gave British television
- Coronation Street — running since December 1960, the longest-running television soap opera in the world, made by Granada in Manchester and still set there.
- The big entertainment formats — Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, The X Factor, Britain’s Got Talent, I’m a Celebrity, Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway. Several have been sold to dozens of countries.
- Drama — Inspector Morse, Poirot, Downton Abbey, Broadchurch, Mr Bates vs The Post Office.
- News at Ten — with the chimes of Big Ben, and for decades the most watched news bulletin in Britain.
- World in Action — Granada’s investigative series, which helped overturn several major miscarriages of justice.
Public service obligations
ITV is commercial but not unregulated. As a public service broadcaster it carries obligations on news, regional programming and original UK production, in exchange for prominence on electronic programme guides and access to spectrum. Its regional news bulletins are a genuine service in areas the BBC covers thinly.
Mr Bates
In January 2024 ITV broadcast Mr Bates vs The Post Office, a drama about sub-postmasters wrongly prosecuted for theft on the evidence of faulty accounting software. The scandal had been documented by journalists for over a decade with limited effect; within days of the drama airing, the government announced legislation to quash the convictions.
It is the clearest recent demonstration of what mass-audience television can still do, and it is cited constantly in British arguments about the value of public service broadcasting.