ITV: too scared to save itself?
It’s rather telling for ITV, still the UK’s main commercial television broadcaster that the first time I saw this ident for the main channel was as part of a BBC News report on how badly they’re doing.
The image we get of flagship channel ITV1 is that its safely family friendly. ITV is the home of depressing Sunday night dramas like Heartbeat, which is soon to return for the seventeenth year. ITV is about soap operas and reality TV shows inspired by Channel 4. The sad truth is that if ITV disappeared from the TV package instead of Sky I wouldn’t be bothered.
The channel is losing revenue as it collapses onto its rump demographic of older working class people who are sadly not at the top of advertisers’ lists. As executive chairman Michael Grade admits, his predecessor Charles Allen was too busy empire building to make TV programmes and the current culture is too risk averse to be creative. It’s clear that when John Cleese called him an ‘upstart caterer’ he’d greatly overestimated Charles Allen’s talents.
Now as its world falls apart, ITV must put aside its fears and take more creative risks than ever before if its is to survive the in a multi-channel digital TV world.
Comments (2 comments)
A minor point, but that’s actually an old ITV1 ident, discontinued last year.
James / March 7th, 2007, 3:24 pm / #
Doesn’t that say it all?
Stephen Newton / March 8th, 2007, 10:08 am / #
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