In what is without doubt the most extensive monthly addition to the Transdiffusion Network in its history, we have several things to celebrate. The obvious one is the fiftieth anniversary of commercial television in the UK, and as Kenny Everett noted, Britain is virtually unique in getting commercial radio after it got commercial TV. The political manoeuvrings that went on behind the scenes to persuade the generally opposed Conservative Party of the late 1940s that it wanted what Churchill called a "tuppenny Punch and Judy show" is a fascinating tale and H H Wilson's book Pressure Group tells it absorbingly. The tale we tell this month - in a brand new ITV at 50 site containing eighteen articles with more to come - looks at the past and present of the Populist Channel and also runs through TBS writers' and editors' Top Ten ITV companies over the years.
There's another anniversary too, though: it's six years this month that Transdiffusion hit the web in 1999, and in that time this collection of sites has gone from strength to strength, and to what is now around 2,500 pages of information, comment and analysis receiving literally hundreds of thousands of visits a month. In bringing this bumper fun book of additional material to the Net this month I would like to say a warm 'Welcome Back' to popular contributor Andrew Hesford-Booth after a trying past year, along with a special 'Thank You' to Russ Jamie Graham, who not only edited the sites for much of that time but also designed what must be some of the best-looking pages on the Web - and over the past weeks put both the new ITV50 and the stunning Talk of Thames sites together, despite quite a seriously poor state of health. I'd also like to thank Chris Bowden-Smith for thinking of the whole Transdiffusion idea, an entire, er, forty-one and a half years ago - and still busy as Commissioning Editor today. It's great to work with such an amazing team of editors, writers - and behind-the-scenes staff busy putting together the next incarnation of TBS - thank you all for your most valued contributions past, present and future; and thank you all out there for reading us.
