Goodbye children

It has been suspected for some time that ITV was losing interest in childrens' TV, even when it was still going ahead with the launch of the CITV Channel, and today's announcement simply underlines the fact that expensive children's television production is an inconvenience when in purely commercial terms a cheap chat show can obtain a similar audience size.

ITV has often complained that due to historical regulatory controls it wasn't allowed to fully exploit the intellectual properties of the children's TV shows it produced, unlike its rivals and (especially) the BBC, who was able to licence the production of Teletubbie dolls whereas ITV theoretically had its hands tied so couldn't do anything similar to this.

But inconvenient rules never stopped ITV from doing things it really wanted to do in the past, so it seems fairly obvious that ITV wasn't too bothered about this sort of thing when it was preoccupied with failing to compete with Sky in the pay-TV arena. And Granada was also busy swallowing up various franchises (culminating with Carlton) and slashing production jobs.

Although the production of high quality children's TV has hidden cultural benefits, it arguably also helped to foster a degree of loyality between the channel and its young viewers, which in turn extended into adulthood. But ITV nowadays is much more concerned with 'commercial impacts' today as opposed to (re)building the loyality of viewers for the long term.

But that's the whole trouble of wanting tough regulation on one hand (the banning of so-called 'junk' food advertising) and weak regulation on the other, meaning that ITV can easily jettison more of its public service responsibilities and has the ideal excuse for doing so if it can prove that it is no longer economically viable (even if it can still be made viable).

At this point of time, ITV will probably keep the CITV Channel going just as long as it's popular and can source enough cheap cartoons to keep the kids happy, but it may well throw in the towel if ITV feels that it would be financially better off converting the Freeview slot into another quiz channel.

That would be the result of a ban on 'junk' food advertising, then.