Car crash television
ITV Play Website
Friends get to play on ITV
ITV Play launched at midday today, and watching it was a thoroughly depressing experience for anyone who still believes that commercial television should at least be of "merchantable quality". Its Freeview predecessor Men & Motors offered lots of car crashes for viewing entertainment but ITV Play was car crash television of a different kind: so bad than it was, erm, terrible.
The proceedings kicked off with the morally dubious exploitation of a mainstream brand for pure profit, namely the awfully-titled "This Morning Puzzle Book" which had nothing whatsoever to do with This Morning (indeed it even starts when the morning has actually finished), apart from the title music and the studio used.
Firstly there was a tedious game based on "Guess the contents of the shopping list"; all standard fare for modern quiz TV though at least the game looked reasonably honest in its execution (it had to be), but it took over 90 minutes to get their first winner. There was a later welcome for "all the viewers who have just joined us from ITV1" - ah, the joys of cross-promotion...
Ironically one of the games played was based on the "Yes/No" interlude game that was a feature of the early ITV quiz show Take Your Pick. Some might say that this proves that it's only the past repeating itself, but the key difference is that ITV is now making money from the direct and continuous exploitation of the ITV brand, which is essentially unchartered territory.
ITV has always offered lowbrow entertainment from its inception (as the Take Your Pick example proved), but this is probably the first time that ITV has been so blatantly downmarket in its commercial explotiation of its intellectual properties. In the past it was regulation that prevented commercial television from stooping so low, but the safeguards have now been removed.
The bottom line is that ITV is out to make money from the new channel and it will doubtless attract a legion of loyal game players, but what effect it will have on what little prestige that the ITV brand still has remains to be seen. Could anyone still honestly trust a serious current affairs programme on ITV1 after watching ITV Play for any length of time?
