Not your parents' ITV

“What ITV is up to” is a subject that occupies our minds from time to time here at Transdiffusion, especially in the wake of the 50th anniversary last year, which encouraged us fairly inevitably to look back over that half-century to compare then and now.

The comparison, of course, is fairly meaningless. The world of modern digital multichannel television, emerging new distribution models and methods, and the changing face of the population and its perceived preference of entertainment, means that the forces that created ITV are not those that drive it today.

So it’s probably not terribly helpful to compare ITV’s past successes with its present, even if we agree with Sir Denis Foreman that reality television is ghastly and we wish ITV did more of what it was great at in the 80s and 90s (which itself was not unconnected to Sir Denis).

Basically, today’s ITV is not targeting his demographic, nor is it targeting the baby-boomers like myself: it has been unashamedly aiming at younger viewers for some time, and that market is perceived as liking reality shows, celebrity quizzes and all the stuff you’ll find on ITV1 of an evening.

How successful is this strategy? Well, probably quite successful. Despite high-profile apparent disaster areas like Love Island, ITV is top of the heap as far as commercial television productions are concerned – at least according to the views of an anonymous City media analyst relayed to the MHP list recently.

Some may point out that an audience of 10 million viewers for a hot new prime-time show isn’t very good. Well, compared to the days of two, three, four or even five terrestrial TV channels, it’s not. But modern audiences are fragmented by the proliferation of channels, many of whom serve up essentially the same fare. The days of enormous audiences are probably gone, and the key to success may well be to target a specific demographic, as ITV appears to be doing, or alternatively a particular type of programming.

We’re used, traditionally, to broadcasters being all things to all people. BBC One or ITV used to have a broad mix of popular material and some more worthy stuff (and sometimes, things that were both). That ethos survives, but ITV has decided to move towards a particular audience and keep it. Advertising revenue is dropping for all media except perhaps the internet, probably because the ad budget is spread much more thinly over more media than ever before: ITV wants to keep as large as possible a piece of a shrinking pie. Other channels might take a different approach and aim to be the viewers’ choice for a particular genre of programming: with lots of channels there’s room to specialise, and the only channels that can’t are those that have to be perceived as targeting a ‘general’ audience.

The fact is also that the programmes we baby-boomers and no doubt Sir Denis enjoy are not cheap, even if they are ratings-winners – which is by no means always the case. A quality period drama such as you may find in reruns on one of ITV’s other channels, or a BBC natural history documentary series like Planet Earth, is extremely expensive to make and thus needs an enormous audience to justify itself. A reality show on the other hand, while not ‘cheap’ is at least relatively so, and therefore does not need to command such a massive, impossible-today audience. So ITV can make more money while having a smaller audience share – and that is no doubt fine, as today’s ITV is a company that exists to make money first and television programmes second. Was it ever thus? Well, certainly much of the time.

There is a disturbing corollary to this, however. If the programmes that the rest of us want to watch are going to be expensive and aren’t going to capture enormous audiences, who is going to do them, if anyone? The answer has to be public service broadcasting, either in the form of the BBC and Channel Four, or some other future PSB model that has yet to be imposed on us.

ITV has largely, but not entirely, stopped making those kinds of programmes. So if that’s what some of us want, we should be able to happily forget the past cultural glories of the channel, leave it to measure its success by ratings-metered popularity, and take our custom elsewhere.

What we need to do, therefore, is to make sure that the people who make what we think of as ‘quality programmes’ in this country are encouraged, properly and securely funded, and, fundamentally, remain able to make and air programmes whose success is not merely measured in ratings terms. That, my friends, means supporting the BBC and other channels where quality programming, and not mere ratings, come first. And that, inevitably, and like many other things, has something to do with politics.