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In the most recent update...
Φ Back on the Late Shift NBC hasn't learned its lesson not to alienate its viewers... or its talent.
Φ Selling KERA An email to the local PBS stations leads to 60 seconds of fame
Φ City Road Tyne Tees's former home hits the wrecking ball
Φ Thirty Years of Grange Hill - Part III Popularity and hard hitting storylines.
Φ Paradise Lost Part IV - Central House Exploring the extension for the new company.
On the blog...
The latest musings from our editors
Φ 10 March 2010 - Marketing defeat
Φ 3 March 2010 - Most people like the BBC as it is
Φ 2 March 2010 - Beating the retreat
Φ 26 February 2010 - Sacrificial lamb
Φ 18 February 2010 - There's an app for that
30-second guide to...
Anglia Television was the ITV contractor for an area initially defined as the "East of England", later redefined as "East Anglia", from 1959. The company almost immediately made an unsuccessful claim on the Dover transmitter, which went more logically to Southern than on the basis of it being in the East of England. Originally only covering Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Cambridgeshire (plus, as was the case then, Huntingdonshire and the Isle of Ely), the company's reach expanded to Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire, Lincolnshire (previously awkward gaps in the ITV system) and the East Riding of Yorkshire with the opening of the Sandy Heath and Belmont transmitters in 1965. It was subsequently deemed by the IBA to have overreached itself as a relatively minor company, and from 1974 lost Lincolnshire to Yorkshire Television in a complicated set of arrangements with its coverage area being, accordingly, officially renamed. This meant that parts of North Cambridgeshire and North West Norfolk now received Yorkshire rather than Anglia: later, some Anglia-only relays would be installed in this area. The company's image and style of presentation in particular, with its clock particularly dated (although the original clock now looks genuinely other-worldly) strongly associated it in many people's minds with the agriculturalism of its region although as time went on this was increasingly misleading. In 1988, a new design by Lambie-Nairn (which would last until 1999) updated the company's image and aligned it more with the exploding hi-tech industry in the west of its region than with the agriculturalism of the east. Regular Anglia announcers in the 1970s and 1980s included Michael Speake, Katie Glass and Helen McDermott.
The company's startup music, from its inception to the mid-1980s, was Ralph Vaughan Williams's Sea Songs medley while its ident was, on a similar theme, an extract from Handel's Water Music. While never one of the Big Four or Five (or even, putatively, Six), Anglia nevertheless had more nationally-broadcast programmes than the likes of Westward or Ulster; its most famous networked programmes were the game show Sale of the Century, the series of wildlife documentaries Survival (Sale of the Century and a Survival Special were, entirely coincidentally, shown on the same night as an all-out strike at the BBC in December 1978 and gained over 20 million viewers, probably the all-time highest for their respective genres), and the anthology of short stories Tales of the Unexpected. In 1979 its distinctive ident was, remarkably for a company outside the Big Five, the second most recognised (after that of Thames in a national survey.
In 1994 the company was taken over by United News and Media, where it would be cross-owned with Meridian and, later, HTV, along with Express Newspapers. Continuity continued to come from Norwich, at least some of the time, until January 2000, when it moved to Southampton (shared with the other United franchises). Later in 2000 Anglia became part of the Granada group, and subsequently ITV plc. Since October 2002 it has had national ITV1 continuity, with the Anglia name only mentioned before the few remaining regional programmes.
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