The symbols of ITV explained 

19 August 2020 tbs.pm/70705

Worthing Herald masthead

From the Worthing Herald for 28 August 1959

ON the Independent Television exhibits at the Radio Show, which opened at Earls Court on Wednesday, are displayed the identification symbols of the programme companies.

The ITV people sometimes find that viewers are puzzled by the appearance of, for example, a Granada symbol in the programmes seen in the London area when they know that Associated Rediffusion is responsible for providing the programmes seen there on that day.

It might, therefore, be useful to explain why this happens and such an explanation also demonstrates the complexity of the independent television network.

 

 

The symbols are, in fact, of two kinds. There is, on the one hand, a producer’s symbol inserted by the company originating the programme; and, on the other hand, there is a symbol for the company carrying the programme in each area. These individual companies are responsible for the provision of all the programmes in their particular areas, and they draw upon their own resources and those of the other companies for this purpose.

Associated Television, for example, is responsible for providing programmes in the London area at the weekends. It is the “provider” of these programmes and is responsible for either producing them itself or entering into contracts with other programme companies to let it have some of their productions.

In this way programmes can come from studio centres in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, Cardiff, Southampton, Newcastle, Norwich or Belfast, and Associated Television is at liberty to select whichever programmes it feels will suit its audience best and which will also conform to the requirements of the Authority in relation to “balance” between various programme types.

 


 

❛❛Russ J Graham writes: You can’t go far in researching this history of ITV without tripping over articles like this, explaining the structure of the network.

And, like here, they invariably refer to it as ‘complex’. Usually there’s also a quote from someone in ITV or from the Independent Television Authority patiently explaining how its a federation, how there are big companies and little companies, how they exchange material and so on, all in a tone that seems to say “this is all terribly complicated!”

I’m not sure I believe that. I’d go as far as saying that the vast majority knew that their local station was XYZ-TV, and it showed its own programmes, American programmes and programmes made by QWE-TV and RTY-TV and the like and they were ‘ITV’ in their regions. They may have been hazy on where those regions geographically were, but that’s neither here nor there. For most people, if they thought about it at all, the structure of ITV was perfectly simple.

But still perception that nobody knew what was happening and why, and how they could be watching Tyne Tees but see a Southern programme, and that it was all terribly, terribly, confusing and off-putting remained. Indeed, it got stronger, with the Independent Broadcasting Authority not needing a single prompt in the 1970s and 1980s before they would trot out a spokesman with diagrams to ‘explain’ this tangled and convoluted system, whether people needed it explaining or… well, not.

It reached its apogee in 1989, when one of the stated reasons for introducing a unified look, to greater or lesser success, was that people in London saw a Granada documentary and thought they were watching the BBC. To use a modern phrase: didn’t happen.

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9 responses to this article

Russ J Graham 20 August 2020 at 3:52 pm

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