ITV1... everyone else nil! (ITV 1)

Member Name: T4imbo3107

Product:	ITV 1
Date:	07/10/08 (319 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: UEFA Football coverage over two channels.

Disadvantages: Drama and Soaps make up most of the evening schedules.

ITV1 is going through a serious bad patch at the moment, after the phone line scandal and with programs like Ant and Dec's Takeaway the channel is not having the success that it had in the past and with falling revenue from advertising the company has decided to cut back on its regional programmes to absorb the drops in revenue. Today it has been branded as a nationwide channel rather than the regional identities that had long been established such as Thames Television for London or Central for the Midlands region.

The channel itself started broadcasting under the name of Independent Television on 22nd September 1955, as an alternative to the BBC that only had one channel at the time. Throughout the 1960's and 1970's the channel gave us a whole host of well known acts such as Benny Hill, and Morecambe and Wise. Also it gave us shows like The Golden Shot, New Faces and Opportunity Knocks that was a springboard for people like Marti Caine and Freddie Star. It also gave us variety, obviously the choice to switch channels but also big stars appearing in a one hour variety show that meant we could be entertained from home without having to travel. This was the Golden Age of Television, viewing figure s could easily reach 20million for a single program in these days, and it would usually be the talking point the next at school as well. These were shows like Live from Her Majesty's that went out on a Sunday evening.

I can remember watching this as a kid and been lifted from the usual Sunday quietness to a completely different level. I suppose today the equivalent is The X Factor that hopes to make a star out of someone, but this is a different time and now it is purely for money rather than the actual talent the person has.

More recently the channel has expanded its broadcast capabilities by utilising the new digital facilities and creating a plethora of choices for viewers. ITV launched ITV Digital, a similar set up to that of the BBC, with a News and Sports channel. Trouble was that the coverage was so bad that the News Channel folded and the Sports Channel didn't really have much to show as Sky had most of the rights to the Football games that ITV wanted, so ITV had no choice but to show games that were further down the league tables.

After the expensive failure of the ITV Digital network, which was then re-branded as Freeview, the channel faced further embarrassment when the launch of ITV Play was found to be raising funds without giving viewers a fair chance of competing in the games being broadcast. For example that the 1000 players who had phoned in to a premium line experienced a busy tone even though they had paid £1 to get through, so you could have a couple of hundred people continuously trying a £1 per time with the phone being answered to every 1 in 50 players who got through to the show.

At the time of the ITV Digital fiasco, further channels were launched, this included ITV2, ITV3 and later on ITV4. The majority of these channels showed repeats of programs, the exception being ITV2 where the practice of seeing programs first before they were shown on ITV1 was done. Now that ITV1 was established to the public this meant that the rebirth of ITV1 was now complete. Channels from ITV1 to ITV4 were readily available on satellite and cable to watch and all were now part of the ITV family.

With regards to Sport, there is very little other than Football shown on the channel, ITV have the rights to UEFA Champions League, that they do utilise ITV1 and ITV4 effectively by showing a game on each channel. Also they managed to obtain the rights to the annual Boat Race as well from the BBC. At the end of this season they will also lose the broadcast rights to F1 as these will go back to the BBC to broadcast, this in my mind is a good decision as watching F1 with advertisement breaks is utterly ridiculous and means that on some occasions the incidents that occur on track occur when the adverts are being shown.

The biggest change for the channel is the image that it gives out on-screen, the loss of the regional identities I think has been its biggest downfall in recent years and this has alienated viewers. Beforehand there were 15 regional channels ranging from Grampian in the North to Meridian in the South. These channels all had their own presenters and their own identity that was individual to that station. Under the re-branding exercise that was abandoned all the individuality that was built up over the years and absorbed them all under the ITV1 corporate logo. The only exception being for the regional news desks that still broadcast to their relevant regions but again had the makeover performed so that all the titles and music were in uniform with each other.

Even though the news is provided by ITN, the quality of it can be labelled as scare mongering at the best of times, in some cases as the "worst possible scenarios" are always given to the audience under the "what does this mean for you" label. I don't like this at all and will quite happily change channels to watch Sky News. The way the dialogue is scripted and delivered is just horrendous, which is the other reason I tend to change channels. With News at Ten being consigned to the scrapheap then miraculously being bought back with a new look really does show what the management have as a game plan for this channel. Bottom line is that it looks like it has no idea as to what they want or even need to do.

Overall the channel has changed completely and now it just seems that the channel is headed by soaps and drama. Coronation Street and Emmerdale are shown at least five times a week each in direct competition with Eastenders. The amount of drama shown as well on the channel is higher than normal and even though I enjoy things like A Touch of Frost and Kingdom, I don't expect to see repeats of the same series again and again in such a short period. Like I say the channel has changed and is now just a corporate picture box with little soul or identity, at least when it was Thames we used to get an on screen continuity announcer that gave the whole show a personal touch, truthfully I miss these! There is no real stab at making anything funny on this channel any more now as ITV used to show good comedies like Robins Nest or action series like The Professionals are never shown. Even the films have to be split in two to accommodate News at Ten.

ITV2 is utilised a secondary channel in much the same way as BBC3, the trouble is that ITV1 never seems to be backed up by these channels at all and all seem to be individual rather than working in a joined up method to establish ITV1 as the fundamental channel that should be the first place that the viewer clicks to watch a program. ITV as a whole rather than just ITV1 is in a mess at the moment and I think that this has come at the wrong time for a channel that is struggling to keep their head above the water while others are succeeding where they are failing.

Summary: Needs a complete reboot!!!