One of the saddest sights in television is the corridor leading to the Granada canteen. This is not because of the food, which is good, but the publicity photos that line the corridor, photos of ITV's current stars and top shows. Note "current." Of the great names of yesteryear, there is no sign. Shakespeare's Ulysses would have approved: ITV's present eye praises the present object. Who has time for the past?
Melvyn Bragg's five-part history, The Story of ITV: The People's Channel—is a rare chance to open the treasure trove of ITV's first 50 years. The theme music and title sequences alone are evocative. In one clever scene, members of the public sing the lyrics of The Adventures of Robin Hood (once heard, never forgotten). The opening music from The Sweeney or The Avengers, a few words from The Prisoner ("I am not a number"), tell us more about the presence of television in our lives than countless media studies theses.
But too often the series becomes one long photo-lined corridor. It is too concerned with what counts today and keeps cutting from the past to interviews with Ant and Dec or Coronation Street's latest young stars; Chris Tarrant, Frank Skinner or Parky. The second programme, on drama, begins on the set of Footballers' Wives and it is a while before we get to our allotted eight seconds of The Naked Civil Servant and 15 seconds of The Knowledge. Blink and you've missed it. The World at War? 37 seconds. The Kenny Everett Video Show? Six seconds. Trevor Griffiths's Bill Brand? McKellen and Dench in Macbeth? Alan Bennett's plays for LWT? Clive James and Russell Harty? Nothing.
As Bragg rightly points out, ITV's achievement is unique in world television. No other commercial network has produced so much great television across so many genres. The American networks have produced more great comedy and entertainment. But ITV wins out in its history series, dramas (single plays and great series), long-running children's programmes (How, Magpie, Rainbow), and news and current affairs. But if you are going to boast—rightly—of this achievement, then why be in such a rush to get to today's hits?
There are two problems with this kind of "presentism," the idea that what matters is what is popular today. First, it is bad history. Of course, you have to cut the cake somehow, and inevitably tough choices have to be made. What is troubling is the pattern. It is the history programmes, the arts programmes and the quirky dramas that get left out.
The second problem is even more troubling. Why was this series thematic and not chronological? The answer is obvious. You might begin with Pinter and Olivier, some clips of Judy Garland at Sunday Night at the London Palladium, those amazing first episodes of Coronation Street; then continue with The Avengers, the early days of This Week and the ITV precursors of Monty Python; then Dennis Potter and Bennett at LWT in the 1970s and into the 1980s with Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, Inspector Morse, Minder, Jewel in the Crown; then the early 1990s: Cracker, Prime Suspect, The South Bank Show and Spitting Image still going strong. And up to the present with—what?
The press pack sent out with the series includes "ITV's 50 Greatest Shows." From the last five years we have: Ant and Dec, Footballers' Wives, I'm a Celebrity…, Pop Idol, Tonight with Trevor McDonald and Who Wants to be a Millionaire? It is all trash with plummeting ratings. And here's the rub. The collapse of ITV, both in terms of its ratings and its creative output, is the biggest story in British television in the past ten years. It haunts The Story of ITV but no one addresses it directly.
As they approach the present, the programmes become increasingly evasive and strident, like a corporate promo. ITV "supported inquisitive, awkward programmes that challenged establishments worldwide, and placed investigative journalism and documentaries squarely on ITV." True enough. "They're still there." Cue a clip from John Pilger's acclaimed Stealing a Nation (2004). The implication is clear: that the great ITV tradition of investigative journalism and documentary-making is still alive and kicking. Is it? John Pilger made 21 programmes for ITV in six years in the early and mid-1970s. In the last six years, ITV has shown six Pilger documentaries.
Other current affairs programmes have fared less well. This Week stopped in 1992; World in Action in 1998. Those programmes, shown at peak time, contributed some of the haunting images in programme five. Are Tonight with Trevor McDonald or Dimbleby a substitute for these? Is this simply change, adjusting to a new multi-channel world? Or is this, as elsewhere, pure and simply, decline—fewer current affairs programmes and worse?
Here was a chance not just to pay tribute to ITV's past, but to intervene in what has happened to ITV more recently. Instead the people who run ITV are given plenty of time to tell us how well everything is going: the potato yield, comrades, is up yet again! The audience, meanwhile, is voting with its feet. The people, in increasing numbers, are giving up on the People's channel.
