Historical details of Central and other ITV Companies

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITV_Central Its been overhauld, what does everyone think? mind you is anything missing?

A link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_(TV_series) - has everyone forgotten this?

Nottingham was also the home of The Children's Channel/TCC until they moved in to TVS' old studios with the rest of Flextech's stuff. Central was originally a shareholder too.

I'm sure they also handled the playout of a few other channels (other than the Carlton ones later on).

It's sad to think there's no major studios in the Midlands any more. The East was and continues to be under-represented on the network; I guess it doesn't matter for much in the end.

Actually after more digging Central never joined TCC until January 1987.

It is a shame really I always thought the old regional structure was great for ITV and Central was a great part of that with superb tv presentation, all gone done and dusted and in the rubble (broad street studios)

I take it this was from 1987 - 1993?

I get the feeling, Brum was never that important in the first place? I expected brum to have went become, the cost of keeping an old big studio complex was pointless especial with Nottingham being more modern and upto date.

Actually central dealt with nearly all of " Carlton Uk Productions" so even during the 90s Central was still a big input to the network. including Catchphrase. Its Granada, it always been granada who is at fault of the trouble with ITV not Carlton.

One piece of history I cant found still is this:
Central also refocused its business by severing ties with Chris Bearde Entertainment, a game show production house that had lost an estimated US$5 million, and Wordstar, a company providing newspapers and magazines with entertainment news worldwide.

I think it got to the point that they didn't need Birmingham with such a modern complex at Nottingham. There was certainly no need to have two major production bases an hour away from each other.

There's an article on Trandiffusion by an ex-Central staffer that points out that although Carlton are seen as the bogeymen for winding down Brum, as early as 1991 Central themselves were moving everything to Nottingham apart from regional news, CITV and transmission, leaving Broad Street quite empty. This was a good three years before Carlton took full control.

A problems here: Why did Central buy the building then in 1991 if there know Brum was on its way out? unless there were hoping to make a big profit on selling the building on?

Do you have a link to this piece?

Now that we're way past the Carlton/Granada era of ITV, I'm thinking more and more that Carlton were the good guys in the duopoly. Carlton appear to be hated mainly for two things. 1) They replaced Thames and 2) They rebranded Central and Westcountry. With Thames, it was the ITC's fault for not awarding Thames the contract, not Carlton's fault for winning it.

And with the rebrand, yes it was a shame to see two big regional names go when everyone else got to keep theirs for another 3 years, but Carlton remained committed to maintaining the local broadcasting operations for those regions largely as they were before (and through Nottingham kept Central as a big network producer, even though it wasn't under their own name). Granada on the other hand may have kept the regional names up on screen but behind the scenes they were quietly dismantling everything, removing production capability in favour of everything being made at Manchester or London, and reducing the local broadcasting operations to shadows of their former selves which the three Carltons (and later HTV) were not suffering from at this time - eg of the Carlton-owned stations all but 1 still retained regional continuity until October 2002. On the flip side, only 1 of Granada's stations DID hold onto this feature until the last day.

When the eventual merged company was little more than a takeover of Carlton by Granada, with most key positions (including the top job) being held by ex-Granada people and the share distribution being skewed towards ex-Granada shareholders, it is little surprise that the merged company essentially became a wider rollout of a road which Granada were already well down (but notably, Carlton were not) before the merger, and that the surviving production centres were all Granada's before the merger.

I'm not naïve enough to believe that had the merger favoured Carlton that today we'd have a proposition similar to Central and Westcountry between 1999 and 2002, but I do wonder if things would have turned out a little different with regards to regional news provision (regional provision in general) and production centres. Certainly, I doubt Central would have fallen from a major network producer to nothing more than a watered-down regional news operation.

Whilst I think you're right that too much of what happened to regional ITV (and what's happened to TV in general) is attributed to Carlton, I feel they were hardly a bastion of regionalism. If Carlton had 'won' in the merger wars of 93-04, not a lot would be different to now. ITV might be known as Carlton maybe but that's about it. The same reasons would be there why Manchester and Leeds would need to be kept to some extent and I doubt Carlton would've cared about Birmingham or Nottingham once it had aquired LWT's studios. Nor would they care about regional identities any more than Granada, as can be attested by the fact they got rid of the Central and Westcountry brand identities.

The transmission and continuity arrangements for the two big blocs prior to 2002 was indeed ironic. GMG North's centralized and often lackluster continuity rendered the regional station idents near enough pointless outside of regional junctions (which were becoming less and less by that time). Carlton's single identity for its three stations (not including HTV) made dedicated continuity near enough pointless outside of regional junctions as "Now on Carlton, Coronation Street" would've been heard in three different regions and even though the voices would've been different, this would've been irrelevant to the majority of viewers, particularly as the regional names were never used i.e. it was never "Now on Carlton Central, Coronation Street", always just "Carlton". I think they only retained regional continuity because it was actually easier than centralizing it. Whilst all three "Carlton" regions had their own dedicated playout, only Central's was coming from standalone facilities. Carlton's London operation was coming from LWT's transmission facilities, whilst Westcountry's was coming from HTV in Cardiff, even though continuity was in Plymouth. It would've been difficult to centralize them all into the London operation as Carlton only operated in the week in London. This would've meant a weird situation where in the week there was just a Carlton service with regional opt outs for all three regions but on the weekends there would be a reduced Carlton not including London but with a totally standalone LWT service. Although I don't know for sure, chances are LWT's facilities weren't able to handle such an operation at the time without an upgrade. LWT being separate from GMG North will have been for similar reasons and not because Granada valued LWT more than the others. Clearly ITV was in a state of evolution and Carlton, Granada etc knew that there would eventually be one company running all or most of the ITV network and that playout for much of that would be unified in London.