The Dream That Died: The Rise and Fall of ITV
by Raymond Fitzwalter
Troubador Publishing, £14.99

SOME years ago, with all party support, I introduced a Bill designed to counter the rise of tabloid TV. The Media Diversity Bill sought to promote a level playing field between satellite and commercial television, break up the Murdoch empire and impose some minimum standards.

“What I fear most,” I said at the time, “is not political bias but the steady growth of junk television – the trivialisation of everything that is important in our lives and its consequent effect on our culture; a flat refusal to address what is going on in the world in favour of an endless diet of game shows, soap operas and the unadulterated hate that is already a feature of our most loathsome tabloids.”

Needless to say, my Bill got nowhere, but who would deny that much of what was then predicted has since come to pass. Ray Fitzwalter has now set out to document what went wrong and, as befits a former editor of World in Action, he has done so meticulously.

He starts with the good years. The rise of Granada Television, founded by the redoubtable Bernstein brothers, businessmen who cared about more than profit. Granada’s credits included Brideshead Revisited and Jewel in the Crown as well as popular favourites such as Coronation Street and the hard-hitting documentary series World in Action.

It began to go wrong in the mid-1980s. Margaret Thatcher had long had it in for the ITV companies which she believed – and she was not entirely wrong – to be bloated and over-manned; even more importantly, she also believed that independent television was an adventure playground for dangerous left-wingers. Her solution was to auction off the ITV franchises.

The catalyst was Death on the Rock, a Thames Television documentary which suggested that, contrary to the official version of events, three IRA terrorists killed by the SAS in Gibraltar had been executed in cold blood. From the moment that programme was broadcast, it was war.

The 1990 Broadcasting Act required the ITV franchises to be auctioned. Rules on takeovers were relaxed. A frantic bidding war ensued. Profit rather than quality became the prime consideration. Most companies paid so much in the desperate scramble to hold on to their franchises that they had little left in their coffers to make good programmes.

There was another factor, too, which contributed to the downward spiral on which ITV now embarked. The rise of satellite television and, in particular, Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB. As ever, Murdoch persuaded the government to ease his passage by exemption from many of the rules about quality and domestic production that governed the terrestrial companies; plus he had a little help with marketing from his newspaper empire and a blind eye from the regulators.

Although Granada, unlike most of the other television companies, won back its franchise with a very modest bid, it too fell prey to the endless round of cost-cutting that eventually destroyed it. The chapters on the destruction of Granada in this book are particularly interesting. Out went the programme makers and in came the money men, squeezing the business until there was nothing left, but hugely enriching themselves in the process.

It was a similar story elsewhere. The result is a matter of record: the virtual disappearance of serious documentaries, little or no interest in abroad, dumbed down news bulletins and now phone-voting scandals. We are headed down the American road: hundreds of channels with little worth watching on any of them.

This is a seminal work. Scrupulously researched and all the better because Ray Fitzwalter was an eyewitness to many of the events he recounts. Although there is never any doubt where he is coming from, he goes to considerable lengths to be fair to those he criticises. He does not pretend there was a golden age of television or that the decline of ITV is down to any single cause. It is, nevertheless, a story that had to be told and an awful warning of what may lie ahead for the BBC if certain people in the Tory Party have their way.

Chris Mullin