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Assess the Factors Which Led to the Creation of Itv Essay

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Assess the factors which led to the creation of ITV in 1954

Commercial Television has been playing big role in our lives for about 60 years already, whether it is the Morning News, Downton Abbey or The Britain’s Got Talent show (Johnson, Turnock, 2005: 1). Commercial television is entertaining, educating and informative and tries to fulfil viewer’s wishes of what they want to watch. British audience has been able to choose what they watch since 1954, when government published the Act of Television which allowed the creation of the first independent television in the United Kingdom. The creation of ITV broke the BBC’s monopoly and introduced country a new era with free market and diverse television channels (Williams, 2010:151). …show more content…

Also, many senior positions in the BBC were still suspicious of the new medium of television (Turnock, 2007:21). Lord Reith summed up the general attitude of BBC’s management to television when he told that ‘television will be of no importance in your lifetime or mine’ (Williams, 2010:144). General opinion in the BBC was that television would not become as successful as radio. As well as BBC management, government did not find television being as important as radio. On the contrary to the BBC’s management, there were people who saw future in commercial television. One of those people was Norman Collins who became a director general of Independent Television who left the BBC and started to campaign commercial television (Crisell, 1997: 78). BBC’s broadcasting developing slowly because of the shortage of technical knowledge which gave a reason for government to legitimize commercial television which would also give jobs many advertisers and television people. Commercial television campaign was also able to persuade the government that competition would make television better as companies had to give their best to make the viewer to watch their channel.
Another reason which made commercial lobby successful, was the circumstance that important members of government including the Prime Minister, Churchill, were not prepared to defend the BBC (Curran, Seaton, 2010:154). After a change in power in late 1951, the conservative party decided to publish its ideas for

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