Broken By The Hammer: ITV after 1993

16th October 1991
Thames, Granada, TV-AM, TSW, TVS and Oracle lose their licences to broadcast.

1st February 1992
The six announce the creation of a new company UKTV and announce their intention to sell their programmes to the BBC, ITV and Sky.

6th September 1992
Sky announce that they have bought the rights to Coronation Street, The Bill and Minder.

1st January 1993

Sky One Primetime Schedule

7.00 Coronation Street
8.00 The Bill
9.00 Minder

Any takers?
 
So basically ITV completely collapses?

Not sure how much life there is in this one on its own, though, unless it's going to be "Murdoch becomes even more powerful and can never suffer his recent implosion". Maybe more money comes into the Premier League sooner, so you don't get English teams being knocked out by Scandinavians in those Britpop years ... but even that simply speeds up something that did happen anyway. Would it render something like Corbyn completely impossible? That's the only level on which I'd really be interested in this; anything else is just a Digital Spy / TV Forum parlour game, and I've had enough of those.

The real challenge is to create a world where the "commercial public service" hybrid - pretty much unique to Britain - doesn't become unsustainable and unaffordable. There's a piece in one of the Politico counterfactual books which I'm sure some here have read which proffers the ancien regime of UK broadcasting surviving much more because Murdoch didn't buy the Times & Sunday Times, but then blows its own argument up by suggesting that British politics are still much the same - and had that been the case, BSB's monopoly would have been every bit as out of step politically and every bit as vulnerable.

Or what about: the Reithian duopoly is still broken, but in the name of '68 (which is where most of its original critics, ultimately Blairites, came from) rather than the name of commerce and the market? *That's* a good one to do where UK TV is concerned.
 
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