Verity Lambert 1935-2007

Verity Lambert is best known to those of us who follow the media and media history as the original producer of Doctor Who from 1963 onwards. But she started her career at Granada, then went to ABC before joining the BBC in 1963.

She later produced for London Weekend Television before becoming Head of Drama at ABC's successor, Thames Television. 1985 saw her creating her own company, Cinema Verity.

But to all Doctor Who fans, and to a lot of people around the world, she will be seen as the original producer of Doctor Who. In fact, in the recent revivial series, in an episode called Human Nature, the Doctor, under his human name of John Smith, refered to his parents by name. Sydney and Verity. She will forever be the mother who gave birth to Doctor Who, and steered it through it's early years becoming a very popular and successful science fiction drama series.

Granada Industrial Dispute in ITV's Future?

Media Guardian reports that staff at Granada Media belonging to the NUJ, Bectu and Amicus will vote on strike action in a pay dispute after Granada imposed a 2% pay rise.

If the strike went ahead, it would affect output across all seven of Granada Media's ITV franchises.

This is a large blow for ITV and Granada, coming just a couple of months before the merger between Carlton and Granada takes place.

This highlights the danger of allowing ITV to be consolidated into one company. ITV's strength lay in the fact it was not one comapny but many companies. Such a strength should be particularly obvious now. Under the old-style ITV, you had 15 major production centres, and 15 companies that could have by now been working separately to create a myriad of channels in the multi-channel arena, alongside network ITV's efforts.

Instead we've had 3 companies trying to enter multi-channel arena, Carlton via cable channels and OnDigital, Granada via GSkyB and Scottish TV via Sky Scottish. Of all of these, mainly lacklustre efforts, only GSkyB remains with Plus and Men & Motors, alongside ITV2 and the ITV News Channel. GSkyB may not survive much longer as there are plans to transfer the material that Plus uses into an ITV Gold channel, and Men & Motors is hardly able to run by itself as a "primary" channel without Plus to pull in some prestiege advertisers for the prestiege programming.

Add to this, that this industrial dispute could take out, temporarily, half the ITV network in one go, and the ever present possibility that this new ITV plc company could fail, and by doing so take out not only most of the ITV network, but about a third of all new production in this country, and we are talking serious consequences that very few people seemed to have noticed. It could mean the end of the UK as a major television producer, with the US becoming more dominant than ever before.

ITV in crisis

ITV has been facing up to some major problems recently, and arguably, it has not been coping very well with them. In what has been a tough time for the commercial broadcaster, the ITV companies have faced major problems with ITV Digital, falling revenues from advertising, falling audience figures with BBC1 and Multi-channel TV benefiting the most and a greater than average number of new programme failures, including some very high profile ones such as Shafted. The question is, what happened to ITV to allow it to fall so far?

There are a number of potential reasons why ITV’s fall has been so bad. One potential reason can be traced all the way back to the creation of Independent Television back in 1954. Originally, the Independent Television Authority was supposed to have created 2 commercial networks, each with additional licenced programme providers. But it ended up being only one commercial network, and no additional programme providers, which made things difficult for Associated Rediffusion and ATV London in the initial months of Independent Television. These days, such an arrangement with additional programme providers licenced for ITV would undoubtedly have seen more of the old franchisees become production companies, and also some good companies that never quite made it to being franchise holders, providing programming. It would also make for a more competitive ITV in terms of programming.

Another potential reason why ITV is in possible crisis goes back to the 1990 Broadcasting Act. In the act, it allowed the ITV companies to merge with each other, and potentially be bought by other companies too. Why was this a bad thing? Well, ironically for the same reason that lack of additional licenced programme providers was a bad thing. Instead of having a competitive ITV with 15 companies and the threat of losing their franchise if they didn’t perform up to scratch, you now have just 5 companies, who know their licences are pretty safe, and therefore less competitive, less challenging and less satisfying in terms of programming.

Another potential reason lies in what has been recently a major situation in broadcasting terms, and that is the situation between ITV and Sky. In 1998, ITV decided not to launch on Sky Digital, despite the fact that BBC1, BBC2, Channel 4 and Channel 5 were all launching on both Sky Digital and On Digital. On Digital, nowadays know as ITV Digital, is owned by Carlton and Granada, the two biggest ITV companies. Granada have some history with Sky as Granada was involved in the British Satellite Broadcasting venture of 1990, which ended with BSB merging with Sky. Carlton had channels of its own that it didn’t want on Sky, and had previously restricted them to just Cable. Carlton and Granada felt that On Digital needed an advantage over Sky Digital, and they felt that ITV would give them that advantage. So ITV refused to launch on Sky Digital, and also refused to launch ITV2 on Sky Digital. This move was to prove costly in financial terms with many millions of pounds of advertising revenue missed because of this one move. ITV1 and ITV2 were to launch in 2001 on Sky Digital, but the damage had been done. The move had cost them advertising revenue, and it had cost them viewers too, and the longer they stayed off Sky Digital, the more it was going to cost them in terms of viewers and advertising revenue. So, they finally put up and launched on Sky Digital.

Another potential reason lies in the fact that On/ITV Digital always looked to compete with Sky Digital. Alongside the fact that ITV had been having something of a tiff with Sky for many years, going back to the lack of agreement between Sky News and ITN, over ITN acting as programme producer for Sky News, in 1988, and continuing through Sky’s failed attempts to replace ITN as ITV’s news provider, when you put all that together, you see ITV trying to compete with Sky, one by not providing ITV and ITV2 on Sky Digital, also by trying to use ITV’s advantage as a terrestrial broadcaster to persuade people to go to On Digital, owned of course by two of the biggest ITV companies. Put that very complicated mix together, and what do you have? You have a channel provider on Digital Terrestrial, trying to compete with a channel provider on Digital Satellite, where really they shouldn’t be competing at all. On Digital was the only licenced digital pay-TV provider for Digital Terrestrial, and Sky Digital was the only digital satellite pay-TV provider. In theory, they shouldn’t have been competing with each other as they were two different markets. However, in practice, people were comparing the Sky/On situation to the Sky/BSB situation of 1990, long before either side were actually transmitting digital programmes, and this wasn’t helped by On Digital themselves, whose advertising was at least initially quite blatantly stating their competitive agenda.

Whichever reason it was, and whichever way you look at it, it comes down to competition. Sky had had no real competition in the Multi-channel arena after their merger with BSB, and ITV in itself was less competitive because the number of ITV companies had dropped from 15 to 5, and because the franchises were no longer being seen as under threat every whit and while, so there was no pressure on ITV to perform. Now ITV is in this situation. To this writer, it looks like a crisis, a crisis of ITV’s own making. They wanted the ability to merge stations, to eventually become 1 giant national ITV. They wanted the franchises to be easier to renew, therefore creating less pressure, and supposedly more time for increased investment. They wanted the greener, less regulated grass on the other side of the fence. Now they’re there, they are finding it’s leaving a foul taste in their mouths, but instead of backtracking, ITV seek to blame the BBC and Sky for their own problems. There’s an old saying. It says, “You reap what you sow”.

So, how can ITV get themselves out of this predicament? Well, the only way they can do it is to go back to being more regulated, and back to being a commercially funded, not commercially driven, public service broadcaster. They must waste less money on unnecessarily extravagant set designs, cut down the amount that is just given away to shareholders, and start re-investing in the people who really count, the viewers.

Brand X

ITV has become ITV1, SkySports.comTV has reverted to being known as Sky Sports News - two recent examples of just how important the correct brand is to television stations and networks. But branding isn't just the station name, it's also everything that identifies the station as being what it is. So, just why is the brand so important?

One reason is to help viewers build a familiarity with the station. Westward's brand was a very strong one in the South West of England, and indeed still is, despite the fact that it disappeared from our TV screens at the end of 1981. Why is it so strong?

One reason is that although Westward changed their idents a few times, they never changed their symbol - it was always the Golden Hind - and the continual use of this symbol for 20 years meant that people built a familiarity with it. Every time that ship appeared on the screen, you knew you were watching Westward.

Another thing that helped build familiarity was the regular team of station hosts, otherwise known as Continuity Announcers. When Roger Shaw told you that now on Westward was The Avengers, again, you knew you were watching Westward, because his face and voice became associated with Westward, and many years later, TSW as well. Familiar faces, familiar voices and a familiar symbol, amongst other things, helped to create a very strong brand for Westward, one which survives almost 20 years of disuse.

By way of an aside, in the United States, consumers regularly rate General Electric second out of 10 manufacturers for Blenders. The company stopped manufacturing white goods of this type more than 20 years ago. A powerful and quality brand is self-perpetuating.

Another reason why brand is so important is that it helps identify the sort of programming you can expect. Cartoon Network shows nothing but cartoons, Discovery Channel is all about documentaries, Disney Channel is children's and family entertainment, brands like that are familiar and give a good idea what the station is about.

But what about a brand like Boomerang? Now what kind of channel is that? It sounds like something to do with Australia or thrown weapons. In fact, Boomerang shows classic cartoons, such as Tom and Jerry, Droopy and Barney Bear. But again, if you'd never heard of the channel before, would you know that it showed classic cartoons? Possibly not, which is why it was initially introduced to the viewing public as a strand of programming on Cartoon Network, before it was launched as a separate channel.

Getting brands associated with whatever the channel wants you to associate it with, has always been a problem. Before 1956, would anyone have associated the word Granada with the North or North West of England? Possibly not, but it is now, and has been for quite some time, associated with the north. On the other hand, could you associate Rediffusion with any particular part of the country? Possibly not, because in the station name, there is no geographical indication of where the channel broadcasts or in this case, broadcasted, to. That's why from about 1964, you saw the words Rediffusion London on screen, in order to build that kind of association.

EuroNews or EuroSport have a similar kind of association, but this time you know they broadcast right across Europe, because of the Euro in their name. Other station names, such as Thames, Southern, Grampian and Ulster, are geographic names, in order to gain the respect of the local audiences. Names like that have a distinct advantage over names without any such geographic reference, such as Rediffusion, ABC, ATV or Carlton.

Also names that are based on the programming that's on the channel, such as Sky Sports 1, UK Gold, Travel Channel and BBC Knowledge have an advantage over channels where the name of the channel has no immediate reference to the programming, such as Q, Hallmark, Trouble and Bravo.

So, if you want your brand to stand out from the crowd, especially in today's very crowded multi-channel market, you need every advantage you can get. Just having your logo permanently on screen all the time won't cut it any more. Not distinctive enough, everybody's doing it. You need to make your station symbol, ident or logo very distinctive, something that will grab your viewers attention.

You need to have your announcers present it distinctively, you have to promo your station and programmes consistently and judiciously, so that you're viewer doesn't think they've seen everything the programme or channel might have to offer.

But most importantly, the brand has to become familiar in people's minds fairly quickly, and the brand has to be respected, otherwise your potential audience might not turn to your channel and that will prove disastrous.