Associated Television

• 1. Introduction

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  Associated Television began broadcasting to Londoners on Saturday the 24th of September 1955, the second franchise in the brand-new ITV network to go on air. It did so under a name it would not keep for long. Within three weeks, a legal battle over three initials had forced a rebrand, and a logo designed on a transatlantic flight was being readied for screens across Britain. What followed was nearly three decades of variety shows, soap operas, and children's television that shaped what British audiences expected from commercial broadcasting. Behind it all were two showbusiness agents, a sidelined visionary, and a shadowed eye that one executive reportedly sketched at thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic.

• 2. Grade, Littler, and Collins

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  Norman Collins ran the Associated Broadcasting Development Company, and Prince Littler and Lew Grade ran the Incorporated Television Programme Company. Each had applied separately to the Independent Television Authority for a franchise to operate one of Britain's new commercial television stations. Collins won. Grade and Littler did not, largely because the ITA saw conflicts of interest in the pair's existing showbusiness dealings. That outcome, however, did not last. When ABDC ran into serious financial trouble, the ITA invited Grade and Littler to join Collins's consortium. They brought the money the operation needed, and in doing so, they took control. Collins was pushed to the margins of the company he had built. The new combined entity was first named the Associated Broadcasting Company, but the Associated British Picture Corporation, which operated a large chain of cinemas under the initials ABC, successfully sued over prior ownership of the name. After just three weeks on air, the broadcaster became Associated TeleVision Limited. The logo that had been drawn for ABC was tweaked to read ATV, and the shadowed eye it depicted, reportedly sketched by Grade himself on a flight back from the United States and inspired by the CBS logo, went on to become one of the most recognised symbols in British broadcasting.

• 3. Two Regions, One Broadcaster

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  Friday the 17th of February 1956 marked the opening of ATV's Midlands service, the third ITA franchisee to go on air. From that point, ATV held an unusual dual position in the ITV network: it broadcast at weekends for London and on weekdays for the Midlands. The weekend slots in London were served alongside ABPC's ABC Weekend TV, which covered the Midlands at weekends. This split arrangement placed ATV among the ITV 'Big Four', the small group of companies that together produced the majority of programmes distributed across the national network. When financial losses from ITV's difficult early years became severe, London weekday contractor Associated-Rediffusion absorbed some of ATV's losses. Further funding came through selling shares to the Daily Mirror newspaper. By 1966, the company's structure had been reshaped entirely: both ATV and the Incorporated Television Programme Company became subsidiaries of a newly formed parent, the Associated Communications Corporation. That reorganisation marked the moment Lew Grade moved from being the greatest influence over the company to holding outright control.

• 4. Studios and Production

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  Elstree, Borehamwood in Hertfordshire had been film studios since 1914. ATV acquired them in May 1958 with the intention of using them for ITC television shows shot on film. One of the first productions filmed there was The Adventures of William Tell. Before Elstree was converted for electronic production, ATV London worked out of a series of converted venues including the Wood Green Empire, the Hackney Empire, the former Highbury Film Studios, and briefly the New Cross Empire. These proved inadequate. The first of four electronic studios at Elstree opened in November 1960. Continuity and smaller-scale programming, including Police 5, were handled from a separate master control facility on Foley Street in Central London. In Birmingham, ATV's Midlands studios began in Aston, jointly owned with ABC under the name Alpha Television. As colour television approached, ATV built a large purpose-built facility off Broad Street near central Birmingham, the ATV Centre, which replaced the Aston studios. The ATV Centre remained in use until 1997, though two of its production studios were mothballed in the early 1990s. A documentary about the ATV Centre, released in 2011 by the Media Archive for Central England, featured contributors including Chris Tarrant, Shaw Taylor, Jane Rossington, and Bob Carolgees.

• 5. The End of ATV

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  Criticism of ATV's regional programming mounted through the 1970s. Critics argued that local output was too focused on Birmingham and failed the east of the Midlands region. In 1980, the Independent Broadcasting Authority concluded that ATV's lack of regional programming, compounded by its major production centre sitting at Elstree in Hertfordshire well outside the Midlands franchise area, was harming the region. The IBA required any new franchise applicant to be more firmly rooted in the Midlands and to maintain separate facilities for the East and West Midlands. A shell company, ATV Midlands Limited, was created by ACC solely to apply for the contract. It won, but the conditions were demanding: ACC had to sell 49% of the company, give up executive roles, sell the Elstree studios, and rename the business. ATV ceased broadcasting at 12.34 in the early morning of Friday the 1st of January 1982, following Scottish Television's networked Hogmanay Show. Original announcer Shaw Taylor offered a brief tribute, and duty announcer Mike Prince signed off with a recording of the National Anthem made at St. Chad's Cathedral in Birmingham. At 9.25am that morning, Central Independent Television began broadcasting in its place.

• 6. The Archive and What Remained

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  Central Independent Television inherited the studios at ATV Centre in Birmingham and at Elstree, along with land ATV Midlands had already purchased for a planned studio centre in Nottingham. In 1983 the Elstree centre was sold to the BBC for around seven million pounds; it is now home to the soap opera EastEnders. The East Midlands Television Centre in Nottingham opened in September 1983 and was officially opened by the Duke of Edinburgh in March 1984. The rest of ATV's archive was sold by ACC. In January 1995, PolyGram Filmed Entertainment acquired ITC for $156 million, with Lew Grade returning as chairman for life, bringing him back into control of ITC until his death in 1998. Carlton Communications assembled much of the former ACC's intellectual property through the 1980s and 1990s, and in early January 1999 it bought ITC's television and film library from PolyGram/Seagram for £91 million. That purchase doubled Carlton International's stock to 15,000 hours of programming. When Granada merged with Carlton in 2004, all of ATV's national archive programming passed into the merged company's ownership. Regional news material from both ATV and Central is now held at the Media Archive for Central England at the University of Lincoln.

• 7. The Zoom 2 Ident

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  In 1969 ATV launched what became its most recognised on-screen identity, an ident called Zoom 2. It announced colour broadcasting to the Midlands for the first time. The sequence began with three lightspots in red, blue, and green, growing individually and combining into six colours above the caption 'In Colour'. The spots then merged into a single cream dot, which expanded and transformed into the ATV shadowed eye, fully formed in yellow, against a background that shifted from light grey to dark blue. The music was composed by ATV's musical director Jack Parnell and arranged by Angela Morley: four trumpets, four trombones, timpani, and vibraphone in a twelve-beat fanfare. A separate version, featuring only a white dot on a black background growing into a white shadowed eye, was produced for programmes still being shown in black and white. Zoom 2 remained on screen from 1969 until the ATV name was retired on the 1st of January 1982. The ATV Music division, a separate venture set up initially to publish television theme tunes, followed a similarly long afterlife of its own: it eventually came to include Northern Songs, the Beatles' publishing company, before passing through several owners and ultimately into the hands of Michael Jackson, where it was merged into Sony/ATV Music Publishing.