Death by a thousand cuts

In the continuing saga of the gradual demise of ITV it was announced yesterday that its chief exec, Charles Allen, was to resign. It had been pre-empted for quite a while though, so hardly a shock.

I would say that ITV had gone into a terminal decline as soon as Thames lost its franchise years ago, but that was just one low point in the fairly roller-coasteresque fortunes of commercial TV. I think the rot really set in with the ITV Digital fiasco and the merger to one single company. The regional identities were lost forever in favour of an amorphous, souless behemoth.

Over the last few years as ITV passed its 50th birthday, we've had announcements of big losses - the failure and closure of the dedicated news channel, the loss of any kind of childrens' programming production, the scaling down of drama, the dropping of documentary production...

In their place we've had the ramping-up of of soap to the extent that now there's five and a half hours each week just in primetime ITV1 - around a fifth of airtime (taking primetime as between 7 and 10pm, compare to BBC1 with 2 hours-worth a week). The rest seems to be filled with re-runs, reality shows, clips shows or insipid dramas containing a very small selection of golden-handcuff "slebs" like Sarah Lancashire, Robson Green or Ross Kemp.

The strategy for their attempted viewer-grab viewers is to analyse what was cheap and popular in the nineties and turn it up to eleven. New viewers are passing over ITV1 while they try to bolster numbers by double-counting their soap figures with ever increasing numbers of episodes. This is far more than a symptom of a digitally fragmented audience. Even the Bill, which I used to enjoy, is more soap than drama and the once indestructible ITN is a shadow of its former self.

When Mr S and I stood on the embankment and watched the fireworks for the 50th birthday go off over the former LWT Tower (although we were there more for the Mayor's Thames Festival) I remember remarking that it was more of a wake than a celebration.

Whoever replaces Mr Allen has their work cut out for them.