50 Years of ITV Daytime
Its fifty years since ITV daytime began its full day of broadcasting…
On October 16th 1972 ITV began full afternoon transmissions with a mix of new programmes and old favourites rescreened.
It also wasn’t the same across the UK, with Granada and Tyne Tees showing Crossroads, the former for the very first time, in a new daytime slot, while the rest of the country saw it in the early evening. Old favourites making their afternoon re-run debut included Roger Moore in the sixties action serial The Saint, while Granada Television’s A Family At War had another outing.
Shirley McClain was on screen in the ITC production Shirley’s World and from Thames Television Harriet’s Back In Town starring Pauline Yates. For children, there was the start of a twenty-year run of Rainbow from Thames TV, along with Rupert Bear from ATV, a variety show using puppets hosted by young presenter Diane Mewse in Diane’s Panda Party from YTV and a revival of Larry The Lamb switching from the BBC to Thames TV for the new ITV daytime offering.
Terry Wogan fronted his first telly chat show with Lunchtime with Wogan (ATV), having earlier in the year made his major prime-time TV debut on ATV’s Saturday Variety show as one of the rotation of hosts. The long-running game show Mr & Mrs also was on the air, with a quirk. The production was made for one series a year by HTV – with Alan Taylor as host – and the second series was made by Border Television – with Derek Batey overseeing proceedings – the latter likely the most famous of the two.
Grampian gave us Melody Inn, which did pretty much did as the title suggests while fellow North of the Border company Scottish Television provided us with half an hour in the company of Andy Stewart.
In serials, there were thrice-weekly legal dramas with Crown Court (Granada), the lives and loves of the doctors and nurses and the occasional medical concern of a patient in General Hospital (ATV) and the lives of rural families in the Yorkshire Dales in Emmerdale Farm (YTV). It was General Hospital, set in the fictional Midland General that initially became the runaway hit of all the ‘soaps’ in daytime.
It proved so successful that in 1975 it was repeated five days a week with all its half-hour episodes from 1972-75 seen once more in the afternoons before it was relaunched as a weekly hour-long prime-time drama later in the same year. The show would finally see its last patient in late 1979.
However, it would be Emmerdale Farm that would last the course, although it spent most of its first fifteen years in the daytime failing to trouble the TV Top 10 ratings or be that much noticed by the press. A failed reboot in 1989 almost saw the end of the show entirely, but it hung on with gradual changes to cast off its old ‘boring’ image and make it a hit (aiming for younger more lucrative viewers). It was at its last chance with ITV bosses in 1993 when Emmerdale execs brought in Phil Redmond of Brookside (Channel 4/Mersey TV) fame to drop a plane on the village of Beckindale and see the ratings soar along with the inferno.
The afternoons also launched what would become a staple part of daytime programming, the magazine show. From ATV Jean Morton hosted a female-slanted twice weekly Women Today, while a broader range of topics was covered in Good Afternoon from Thames TV with a rota of presenters including most famously Mavis Nicholson.
