This Monday, at 6 am, a much-trumpeted ITV rebrand was revealed. The ITV logo has been re-designed and the 1 has been dropped to make their flagship channel ITV once more. The idents are now more expansive spatially and are integrated to whatever is on the screen at the time, creating a stable but flexible brand interacting with a multiplicity of products, courtesy of channel-specific idents and âcolour pickingâ. While initial responses to ITVâs new branding aesthetic, and particularly its logo, have been referred to by commenters on Digital Spy as a âload of buttocksâ and more coyly in the Daily Mail as âthe outline of a human bottom,â the rebrand enables ITV to re-vision itself as a cohesive, commercial producer-broadcaster in the global market, bringing together its channels, products and platforms. In addition, the rebrand re-orients ITV through its Transformation Plan, the webpage for which states: Â Our vision remains to create world class content which we can make famous on our channels, before exploiting its value across multiple platforms, free and pay, in the UK and internationally. Content creation therefore lies at the heart of our Transformation Plan.
There is a certain irony then in the channel-specific rebranding of CITV when, post-2003, ITV investment in childrenâs television has been so drastically reduced. I want therefore to look at the implications and possible rationale for the recent rebranding as well as the recent transmission of 30 Years of CITV (29th December, ITV1) and the recent âOld Skoolâ weekend of nostalgia programming (5th and 6th January, CITV), and suggest that there might be a shared strategy at work between the two. Iâll look at how CITV, and the history of âChildrenâs ITVâ as a brand, is currently being conceptualised through its logo, idents, and a retro-vision re-capitulation of its operation and history.
This ITV rebrand is being hailed as the âbiggest on-screen brand overhaul in 11 yearsâ (The Guardian, 16/11/12) but childrenâs programming on ITV has been experimenting with brand and identity since its inception. Starting with âTea-Vee Timeâ in 1955, rebranded as âChildrenâs ITVâ thirty years ago, it has never really stopped experimenting with its own identity and associated ideas of public service broadcasting and the child audience. The 1983 launch of the âChildrenâs ITVâ brand was partially in response to what was seen as the BBCâS stranglehold on weekday childrenâs programming. In the report from the 1981 IBA Childrenâs Consultation, Mary Baker (Thames TV) located the weakness of ITVâs appeal to the child audience at the time in âthe lucky dip nature of programme scheduling and selectionâ. The proposed response to âill-balanced outputâ and audience disaffection was a system which would incorporate âconsistency, familiarity and loyaltyâ. Sir Brian Young drew the consultation to a conclusion by suggesting a shared need for âa critical mass, […] a central thrust, and [âŚ] a single co-ordinated plan.â Far from valorising national ITV childrenâs output pre-1983, the 1981 (and 1973) IBA Consultation identified its problems with regard to both production and network transmission and the brands of Watch It! and then Childrenâs ITV were developed as a response.
The more recent rebranding however stands in quite a different light, given the move to a model in which ITV are not a childrenâs television producer-broadcaster but more accurately speaking a publisher-broadcaster since they stopped in-house childrenâs television production in 2006. The CITV channel was launched in the same year and in 2010 all childrenâs programming was shifted from terrestrial to digital. It was on this Freeview channel that the recent âOld Skoolâ weekend of nostalgic programming, celebrating the thirty year anniversary of âChildrenâs ITVâ, was shown.
However, even within its celebrated 30 year, the demands of a long-running service necessitated periodic rebranding, as we can see in this 2009 CITV rebrand by Red Bee Media.
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The emphasis here is plainly upon the ludic, public service values of childrenâs imagination and play, as well as the commercial value of entertainment and the carnivalesque in the use of bodily functions as entertainment in and of themselves.
If we look then at the new CITV idents, itâs possible to identify some commonalities but also some important differences.
The emphasis is once again clearly on the traditional elements of childrenâs television promotion: a carnivalesque overturning of the everyday, the importance of play, and the privileging of entertainment. However what is also interesting within these idents is the incorporation of the child audienceâs own creativity as drawings which interact with the CITV identity, suggesting a participatory, adaptive element to CITV and a closer construction of children as audience and even producers. Karen Luryâs examination of the Nick Jr channel identifies it as âa âpersonalityâ and a place; whilst it literally has a âfaceâ, it is also âownedâ and inhabited by the child viewer â it is âjustâ for them.â (Small Screens: Television for Children, ed. David Buckingham)Â CITVâs current branding might not have a face, but it certainly has a voice: the identification of child viewers through their drawings, a childâs voiceover and the speech bubble which features as a key part of the logo all suggest that CITV represents the child viewerâs âvoiceâ, creating personality, power, and place, ostensibly inhabited by the child audience. The re-brand suggests that childrenâs creativity, performance and ludic activities are an integral part of their brand.
This rhetoric is reinforced in 30 Years of CITV where child presenters and actors, such as Ant and Dec, Samia Ghadi and others are shown as adult fans, viewers and producers themselves.  Last month, ITV celebrated the 30 years of âChildrenâs ITVâ history with a retrospective, 30 Years of CITV, which interestingly conflates âChildrenâs ITVâ as a history and CITV as a separate, digital channel. In addition, the first weekend in January 2013 on CITV was the âOld Skoolâ weekend, two days of childrenâs programming from the 1980s and 90s. I have to admit that when I first saw it I did rather wonder at the purpose of what the Radio Times called a ânostalgia-festâ. While New Year is the traditional time for nostalgic programming, ITV childrenâs programmes are no longer produced in-house or shown on terrestrial channels, and all of its childrenâs programming is transmitted on the digital CITV, as was the Old Skool weekend.
As an exercise in nostalgia, however, it was well-received going by online response and ITV Mediaâs report of the highest ever weekend share for CITV (2.2%), but given that so much of ITVâs childrenâs output remains commercially unavailable, it seemed like something of a commercial cul-de-sac. (Despite a committed fan following and an enthusiastic response on Twitter, Knightmare has never been released on DVD.) Indeed, many of the Tweets were calls for a dedicated channel for nostalgia programming of âChildrenâs ITVâ. Carlton Kids, with a tagline of âItâs not just for the childrenâ, operated along these lines in the 90s but folded after two years; however, prospects for such a channel may be improved now that ITV has a more stable and penetrative digital platform than ONdigital.
Having watched CITVâs rebranding with interest, it occurred to me that this retrospective of childrenâs programming over December and January might also work as part of the 2013 rebranding of ITV. The 20th anniversary Childrenâs ITV Celebration Special in 2003 was far more oriented to a child audience; the âmums and dadsâ were secondary viewers.
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In the 30 Years of CITV programme, shown on ITV1 at 6.30-7.30pm on a Saturday evening, the balance seems to have shifted. The programme appeals to adult audienceâs nostalgia and loyalty and emphasises entertainment and popular culture, creating a wider history and historical audience for ITV.
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This is a re-visioned âChildrenâs ITVâ history and a contemporary channel marketed across multiple platforms to a nostalgic adult audience. Its loupe-focus on âChildrenâs ITVâ as the history of childrenâs programming on ITV reframes CITV into a glossy, monolithic producer-broadcaster of a national, rather than a network, childrenâs service.
Thereâs no doubt that âChildrenâs ITVâ has been successful in its 30 year run but its current framing as a Golden Age of national childrenâs television is a little disingenuous. While Tim Worthington rightly points out that â[t]here’s absolutely no logical reason why a celebration of a specific anniversary (in this case, the launch of the proper branded presenter-linked CITV slot) should include anything from before the date being celebratedâ, going by the 30thanniversary programme, nothing existed before then. Nearly half of 30 Years of CITV is taken up with the output of Ant and Dec. Childrenâs programming on ITV has a long, exciting and controversial history over a fifty-eight year span. To so precisely locate the history of ITV childrenâs programme within half its lifespan, and around such specific presenters, seems to me to erase some of that history in an attempt to reformulate it into a streamlined, stable and nationally-inflected identity more in line with ITVâs contemporary branding and its Transformation Plan.
The 30 Years retrospective elides the regional identities that went to make up the unified service, the primacy of scheduling to separate and mediate childrenâs television and the multiplicity (and absence occasioned by periods of out of vision links ) of presenters. In addition, the brevity of the programme allows for a narrative economy that necessarily skips on-going rebranding within the âChildrenâs ITVâ period, shifts between scheduling and format such as presentation, and the move from regional franchises to a commercial monolith in the wake of the Broadcasting Act 1990. Simultaneously, the programme uses multi-programme presenters as a narrative spine, giving a sense of overlapping continuity and televisual heritage that proceeds from childrenâs television into adult television, CITV into the wider, contemporary ITV brand. However in so doing it also suggests that the history of childrenâs ITV programming is far more streamlined than its production and breadth actually indicates, and also erases difference between presenters and nostalgic viewers. The comments on beloved programmes and presenters come from presenters themselves, both historical and contemporary, and therefore constitute presenters as fans as well as actors and creators. This conceptualisation of childrenâs ITV as purely driven by affection, aspiration and public service values rather than by industrial pressure is reinforced in the segment on Sooty and celebrity guests: Matthew Corbett claims they appeared for love, not money.
Both 30 Years and the âOld Skoolâ weekend also omit âforeign quotaâ productions which made up a significant proportion of the âChildrenâs ITVâ output and which were one of the key criteria of the new network childrenâs service, established in 1983. The Minutes for the Childrenâs Programme Committee Annual Meeting on 16th November 1982 state that the new âChildrenâs ITVâ should make â[o]ptimum use of acquired material, spread across the week.â Certain programmes for which CITV were unable to obtain the rights (such as Zzzap! according to CITVâs Twitter feed, although the programme did appear in the 20th anniversary) and co-productions are also excluded. In effect, 30 Years of CITV and the âOld Skoolâ weekend of programming create an institutional canon and a newly inflected history for Childrenâs ITV.
Naturally, a broadcasterâs look back at its own childrenâs television doesnât require academic rigor but it does seem to me that the presentation of CITV as a broadcaster with a national, rather than regional, history and an identity which fuses quality, longitudinal audience loyalty, multi-platform access, and links between producers and viewers is an active piece of mythologisation. Samia Ghadi declares in 30 Years that âYou learned your craftâ in childrenâs TV, as was the case with Ant and Dec and multiple other presenters featured, such as Fearne Cotton and Matthew Kelly. Childrenâs ITV television is articulated as a learning curve and linear progression to adult ITV television but thatâs simply not the case for the production ecology of contemporary CITV. Neither ITV nor children are actually active in the production of in-house ITV childrenâs television these days but the branding and the retrospective programming implies otherwise.
The rebranding of CITV through new idents and logo and, as I argue, the lens of âChildrenâs ITVâ history reconstructs ITV and in particular CITV as an homogenous brand; the beating âheart of popular cultureâ according to chief architect of the re-brand, Rufus Radcliffe. It recasts a federal and often competitive childrenâs television service as an integrated brand. I recognise that it would not be possible to represent âChildrenâs ITVâ history in one weekend but it’s even less possible to represent it in thirty minutes on a channel from which children’s television has been erased. Both new idents and logo seem to reference a model of âChildrenâs ITVâ that no longer exists, but 30 Years of CITV and the âOld Skoolâ weekend suture it onto the new CITV model to suggest an ongoing tradition of public service values and a lineage attached to contemporary platforms and economic models. The history of âChildrenâs ITVâ and CITV is being re-visioned alongside its idents and logo.
Victoria Byard is a doctoral candidate at the University of Leicester, and her work is part of the AHRC-funded project, Spaces of Television, a joint initiative between the Universities of Reading, Glamorgan, and Leicester. Her current research is on British childrenâs television fantasy between 1955 and 1994.