Less than 24 hours after being given permission to merge into near enough one company, ITV are already out there trying to ditch some of their public service duty. Nigel Pickard, ITV’s director of programmes, is trying to reduce the amount of public service programming he has to put out, as he laid out in a speech yesterday.
Is 104 hours of religion too much? It really doesn’t matter. ITV have public resources in the way of spectrum, from which they earn an awful lot of money. If they feel they can’t put out the amount of programming they’ve agreed to show, then they should quietly hand the spectrum back and go onto digital satellite or something, and let someone else have a bash. Stop complaining. Make better programmes, and you’ll get a bigger audience.