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Anglia Television
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Anglia Television is the ITV station for parts of Eastern England. It takes its name from East Anglia, but its territory extends beyond the generally accepted boundaries of that region. The station is based at Anglia House in Norwich, with regional news bureau in Ipswich, Cambridge, and Northampton. Anglia Television is owned and operated by ITV plc under the license name of ITV Broadcasting Limited.
Anglia currently broadcasts to Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Essex (excluding the parts closest to the Greater London boundary), southern Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, a small part of southern Leicestershire, northern Buckinghamshire, and northern Hertfordshire.
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Encyclopedia
Anglia Television is the ITV station for parts of Eastern England. It takes its name from East Anglia, but its territory extends beyond the generally accepted boundaries of that region. The station is based at Anglia House in Norwich, with regional news bureau in Ipswich, Cambridge, and Northampton. Anglia Television is owned and operated by ITV plc under the license name of ITV Broadcasting Limited.
Anglia currently broadcasts to Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Essex (excluding the parts closest to the Greater London boundary), southern Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, a small part of southern Leicestershire, northern Buckinghamshire, and northern Hertfordshire. Up until 1 January 1974, Anglia also served the rest of Lincolnshire, and parts of Yorkshire from a transmitter at Belmont. The area has since been served by Yorkshire Television.
Identity
Anglia's original ident was a short film of a rotating silver statue of a knight on horseback. At the end, the camera zoomed in on the pennon atop the knight's lance, which showed the station's name. An arrangement, by Malcolm Sargent, of Handel's Water Music was played over the film. The Anglia knight logo became so closely identified with the station that when, in 1999, the station produced a book to mark its fortieth anniversary, it was entitled A Knight On The Box (ISBN 0-906836-40-9). Before the ident, the channel's start-up music was Ralph Vaughan Williams' Sea Songs, which was used from 1959 until the early 1980s.
With the introduction of colour television in the 1970s, the ident was remade with constant lighting, and the knight constantly rotating on a turntable. In 1988 the knight was replaced by the Lambie-Nairn designed quasi-heraldic stylised 'A' made of triangles, which faded in and out on a fluttering flag during continuity announcements. In the early 1990s, this was replaced with a black background and the flag fading in slowly to deep sombre music with a lighter end to it. This was used until 1999, when (along with most other ITV companies), Anglia took the Hearts idents (which featured the stylised "A", albeit in a square, rather than a flag), which were used until 2002.
In 2002, as with all companies now owned by ITV plc, the station lost its separate identity, becoming branded as ITV Anglia.
Ownership
Anglia was an independent company for much of its existence. In 1994, it was bought by MAI (owners of Meridian Broadcasting), who merged with United Newspapers to form United News and Media. They were joined by HTV in 1996. In 2000, following United's aborted merger attempt with Carlton, Granada bought the TV assets of United (but sold the broadcasting arm of HTV). In 2004, Granada finally merged with Carlton to form ITV plc, which ended Anglia's existence as a separate brand. During its period of UBM ownership, a 'youth' channel was launched to cable and satellite from Anglia's facilities, Rapture TV; some productions for the ITV network were also shared with Rapture, which was retained by UBM after the sale to Granada, but later closed down and its assets sold.
In 1993, the station took over the cartoon studio Cosgrove Hall, when it was sold off by its original owners, Thames Television. Although the station no longer makes a significant content contribution to ITV nationally (the last major programme being Trisha, before she defected to Five), the semi-independent Anglia Factual brand now runs a thriving international business supplying content for Discovery Channel in the USA, Channel 4 and Five in the UK, and other broadcasters worldwide. Notable series include Animal Precinct and Animal Cops for Animal Planet, and Real Crime for ITV (credited as Granada Anglia). , the commercial production agency owned by ITV's sales division is also based in Norwich.
In 2006, Anglia sold its other major studio complex (which included its newsroom and twin news studios) in Magdalen Street, Norwich to Norfolk County Council, who, with the help of the East of England Development Agency, have created EPIC - the East of England Production Innovation Centre. Intended as an "incubator" for small creative and media enterprises, Studio E (formerly home to Trisha) is now available for hire as an independent facility. One of the first tenants of EPIC is Televirtual, a company formed out of Broadsword Productions who made Anglia's legendary children's show Knightmare. A major education partner at EPIC in the shape of will be housing a new at the centre from September 2007. As a consequence of the sale, Anglia News, which moved to Magdalen Street in 1999, has moved back to a new state-of-the-art facility at Anglia House.
In 2006, ITV plc swapped subsidiaries, which involved renaming Anglia Television Ltd as ITV Broadcasting Limited and vice versa. However, due to OFCOM licensing regulation, the new Anglia Television Limited could not take up its renewed status as Channel 3 licence holder, which means that the East Anglia franchise, has now effectively been transferred to ITV Broadcasting Limited. All other ITV plc-owned franchises were transferred to ITV Broadcasting Limited in December 2008, meaning that technically, the former Anglia company now holds all ten licenses in England, Wales and Southern Scotland.
Coverage areas
Anglia originally covered mainly Norfolk, Suffolk, the northern and more rural parts of Essex and Cambridgeshire before expanding to the less rural areas of Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire with the opening of the Sandy Heath transmitter in 1965, covering an area which had previously been an awkward gap in ITV's coverage of the UK. Later in 1965, the Belmont transmitter opened, bringing Anglia's signals to Lincolnshire and the East Riding of Yorkshire, also being available to some viewers in cities such as Nottingham, Leicester and Sheffield.
The Independent Broadcasting Authority decided that Anglia's coverage area was now too large for a "minor" company, and Yorkshire Television's was too small for a "major" company, so YTV was given the Belmont transmitter from 1 January 1974, even though it also covered the northern parts of Norfolk, which now found themselves watching television from Leeds (subsequently, Anglia-only relay stations would be built, restoring the station to parts of north Norfolk). Also, with the transition from VHF to UHF signals, Anglia gained coverage of much of south Essex, including Southend, which had previously been considered part of the London region.
The Anglia region is currently split into two sub-regions:
- Anglia East (Aldeburgh, Burnham, Creake, Felixstowe, Gorleston on Sea, Linnet Valley, Little Walsingham, Overstrand, Sudbury, Sudbury B, Tacolneston, Thetford, Wells next Sea, West Runton, Wivenhoe Park and Woodbridge transmitters)
- Anglia West (Dallington Park, Kimpton, Kings Lynn, Luton, Madingley (Cambridge) and Sandy Heath transmitters)
Future
In September 2007, chief executive Michael Grade announced proposals that would see Anglia broadcasting a single regional service rather than separate news services for the east and west of the region. These are subject to Ofcom consultation and are not expected to be implemented until February 2009.
Notable programmes
External links
- at itvlocal.com
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- ITV's commercial production agency based at Anglia
- Some screen captures:
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