Anglia Television

Anglia Television

Based in	Norwich
Broadcast area	East Anglia
Launched	27 October 1959
Anglia logo from 1987-2004 Generic ident used from 1999-2002. ITV was changed to ITV1 in 2001.
Closed	lost on-air identity on 27 October 2002 (now known as ITV1 at all times)
Website	itv.com/anglia
Owned by	ITV plc

Anglia Television (now known as ITV Anglia) is the ITV franchise holder for the East Anglia franchise region. Although Anglia Television takes its name from East Anglia, its transmission coverage 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.^[1]

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, Bedfordshire, 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 2004, as with all companies now owned by ITV plc, the station lost its separate identity, becoming branded as ITV Anglia.

Anglia House, Anglia Television's headquarters on Prince of Wales Road in Norwich.

Much of Anglia TV's back catalogue is now held and preserved at the East Anglian Film Archive [1]. A number of Anglia's Television productions including The Way We Were, Bygones and Anglia At War have been released on DVD. A compilation of the first years of Anglia TV's local news, Here Was the News was also released in 2009.

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. Many early programmes for the newly-launched Channel 5 were made at Anglia, as UBM also owned a stake in the channel (later sold to RTL Group).

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). Commercial Breaks, 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[2]. 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[3]. 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[4]. A major education partner at EPIC in the shape of Norwich School of Art and Design will be housing a new Foundation Degree in Film and Video 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 the franchise, which means that the East Anglia franchise was effectively 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 Television Limited 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 much 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 Thames/LWT London region.

The Anglia region was previously 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)

However, 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.^[2] Following a consultation period, these changes were implemented in February 2009 with smaller opt-out services retained for both sub-regions.

Notable programmes

References

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External links

• ITV Anglia at itv.com
• Anglia Factual
• Commercial Breaks ITV's commercial production agency based at Anglia
• Some screen captures: later years
• Video of Anglia idents
• The story of the knight logo
• A history of Anglia
• Anglia Television at TV Ark
• Video clips from Anglia Television series, The Way We Were
• Video clips from Anglia Television series, Bygones
• Video clips from Anglia Television series, Anglia at War
• Video clips from 'Here was the News 1960 Part 1', Anglia TV local news from 1959 launch to early 1960
• Video clips from 'Here was the News 1960 Part 2', Anglia TV local news footage from late 1960
• Lord Buxton of Alsa - Daily Telegraph obituary