Well that’s hardly news …
On my tour of newspaper websites this morning I alighted upon this report of ITV’s supposed ‘switch off’ stunt designed to encourage its viewers to go outside and take some exercise. It seems that it did not quite have the desired effect with some ITV viewers – see here – THE INDEPENDENT
It seems that, despite Henry Ford’s dictum “History is bunk”, very little about human nature ever changes. H.L. Mencken hit a nail on the head when he wrote “Nobody ever went broke under-estimating the taste of the American public”.
When I worked in ITV many, many, moons ago it was received opinion that however racist, fascist, ridiculous, stupid, vile and obnoxious one ever imagined the views of the ordinary British man or woman in the street to be in one’s wildest dreams, the reality as experienced was invariably far worse.
At one stage I was one of several executives who received daily log reports kept by telephonists of viewers who had called in to give unsolicited feedback on our programmes – and I should acknowledge here that this wouldn’t necessarily be a wholly representative example of what everybody ‘out there’ thought because, of course, the ‘constituency’ consisted only of those who had bothered to lift the phone and actually call in.
It so happened that, every so often, a summary of our logs had to be prepared and sent to the relevant IBA (Independent Broadcasting Authority) department monitoring viewer reaction so that our lords and masters could assess public reaction to our programmes.
Around the time in the late 1980s when Trevor Macdonald began first presenting the early (6.00pm) ITN News, it wasn’t particularly pleasant, reassuring or edifying for ITV companies, or indeed the IBA, to receive confirmation month after month that during the early evening period almost 30% of all calls from our viewers – as logged by ITV telephonists – were variations on the theme “Get that effing coon off my television screen!”
When I saw the article linked above regarding ITV’s attempted stunt/campaign to get people out and taking exercise it did not surprise me in the slightest.
During the infamous 10-week 1979 national ITV strike over pay the ITV Channel habitually broadcast a simple ‘test card’ apologising for not being on air. It soon became not unknown for said test card to get higher ‘viewer ratings’ than the ITV programmes that previously (had there not been a strike going on) had been broadcast on ITV at various time of the day!
