Few of us knew it at the time, but 25 years ago TV changed. A rule was introduced into the process by which ITV contracts were awarded. It was an official “quality threshold”. This meant that companies entering the bidding race had to prove not only financial means, but creative credentials too.
The new clause didn’t affect the licence holder in Scotland because there was absolutely no competition whatsoever. STV needed to make only a token offer and rough programme proposal to secure the licence. It is now the only remaining independent company broadcasting on Britain’s third channel – a feat, according to Michael Grade in a speech on Monday, that is the equivalent of “defying gravity”.
But the quality threshold did affect other companies. London Weekend Television (LWT), for instance, was not only all but guaranteed renewal, but at a cut-price rate (£7.5m – a fraction of the £36m dangled by a less-tested rival). This was because a few years earlier, Greg Dyke had been tasked with taking the channel upmarket. Suddenly, there was a glut of glossy drama: Poirot, Jeeves and Wooster, The Charmer and The Darling Buds of May and, best of the lot, Wish Me Luck.
For me, this meant pre-teen Sunday evenings of amazing bliss and interest. These would cap wonderful weekends for telly: happy Saturday nights watching Blind Date, chewy Sunday lunchtimes trying to follow Weekend World. LWT’s legacy already included the likes of Upstairs, Downstairs and Clive James on Television and Gay Life, the first mainstream show about homosexuality. A few years on, in the 90s, it gave us Morse, Prime Suspect and Cracker.
LWT folded for good in 2004. The big hits of STV which survived were Taggart and Wheel of Fortune. Those of us who live in the capital do have a territory-specific channel, of course: London Live. Its reruns of Misfits and London’s Burning replace original shows mostly decommissioned just a year after launch. Hard to believe it was so recently that the notion of a quality threshold held water.
Oh, Canada
At the Telluride film festival a few weeks ago, the movies were sometimes hard to focus on amid the excitement of ski-lifts and sudden bears, huge mountains and sightings of Alexander Payne in a waterproof poncho. In Toronto, a town of which I’m fond, attending a film festival I esteem, the movies also paled in comparison to the surroundings. This was because we’d chosen to rent a place in Moss Park – which, it turns out, is not the swankiest bit of the city (Toronto Life calls it “a notoriously downtrodden and dangerous neighbourhood”; a local informed us we were living on “the dodgiest road in Canada”).
When your days start or end with being told to fuck off or being invited to join an orgy, or offered the purchase of empty soda bottles, or – mostly – being repeatedly asked for money by people in sore and obvious need, on-screen drama does lose some of its oomph. Even sitting inside to write up reviews was lively: the yard heaved with raccoons and cats and squirrels; next door there were two big dogs forever tethered together.
As someone who had dimly assumed Canada was a welfare utopia compared with the US, the experience of seeing just how many people are ill-served by the system was a wake-up call. A survey published on Monday revealed nearly 1 million people in the city visited a food bank last year, and that usage in some areas is 45%. Suddenly cinema seems a little less vital.
All aboard
Two pieces of casting news: Chris Evans has joined the movie version of The Girl on the Train, which is about the possible sighting of murder from a train window. And Liam Neeson is to star in The Commuter, about a businessman who becomes accidentally embroiled in a heist on his way to work.
Wi-Fi is being rolled out on the tube, but strap-hangers still make a great captive audience. And there’s little we like more than stories about ourselves.
@catherineshoard
