ITV is 60 years old today. It’s hard to say how well it has aged, though. Because, yes, it has been home to some indelible pieces of television. But, on the other hand, it’s ITV. Approximately 80% of its output has been gormless light-entertainment programmes, or dodgy sitcoms, or interminable chocolate-box documentaries about Caroline Quentin visiting upcycled barnyards in a hot air balloon or whatever.
So perhaps the most appropriate way to mark this milestone is to commemorate a bit of both. The best programmes that ITV has broadcast, and the worst. In the spirit of fairness, let’s start with the best.
The best …
The World at War (1973-1974)
At the time, The World at War was the most expensive television programme ever made. You can still see why. The whole series drips with authoritative prestige, from the doomy theme tune to Laurence Olivier’s narration. It was made at the perfect time, too, just as the leading figures of the second world war were drifting far enough into middle age to be able to be candid about their experiences. It seems unthinkable that ITV could make anything like The World at War these days.
Brideshead Revisited (1981)
Watch any of Brideshead Revisited – a 34-year-old adaptation of a 70-year-old book responsible for providing David Cameron with all the main aesthetic themes of his alleged Oxford debauchery – and you’ll still be struck dumb by just how sumptuous it is. Quite rightly, it is held up as one of the best television programmes ever made, an example of what the medium can achieve when everybody involved is working at full tilt. Compared with this, Downton Abbey – Brideshead’s modern-day equivalent, at least in its own mind – comes off somewhere between sloppy remake and cynical forgery.
Auf Wiedersehen, Pet (1983-1986)
Auf Wiedersehen, Pet was recently voted the best ITV programme of all time, which makes plenty of sense. It was largely written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais. It had a Murderers’ Row of a cast, almost all of whom would go on to become leading men in their own right. It captured a very real moment in time – when British construction workers were forced abroad to work in the 1980s – and on top of that, it had a pretty nifty theme tune.
The Sweeney (1975-1978)
Please, whatever you do, exorcise the memory of Ray Winstone’s grotty green knickers from your mind. The 2012 theatrical remake of The Sweeney must never be allowed to sully the beauty of the original. In its day, The Sweeney was one of the most brilliantly absurd pieces of television around; ostensibly gritty but actually an excuse for a load of blokes, mottled and jaundiced from fags and booze, to slap each other around and say the word “slag” a lot. Again, top marks for the theme tune.
Spitting Image (1984-1996)
Spitting Image has left a long shadow. So long, in fact, that it pretty much killed all ITV’s satirical output. Everything that has come since – 2DTV, Headcases, Newzoids – has been written off as simply a weak Spitting Image imitation. Perhaps they should just bite the bullet and bring it back.
The worst …
Celebrity Wrestling (2005)
Transport yourself back a decade, when ITV’s commissioning process involved picking an activity at random, bunging the word “celebrity” in front of it and getting the messy results on telly as quickly as possible. Celebrity Wrestling was the nadir of this period; a garish, amateurish puke-puddle of a series where a bunch of hapless nobodies unconvincingly thumped around a ring to the delight of no one. Celebrity Wrestling started out as a big Saturday night event show, but was quickly shunted off to the wastelands of Sunday morning, which is still more than it deserved.
Yus, My Dear (1976)
ITV made no end of painfully unfunny sitcoms in the 1970s, but Yus, My Dear probably deserves this place more than any other. It barely even counts as a sitcom, in fact. Watching it in 2015, it feels like a sophisticated anti-comedy prank created by a team of supervillains determined to obliterate all trace of intelligence from a weirdly captive audience.
The Shane Richie Experience (1995-1996)
Some people want to get married on television. That’s fine. But in the mid-1990s, some people apparently wanted to get married on The Shane Richie Experience, a harrowing vision of what Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush would have been like if it had been made by farmyard animals and the criminally insane, and that’s inexcusable. Games included sticking your bum out of a washing machine, dressing up as toast and trying to escape the filming with a scrap of dignity. If you won, you were allowed to get married at the end of the show, which is easily the worst first prize in the history of television. Incidentally, if you were wondering, The Shane Richie experience seemed to mainly involve closing your eyes, taking a deep breath and wishing with every atom of your body that Shane Richie would just shut up for a second.
Babes in the Wood (1998-1999)
The late 1990s. Every television channel in the world is looking for the new Friends. ITV comes up with Babes in the Wood, a show where some babes live in St John’s Wood and literally nothing else happens. If you like the idea of watching Denise van Outen say the word “bollocks” over and over again with her belly button out, this is the show for you. Also, you are Tim Lovejoy, you wish it was still the 1990s and everyone feels very sorry for you.
Shafted (2001)
Only four episode of Shafted were made, and that still feels like several dozen too many. This was ITV’s hamfisted attempt to key into the zeitgeist of simultaneously cruel and incomprehensible gameshows in the crudest way possible. Deservedly remembered as one of the worst television programmes ever made, Shafted is also responsible for terminally damaging Robert Kilroy-Silk’s career. So at least there’s that.
