ITV '90: ripples in a thirty-year stream
William Phillips
Every year our quick tour of television ratings finds that ITV has given a little more ground in peak time. Every year except 1990, that is. Perhaps to its own surprise, ITV marched forward across a broad front. Can it keep up the advance, entrenching itself anew in the big audience's affections before Sky TV and Channel 5 woo the public intensively?
In 1985 the seers of Saatchi & Saatchi's futurology section (J. Perriss, prop.) urged that the BBC must be ordered to sell airtime: it could not possibly compete...