'They're watching Columbo': the vanishing world of ITC, 1970-77

A typical midweek evening, 1976. Note the 'hilarious' mistake in the title of Columbo.

When ITV introduced colour broadcasts on 15 November 1969, the ITC catalogue must have looked like a scheduler’s dream of ready-made colour programming. Since 1966, all ITC productions had been filmed in colour, which was by now essential in securing sales to the American networks. Gerry Anderson had jumped the gun, and was filming in colour from 1962 onwards. By the dawn of colour, and including series that were then midway through their first run, ITC could offer over two hundred hours of filmed drama, in colour, as well as filmed comedy (From a Bird’s Eye View) and a further 170 colour episodes from the Gerry Anderson stable.

With that in mind, it’s interesting to note how little ITC material featured in ITV’s first week of colour. Not every region could receive colour broadcasts at this stage, but on ATV in the Midlands, colour was available from the beginning of programmes on Saturday 15 November. After an introductory ‘Welcome to Colour’ presentation, programmes kicked off with an episode of Thunderbirds (Cry Wolf). So far, so good.

Strange Report was a couple of months into its first run, but on this particular Sunday it had to make way for the full colour spectacle of the Royal Variety Performance. As compensation, viewers could watch one of Simon Templar’s colour adventures (The Man Who Gambled With Life) at 10.35pm. But elsewhere in the schedules, there were no further ITC offerings to be found, aside from Friday’s first-run episode of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased).

By January 1970, not much had changed. Aside from Gerry Anderson productions (Stingray and Thunderbirds), there were no ITC productions to be found in a typical week’s programming on ATV Midlands. Viewers in the Anglia region did somewhat better: the station had not yet upgraded to colour broadcasts, so it was still possible to catch up with some earlier series – the hour-long Danger Man episodes were going out on Sunday afternoons, while the WWII drama Court Martial was tucked away late on Saturday night. Sunday also saw Strange Report at 9.10pm, still on its first run, and The Baron at 11.25pm, albeit both of these colour series could only be seen in monochrome. This wasn’t entirely a bad thing, and February 1970 saw the station embark on a repeat run of Gideon’s Way, a series which would soon disappear from the ITV network: being in black and white made it less attractive to schedulers. But what of those other 200-odd colour episodes of ITC productions?

A typical week in the early 70s might see two or three series dotted across the schedules, with popular titles like The Saint and The Champions still going out at prime time. Most regions offered a similar mix of first-run and first-repeat-run episodes from the ITC stable: Department S and Man in a Suitcase could still cut it in a mid-evening 7.30/8.00pm slot, but if you were a fan of The Baron, you needed a mug of Horlicks on the go: it was hard to catch John Mannering much before 11.00pm. Similarly, The Prisoner, now on its first repeat run, gravitated towards the post-News at Ten slot, as did regional repeat runs of ABC’s The Avengers.

Not much changed through 1971. The novelty value of seeing older programmes in colour kept many ITC titles in the schedules, and a typical week on ATV Midlands in the spring of 1971 included repeats of The Saint, Strange Report and The Prisoner, alongside Gerry Anderson’s UFO and Fireball XL5, the latter now a rare sighting on account of its lowly monochrome status. Brand new ITC material was, of course, still appearing, albeit not in anything like the quantity that had been seen in the late 60s. The Persuaders! joined the line-up in September 71, but with fewer new British filmed productions available to schedule, ITV’s film buyers were looking increasingly across the Atlantic for their programming. By September 1971, a typical Saturday line-up for Midland viewers still included a repeat of Joe 90 at lunchtime, but the evening was dominated by American imports: It Takes a Thief at 5.00pm, a Henry Fonda Western at 6.30pm, and David Janssen’s post-Fugitive starring vehicle, O’Hara: U.S. Treasury Agent at 8.35pm.

The reliance on imported filmed material began to give a skewed look to ITV’s schedules. ATV, who had always modelled themselves on the lines of an American network, began buying in more and more imported films and drama series, as the cost of home-grown productions continued to spiral upwards. Autumn ‘72 saw the arrival of just two new ITC action series – The Protectors and The Adventurer, and in the Midlands, they were stripped together to fill the slot that had last year been allocated to The Persuaders! Two for the price of one, as it were, but neither came close to the bar that had been set by Brett and Danny’s antics.

By 1973, the old ITC titles – many of them still less than five years old – were getting hard to spot. In the Midlands, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) had been demoted to Sunday lunchtimes, and The Persuaders! was repeated on midweek evenings through the summer. Even Gerry Anderson’s series, which had once been ubiquitous across ATV’s schedules, were looking a bit thin on the ground, with an odd Thunderbirds episode occasionally appearing on a Saturday morning, and Stingray going out in the summer holidays.

1974 brought just one new ITC offering in the form of The Zoo Gang, but at a mere six episodes it felt a far cry from the heady days of 30-episode runs. UFO, Department S and The Persuaders! all found a home on Sunday lunchtimes, but it was rare to find a complete, uninterrupted run of anything and repeat runs could extend over a year from start to finish.

Spring of 1975 saw most ITV regions maintaining a weekday afternoon slot in which one of the ITC titles might appear, and a few were still wont to turn up last thing at night. ATV were mopping up what remained of Department S on Wednesday afternoons, before moving onto a short run of black and white Saint episodes. A couple of orphaned episodes of UFO popped up on weekday afternoons and late nights, while the likes of Stingray and Captain Scarlet were now being stripped into the new Saturday morning format Tiswas – no good at all if you relied on the TV Times for your programme information as neither was mentioned in the listings. At least we got Space:1999, which was more than can be said for a lot of the ITV network. But the golden ‘oldies’ were increasingly hard to find.

'Halo, goodbye': Simon Templar gets a rare black and white outing on ATV, April 1975

‘They’re watching Columbo’: so said the man in the television detector van in a famous scare-mongering advertising campaign of the mid-70s. And viewers certainly were watching Columbo, along with dozens more imported American productions, many of them in the now popular ‘Mystery Movie’ 90-minute format. What they weren’t watching in the mid 70s was The Saint, or Man in a Suitcase or, indeed any of the ‘classic’ ITC era productions that had featured so prominently in the schedules of just a few years before, certainly not at prime time. Hawkish viewers with magnifying glasses might spot an occasional repeat in the minuscule TV Times listings for ‘other regions’, but in the ATV area where I was viewing, it was beginning to look like the end of an era.

1976, of course, saw what one might call a ‘slight return’ of ITC product, with Strange Report and, more famously, The Prisoner both seeing repeat runs on ATV. Midsummer afternoons became a ‘take your pick’ of ITC across the regions, with the likes of Danger Man, Jason King and Strange Report on offer depending on where you lived. Late nights in Wales and Southern also found room for Department S (now something of a rarity) and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased). By the following year, ITC material had all but vanished from most of the ITV network. ATV repeated Space:1999 on Sunday lunchtimes, but that was all we got. In the absence of ITC product, fans of vintage filmed drama picked up on a surprising first-run of the Fox/Hammer co-production Journey to the Unknown. It had only taken ATV nine years to get around to it. 

It was still possible to find the likes of The Champions (Yorkshire) and The Saint (HTV) in an afternoon slot, but for the most part, the three-repeats-and-out rule had kicked in, meaning that old ITC titles could not be shown again without renegotiating the original Equity agreement. This would effectively keep those old shows off air for the next seven years.

At the time, there seemed no reason to expect to see any of those old series again. Nostalgia for old television was a phenomenon that had only just kicked in, and ITV saw little mileage in it: their telly-nostalgia panel game Those Wonderful TV Times was hidden away in a lunchtime slot, with schedulers presumably imagining it would appeal only to OAPs. The show, when you could get to see it, was an intriguing source of archive clips. But clips were all we got.

By comparison with the videotaped drama of the era, the ITC series hadn’t done too badly. Some series (eg LWT’s Budgie) didn’t even make it to a first repeat run, and the same applied to much of ITV’s sitcom output. A series like On The Buses would return with new episodes each year, but it was rare for earlier series to get a repeat run. It should also be borne in mind that this was an era in which the word ‘repeat’ as applied to television was always used pejortatively. Repeats were a bad thing: this was the accepted mindset of viewers as perceived by those who scheduled our TV programmes. It would take the concerted efforts of a small number of dedicated fans to bring about a sea change in attitudes, but such things took time, and there would be many ‘wilderness years’ to endure before fans could once again revisit their old favourites from the 1960s.

Back in 1977, no one, not even Lew Grade himself, would have imagined you could make money by packaging up and selling old television in formats that didn’t yet exist. The home entertainment boom in video and, more significantly DVD would extend the ‘afterlife’ of those old ITC series well into the next century: but even that era is now drawing to a close. Don’t imagine for a moment that ITVX is going to rush to find room in its streaming service for the likes of Danger Man or Man in a Suitcase. Only a few digital channels still include archive television in their listings, but this is, if anything, a retrograde step, leaving viewers once again at the mercy of those who schedule content. It’s all too easy to imagine those old series retreating into the obscurity in which they languished during the late 70s. If you want to watch them in the future, you’d better hold onto those blu-rays and DVDs...