ITV regions debate

[Rdd]

Apologies if this sounds stupid but... what was the point of two London franchises for different parts of the week?

The real point of the split franchises in the original set up was that the ITA was supposed to include a measure of competition, and since franchises were more or less exclusive (though they were expecting ITA2/ITV2 at some point) dividing them between different contractors would at least ensure that if they couldn’t have competition for viewers they could at least have competition for the supply of programmes to the “network” (though ITV at this stage was less a network and more a system of the original contractors supplying programmes to each other). The split franchises were less necessary once the network had been expanded to the whole country, but kept for London on the basis that a single London contractor would have been so powerful that it would have dominated the network.