ITV's digital portfolio

So it’s happy fifth birthday, today, to ITV3. And a tip of the hat to ITV4 which is also celebrating – four years of service.

By way of a tribute, one-man OTT-updating machine Dominic Small returns with a history of ITV’s digital strategy. From ONDigital, to ITV2, there have certainly been ups and downs. As Dominic reminds us, the network’s nascent dabbles in the digital market weren’t very successful…

“ITV regional operators did dip their toes into the satellite pool quite early on, with mixed results. Many of the ITV franchisees of the time worked together to launch a new UK-based satellite channel with Europe-wide broadcast, though this pioneering venture – Superchannel – was not as successful as had been hoped and later ended up in the hands of an Italian firm, and subsequently the American broadcaster NBC, who dumped much of the UK content for US-produced output.”

For more, Read the feature »

I’ve been asked this a lot today, there’s something in the papers, isn’t there? Oh, it’s cos David’s doingHamlet. Yeah, okay. I don’t know, really. I don’t know. I’m not entirely sure. I love Doctor Who, I love it, but I think it’s quite hard to go back to things. It would be hard to play Rose again. I was trying to do it the other night. I was trying to be Rose in my bathroom and it was shit! It was really bad acting. And I suddenly thought, “I can never go back, cos I can’t do it anymore”! It must be hard, you know. I am like Rose in many ways, but she’s a bit of a Cockney tomboy (I’m a bit of a tomboy), but I couldn’t do it. I can’t do Rose anymore! I’ve forgotten how to play Rose! I’m dealing with it, guys. But now you’re bringing it up, and I’m getting upset!

When you first sit down to watch Entourage, if you haven’t already, there’s a very strong chance you’ll dislike it, or worse, feel total indifference.The floss-thin plot is as follows – Vincent Chase is an extremely pretty, fairly wealthy, young, moderately successful actor living in LA. Assisting his far from strenuous living are his childhood friends from Queens, New York, who each play roles as manager, chef and driver. They worry about cinematic choices, women, and fast cars. They go to a lot of industry parties, and even Turtle – the tubby runaround boy for Vincent, and a man with a consistently reversed baseball cap and the attitude of a 12-year-old who can’t wait to go to college and join a fraternity – gets laid a frankly insulting amount through the series. These are smug little boys.

ITV2 have recently acquired the rights to the first three seasons of the show, and are churning through them in order. The first, shorter series of episodes border on the banal. Entourage relies entirely on character to push the situation forward, while the plot is usually as loose as waiting for a phone to ring about a “deal”. By the second season, finer details emerge – Vince, for all his childish frivolity in tinseltown, wishes to be taken seriously as an actor, which is why he’s so frequently turning down the role of Aquaman, a big budget, daft sounding blockbuster, in the face of his agent, the brilliantly named Ari Gold.

Ari is in near constant friendly warfare with Eric (or “E”), Vince’s well meaning and professional manager/put upon, but well paid, best friend – bickering over scripts and lunch meetings for their client, each citing endless usually selfish reasons that one thing or another works out best for Vince. Ari, played in turns, ruthlessly, hilariously and sharply by Jeremy Piven, is a near perfect character, whose scenes, arguments, dialogue and increasingly stifling marital issues become more entertaining each episode. They also provide a surprising depth and sense of genuine likeability to a wheeling, dealing and occasionally cheating character that should be severely lacking in any sympathy at all from the audience.

Even better, is Jonny “Drama” Chase. Once the star of cult sci-fi television epic Viking Quest, and the man who was so nearly Joey from Friends, he is supported only by the good fortune and expansive bank account of those around him to keep afloat in day-to-day life, and have the time and expenses to consider, for example, getting his underwhelming calves surgically enhanced to give him a better chance of impressing casting directors with the quality of his legs – a good example of one of the show’s more obscure, but oddly entertaining story arcs.

Elsewhere, he simply finds himself the butt of the others’ jokes, particularly after an incident in a recent episode in which he was banned by Hugh Hefner from the Playboy Mansion, under accusations of releasing a caged chimp at a party. As much as he is played for effective laughs, his character highlights that – in between all the sex, pot and credit transactions – Entourage possesses a beating heart, even if for once, and quite interestingly, the audience are more aware of it than the characters.

One of the more off-putting things for those uninitiated with the show, is the blurring of lines between genres – again, most relative in the first episodes. It’s not outright hilarious enough to be a comedy, and it’s never harsh or eventful enough to be a drama. Therefore, it’s a very light “dramedy”, but considerably and thoroughly hipper and more engaging than Heartbeat. In this debatable confusion could well be the key to the show’s increasing worldwide success.

Entourage has repeatedly been feted as something of a masculine edition of Sex and the City, another HBO classic. Replacing New York with LA, the four central, effortlessly stylish and very sexually active cosmopolitan women exchanged for four fish-out-of-water males with similar interests and pursuits. But, despite it’s immensely attractive cast, Entourage lacks the glamour and idealization of Sex. Its formula is so winning, because the viewer not only gets a funny, irreverent, realistic and therefore, occasionally cynical perspective on Hollywood life, but the main characters are just fairly normal. Like the rest of society, they have their own goals, and quite often misrepresent themselves – but generally, they are simply, hopelessly, themselves.

It is also genuinely good fun to watch, and perfectly fits its Sunday night slot as a smart slice of light entertainment. The glitz is appealing, offering a quality potentially akin to say, Dallas, and the “insider” view on the concerning industry is refreshing – for further reference of its accuracy, the show is the work of Mark Wahlberg, with many of the plotlines and story arcs based on his ascent to stardom with the help of his friends throughout the ’90s. In each episode, it can be expected that a celebrity guest or two will make an appearance, at which point a reasonable knowledge of popular American culture is helpful, but not essential. Here, the surprise appearances and name-dropping feel a lot more natural than say, Extras, and although the stars often appear in a self parodying way, the spoofing is never as harsh or startling as those in the work of Gervais, or even Larry Sanders.

A notably short review then, for a show that needs your attention, ratings wise, and one that definitely deserves 30 minutes of your time – if not just to see something that proves there are several degrees of smart behind this particular slice of brainlessness.

The climax of Hell’s Kitchen USA proved every bit the event that the preceding nine episodes demanded, and, unlike The Apprentice USA‘s finale, it didn’t even need a live audience, Regis Philbin and a house band blaring out the theme tune.

Not that you could ever imagine Ramsay putting up with all that. From start to finish, Hell’s Kitchen USA had a ruthless minimalism that made it the peer of the shameless but compelling Trumpfest. Like The Apprentice, it had a creditable inclination to concentrate on the game itself, at the expense of backstage showboating, unless it had a direct bearing on the action.

The production team weren’t above manipulating the tension, mind, and neither was Ramsay, from his endless cries of “shut it down!” at the end of another shambolic night in the kitchen, to the resolution of the final, which placed the two rivals in front of two doors, but only the champ’s would open. It might have been melodrama, but sometimes that can be the most satisfying kind of drama.

None of this could really fly without Ramsay, though, as the second run of the British original underlined. Manic, obnoxious and charismatic by turn, he remains one of the most watchable people on the box. Declining to tone down his engagingly spiky persona for have-a-nice-day LA, he refused to even defer to America’s culinary lingua franca. Hell’s Kitchen would freeze over, you imagine, before Ramsay ever referred to a “riz-oh-toe”.

And for a British audience, the series had the extra attraction of letting you feel one step ahead of the competitors. In the first instalment, when one aspiring chef didn’t understand what it meant to be branded “a plank” by Ramsay, it was fun. But when he styled himself an “executive chef”, you instantly remembered the hapless participant in Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares who incurred the culinary master’s wrath for adopting the same title. Immediately, you knew he was doomed.

The final pitted Michael (“The 27-year-old kitchen phenom from Los Angeles”) against Ralph (“The 36-year-old veteran chef from New York”). Each handed half of the Hell’s Kitchen dining room, their last challenge was to transform it into the restaurant of their dreams and become head chef for one night.

Ralph, a garrulous character much given to declaring “I have a slight advantage” to the diary room camera at every given opportunity, elected to create a 1920s style Italian diner, Frank and Lulu’s, named after a pair of dogs owned by him and a friend.

The evolution of Ralph’s restaurant produced another memorable cameo from Ramsay’s loyal maitre d’, Jean Phillipe, who’d spent the entire series facing the ire of dissatisfied and hungry customers, including one repellent Californian who ordered in pizza instead and repeatedly bellowed, “Do you have a doctorate?” at him.

Now he found himself obliged to clothe the waiting staff of Frank and Lulu’s. “Do you want the women to wear some black panties?” he asked a bemused Ralph, in reality attempting to select the waitresses’ hosiery. For his part, Ralph rarely had the courtesy to even get Jean Phillipe’s name correct, but for a man who ended a morning conversation with Ramsay with “bon soir” (“Stupid idiot!”) it was barely unexpected.

Michael, meanwhile, was busy solemnly declaring, “I will win this, Chef Ramsay. I’ve put everything on the line for this,” to the giant likeness of Ramsay that topped their living and working quarters. The quiet, likeable tattooed chef came up with Lola Pop, a stark, modern Californian restaurant named after his wife.

Minor kerfuffles over the non-arrival of Ralph’s wallpaper ensued (“This isn’t going to work for me”) before the two chefs took turns at managing the kitchen as a trial run ahead of the big night. Michael sabotaged Ralph by “forgetting” to put the crab into his rival’s crab risotto, something Ralph failed to notice before he served it, but the crew building his restaurant (“So we’ve got a construction worker, with a hard hat on, sending his risotto back, because it had no crab in”) didn’t miss it.

The two chefs finally subjected their restaurants and their waiting staff to Ramsay’s scrutiny. Frank and Lulu’s (“Casablanca meets the Speakeasy meets Ralph”) looked warm and inviting, according to Chef, even if he felt the traditional uniform made the waitresses look like grannies (“Okay grannies, go round the corner and scratch your fannies”), while Lola Pop represented pure California glamour, according to Ramsay, though here, the outfits made the waiters look like ballerinas (“Okay ballerinas, go off and get your tutus”).

Bringing back the discarded candidates to assist the two finalists has become one of the staples of the reality show finale. Hell’s Kitchen USA didn’t disappoint, resurrecting the magnificent Dewberry (“Blueberry?”), a camp oddball who almost walked out in week two, only to be kicked out moments later, and affable klutz Jimmy (“Jimmeeeeeee!”), though sadly there was no sign of Jeff, who’d spent most of episode three rolling around in the corridor suffering from a kidney stone. It’s almost always a masterstroke, as it obliges the finalists to motivate people who have every reason to resent their success and, as week three reject Wendy Liu noted here, there’s nothing in it for them anyway.

Having beaten Ralph in a street-tasting session earlier, Michael got first pick of his team, selecting Elsie, Jimmy and Ralph’s best friend Jessica – the three most experienced competitors available, while his rival had to make do with Dewberry, Wendy and Andrew. The balance fell firmly in Michael’s favour at this point, and it tipped even further towards him when Andrew had to dash to hospital after cutting his thumb, before Dewberry almost fainted with exhaustion (“I think I’m fixin’ to pass out! Don’t let me!”). Recuperating on a pile of crumpled cardboard boxes in the corridor, he eventually came back to the kitchen, where Ralph called him a rock (“I’d rather you be saying that I was Brad Pitt’s wife”) for returning to his post.

In the end, however, the final decision, and the deeds to the new restaurant awaiting the winner, all came down to customer satisfaction. 90% of the diners said they’d be prepared to come back to one restaurant … but then 94% admitted they’d return to the other. Blindfolded, the two finalists were led to those doors, only for Ralph to remain locked behind his, as Michael walked through to the celebrations.

Ramsay announced a rather unsatisfying twist at this moment, however, offering Michael the chance to forego the restaurant that had been dangled before the competitors at every turn, and travel instead to London to learn from the chef himself for 12 months. It was never adequately explained whether this decision meant giving up the new business completely, or even if Ramsay had always intended this apprenticeship to be the real prize, perhaps correctly predicting that it was an opportunity that no winner could turn down.

Moreover, despite Ramsay’s boasts that he had transformed the champ into a masterchef, given that Michael was, unlike some of his rivals, already a professional chef, it felt a bit like the game hadn’t quite taken place on a level playing field. Nor did we ever get a real sense of how long the contestants had been in there. Two weeks? Three months?

For all that, Hell’s Kitchen USA proved that it’s too easy to label something this good as a guilty pleasure. Like the boardroom, the kitchen makes for the perfect television arena.

It’s been intriguing viewing. Here’s a man who has no equivalent in this country. Parkinson’s nearest to him in age, but the antithesis in demeanour. Wogan used to be able to pull off the same mix of grouchy/funny, but nowadays seems to be enjoying a retirement into rather unpleasant bitterness. Jonathan Ross arguably owes his career to Letterman, yet appears spread evermore thinly across a bewildering variety of patchy formats. Chris Evans is just washed up. All four were, at different points in their careers, associated – both in rumour and reality – with attempts to run chat shows on British television twice, three times, even five times a week. None lasted.

David Letterman on the other hand, despite one notorious network hop from NBC to CBS, has grown old with his show over more than two decades. Here’s where the intrigue deepens. It’s not a little unsettling to watch a man nightly disinterring the bones of the same format he’s peddled for almost half a century. Being more used to seeing presenters under the age of 30 reading pithy stories from the press, entertaining unusual guests (and their pets) and swapping in-jokes with the production team makes encountering a man quite a bit older, yet behaving exactly the same way, a striking and almost ghoulish experience.

Letterman – or “Dave”as everyone around him still calls him – has the on-screen appearance befitting that of a notional “elder statesman”of broadcasting: weathered, haggard looks, combined with the cut and swagger of a TV veteran brooding and mooching around his favourite stamping ground. But his behaviour is like that of a small child: snapping at his crew, orchestrating everything to ensure attention is centred on him, whooping and chucking props about, and forever bashing his china mug with a multitude of pencils like a baby pounding the sides of its pram with a giant rattle.

For all of this, just watching the man on telly for a matter of seconds confirms how he continues to be held in undeniable, incredible esteem. Audiences in the Ed Sullivan Theatre in New York hang on his every word, applauding each passing sentence with a vigour you’d partly expect from Stateside crowds, only somehow even more passionate and devoted. WatchingThe Late Show recently, especially since 11 September, it’s felt like both his audience in the theatre and the man himself have joined in hyping up this image of “David Letterman” as America’s great patriot: the nation’s commentator, seer and teacher.

Rather than being particularly disturbing or objectionable, however, this is actually quite fun to watch, thanks to the way it is reaching British screens as if distilled, filtered, and at one remove. You’ve got the time delay for starters. Since ITV2 always screen the programme from the night before, by the time we get to see The Late Show it is literally yesterday’s news. This lends the programme the softened, tempered feel of a bizarre time capsule arriving fossilised from a far distant place. But also, and given the show’s huge profile, anything controversial or momentous that might have happened we are able to read about in advance, and then enjoy all the more when finally shown on air. Letterman’s first programme post-11 September for instance, or more recently the show where he announced on air his decision to stay with CBS, made headlines that turned The Late Show‘s transmission in this country into more of an extraordinary media event.

The programme’s various constituent parts and trademarks command a different kind of appeal. There are the grinding in-jokes that you sense could have been culled from any number of US broadsheet gossip columns. Plus there are the guests, who are mostly big enough to have immediate resonance here, but not always – the exceptions usually being US senators and congressmen, or fellow network “faces”, but who are inevitably greeted with the same degree of wild adulation as a Hollywood film star. The sum impact is that of a genial dose of half-familiar American pop culture being pointedly measured out across the Atlantic, and then served at arm’s reach in order to help us erstwhile colonialists lighten up.

Then of course Dave seems to know every single one of his guests, never mind whether they’ve been on before. This cosiness, sometimes rather cloying and sickly, is currently more than ever the show’s cornerstone. The regular Osama Bin Laden gags, for example, are for the titillation and comfort of a wholly domestic audience, but obviously appeal to foreign audiences for potentially conflicting, unintentional reasons. Perhaps such homeliness is also a product ofThe Late Show‘s longevity. Being on screen so long and so often seems to have fostered a palpable (certainly from a viewer’s point of view) sense of assurance and confidence that oozes out from all participants. It does mean that The Late Show can presume to be congenial and informal, but also amazingly slick. The house band for one, Paul Shaffer and the CBS Orchestra, are right there with the host on every punchline and cue. And no more so than during the famed opening monologue.

For 10 or 15 minutes, first standing at the front of the stage, then from behind his desk, Letterman persists in churning out these twee, crass, often embarrassingly crap jokes and observations, to the sound of an acutely corny musical “response”from the band (a comedy drum roll here, a po-faced bass solo and chirpy keyboard riff there). Recurring topics of late have included St. Patrick’s Day – “My cab driver this morning had a green card pinned to his turban”- and Liza Minelli’s nuptials – “This wasn’t a wedding, it was an episode of Love Boat.” Naturally the studio audience lap it up, while Letterman’s mock contrition – “You have to understand, I’m not proud of this stuff” – just makes them cheer all the louder.

At its most basic, this is all about Dave as dictator, albeit an awkwardly benevolent one, rather than arch commentator. Critic Jim Shelley once memorable wrote damningly of Chris Evans’ predilection for beginning each TFI Friday, “Commenting on what people have been saying about him that week, like an East European leader.” The same charge can be levelled at Letterman, though the man’s age and peculiar reticence (unlike Evans he seems to have tried to keep away from playing the press off against each other) almost – almost – pardons his arrogance. His chiding of the Swedish nation for sending him an award this week for “Best Non-Swedish Speaking TV Personality” was shamelessly self-indulgent, but more innocently silly than menacing and ugly. Besides, they had sent it to him already broke.

However the most compulsive aspect of The Late Show at the moment has nothing to do with guests or comedy items or one-liners. It’s the host’s rather desperate ongoing attempts at lambasting his network. All through the recent period of speculation concerning his possible defection to ABC, Dave continued to blithely insult CBS in the most personal of terms. Now he has re-signed, but he’s still mouthing off about his bosses. He appears to detest his network, but “wants to retire with CBS.” Even the nightly Top 10 List is concerned more with slating fellow CBS shows and personnel than any other, funnier, topics. So ultimately The Late Showis worth watching regularly to see how far Dave feels he can go before real blood is shed, and to catch the precise moment when one of America’s broadcasting legends finally implodes live on air.

Plus it makes for an education. Until the bidding war broke out, the chief knowledge this reviewer had of the host of ABC’s Nightline – the programme Letterman would have replaced had he defected – came from an episode of The Simpsons when Homer enthusiastically declared, “And Ted Koppel is a robot!” after spotting said revelation amongst a list of corrections scrolled over the end of an edition of Springfield’s notorious Rock Bottom investigative series.

Thanks to Dave, then, for helping us all to learn a little more about this respected US newscaster, and that he’s not just a comical over-the-hill automaton. Nor Ted Koppel, for that matter. “Aw, ABC are watching this and they’re having a ball, man!”