ITV Tyne Tees
Overview
ITV Tyne Tees is the Channel 3 regional service for North East England, owned and operated by ITV plc under the licence name ITV Broadcasting Limited. Formerly known as Tyne Tees Television, it serves Tyne and Wear, County Durham, Northumberland, Teesside and parts of North Yorkshire from its studios at The Watermark in Gateshead, across the River Tyne from Newcastle upon Tyne, the city where it was based for its first forty-six years. Its flagship regional programme is ITV News Tyne Tees, broadcast at 18:00 on weekdays. On screen the service carries national ITV1 branding, with the Tyne Tees name retained for regional programming.
Tyne Tees, universally shortened to TTTV by its viewers, holds a particular affection in the North East. It gave the region its own voice on television in 1959 — local accents, local places and local stories — and at its best it produced network programmes, from the music show The Tube to the Catherine Cookson dramas, that carried the North East's identity to the whole country.
History
Tyne Tees Television launched on 15 January 1959 from studios at a converted warehouse in City Road, Newcastle upon Tyne. The then Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, who had represented nearby Stockton-on-Tees in Parliament for two decades, was interviewed live on the opening night, followed by a live variety programme, The Big Show, broadcast from a small studio, and an evening mixing local content with popular entertainment of the day. The launch mattered culturally as well as commercially: the celebrated North East newsreader Mike Neville later observed that Tyne Tees enabled local people to hear local accents and dialects on television for the first time, at a period when BBC presenters tended to speak in received pronunciation.
The station's middle decades were turbulent. In the 1970s Tyne Tees was criticised for chasing the lowest common denominator in programming, and it survived in difficult financial circumstances through a close association with Yorkshire Television under their joint parent, Trident Television. Through the 1980s and 1990s its identity waxed and waned — a proud Newcastle base in some years, a rebrand as Channel 3 North East in others, a name derided by viewers and swiftly abandoned. In 1992 Tyne Tees and Yorkshire merged again to form Yorkshire-Tyne Tees Television, and the subsequent waves of ITV consolidation, led by Granada and Carlton, brought Tyne Tees into ITV plc on its formation in 2004. The original Tyne Tees Television company was dissolved in 2017, its licence having long since passed to ITV Broadcasting Limited.
Studios and Bases
City Road in Newcastle was the home of Tyne Tees from 1959 until July 2005. The converted warehouse studios saw the making of thousands of programmes, and the station became part of the fabric of the city — a nearby pub, the Egypt Cottage, was famously frequented by faces from local and national television appearing at the studios. The site's entrance tunnel even gave a name to the station's most famous music programme, The Tube.
In July 2005 ITV Tyne Tees moved to smaller studios at The Watermark in Gateshead, reflecting the reduced scale of regional production in the ITV plc era. The Gateshead base produces both ITV News Tyne Tees and, since the two news operations were combined, the Border region's Lookaround programme, the two services sharing presenters and a studio set. Tyne Tees also maintains smaller studios and offices elsewhere, including in Billingham, which long served the Teesside sub-region, and facilities in York, London and at the Media Centre of the University of Sunderland. The Gateshead studios also host ITV SignPost, a leading production unit for British Sign Language services, a nationally significant contribution to accessibility in broadcasting made from the North East.
Regional News
News has been at the centre of the Tyne Tees service since 1959. Its early evening programmes developed through titles including Northern Life, which ran from 1976 to 1992, and from 1996 the programme was known as North East Tonight. On 14 January 2013 the service was relaunched under its present name, ITV News Tyne Tees. In its modern form the programme runs for about thirty minutes at 18:00, produced and broadcast from Gateshead with reporters also based at a Teesside office in Billingham. Its transmission area covers Tyne and Wear, County Durham, Northumberland, Teesside, the Alston area of Cumbria and parts of North Yorkshire.
From around 1983 until 2009 Tyne Tees operated two sub-regional news programmes: a North service for Northumberland and Tyne and Wear, and a South service for County Durham, North Yorkshire and Teesside, the latter presented for many years partly from Middlesbrough and then Billingham, where a completely separate programme, Network North, was produced between 1993 and 1995. The sub-regional structure ended in the ITV regional cutbacks of February 2009, when the Tyne Tees news operation was merged with Border's: the combined service retained the North East Tonight and Lookaround titles for the main evening programmes, while shorter bulletins were branded Tyne Tees and Border News. The restoration of separate services approved by Ofcom in July 2013 took effect on 16 September 2013, when ITV News Tyne Tees and Lookaround were again broadcast as fully separate weekday programmes, with shorter daytime and weekend bulletins reintroduced.
Programming
Tyne Tees contributed programmes to the ITV network and to Channel 4 well beyond what its size might have suggested. Its most celebrated production was The Tube, the live music programme of the 1980s made for Channel 4, which became the defining television showcase for Britain's post-punk and new wave generation and a moment when, as later critics put it, Newcastle stood at the centre of the pop music world. The station's adaptations of the novels of Catherine Cookson, the Tyneside-born author, were among the most watched dramas of the 1990s, regularly drawing audiences in the millions and carrying North East settings and stories to a national audience.
Children's programmes were another strength, notably Super Gran, which became a cult export sold beyond Britain. Daytime and entertainment output included game shows such as Crosswits and Chain Letters, and in the very early years the station's best-known offering was The One O'Clock Show, a forty-minute lunchtime programme that became an institution for its generation of viewers. Together with award-winning dramas, documentaries and local programmes across the decades, this output established Tyne Tees as a producer whose reputation travelled far beyond the North East, even in periods when the company itself was financially or organisationally fragile.
Ownership
The ownership and management structure of Tyne Tees altered repeatedly across its history, more than that of almost any other ITV company. Independent at its launch, it was managed during the 1970s by Trident Television alongside Yorkshire Television, in an arrangement born of financial necessity. The two stations merged again in 1992 to form Yorkshire-Tyne Tees Television, uniting the North East and Yorkshire franchises under one company for the second time.
A series of takeovers and mergers across the ITV network in the later 1990s, driven by the large Granada and Carlton groups, eventually led to Tyne Tees becoming part of ITV plc in 2004. Its licence is now held by ITV Broadcasting Limited. Unlike Granada, which arrived in ITV plc as the senior partner in the merger, Tyne Tees arrived as one of the smaller companies absorbed into the new group, and its subsequent history — the move from City Road to Gateshead in 2005, staff reductions, and the temporary merger of its news with Border's in 2009 — reflects that changed status.
Identity
The Tyne Tees identity most remembered by viewers is the TTTV symbol used, in one form or another, from 1971 to 1992 — interlocking letters that appeared at the start of programmes made in Newcastle and became a badge of regional pride. The letters themselves, shortened from Tyne Tees Television, passed into local speech as the universal name for the station. The attempt in the 1990s to rebrand the station as Channel 3 North East, by contrast, was derided by viewers and swiftly abandoned, demonstrating how firmly the Tyne Tees name was embedded in the region.
Like the other English and Welsh regions, Tyne Tees lost its separate on-air identity on 27 October 2002, when it became known as ITV1 at all times, with the regional name used only around regional programming. The present ITV Tyne Tees branding dates from the network refresh of 2013. That the name survived at all — in the news programme title and the regional service — is itself significant: of the identities created in the first ITV decade, Tyne Tees remains one of the most readily recognised in its own area.
Availability and Platforms
ITV Tyne Tees is available across North East England on Freeview, satellite and cable as the local Channel 3 service, broadcasting as ITV1 in high definition with a standard-definition version downscaled from the same feed. Its transmitters include Pontop Pike and Chatton, serving Tyne and Wear and Northumberland, and Bilsdale, serving County Durham, Teesside and parts of North Yorkshire. In some parts of North Yorkshire viewers point their aerials instead to transmitters carrying ITV News Calendar from Leeds, so the practical boundary between the Tyne Tees and Yorkshire services follows transmitter coverage rather than county lines.
The analogue signals in the Tyne Tees region were switched off in 2012, making Tyne Tees, along with ITV London and UTV, one of the last ITV regions to become digital-only. ITV News Tyne Tees is available through ITV's streaming service after broadcast, allowing viewers to watch the North East programme on demand, and satellite viewers elsewhere can select the Tyne Tees variant through regional options.
Audience and Significance
Tyne Tees serves a region with one of the strongest local identities in England — Geordies, Mackems and Teessiders, in the local shorthand — and its history is bound up with that identity. It was the first television service to speak to the North East in its own voice, and its best programmes, from The Tube to the Cookson dramas, showed the region to itself and to the rest of Britain on equal terms. Even in its leanest years, the station produced shows that travelled far beyond its boundaries.
The reduction of the service within ITV plc — the loss of City Road, the merger with Border, the cuts to staff — was felt in the region as a genuine civic loss, and the restoration of a separate ITV News Tyne Tees in 2013 was correspondingly welcomed. ITV Tyne Tees today is a news-led regional service rather than the programme-making company of the City Road years, but its Gateshead studios, its restored evening programme and its role as host to ITV's sign language production unit keep a North East presence at the heart of the network that the region first joined in January 1959.
