Country | United Kingdom |
---|---|
Broadcast area | Nationwide |
Programming | |
Language(s) | English |
Ownership | |
Owner | ITV plc |
History | |
Launched | 19 April 2006 |
Closed | 5 March 2007 (Suspension) 13 March 2007 (Official Closure) 16 March 2007 (Removal) |
Replaced by | ITV2 +1 (on Freeview) |
Links | |
Website | ITV Play at the Wayback Machine (archived 16 October 2006) |
Availability (at time of closure) | |
Terrestrial | |
Freeview | Channel 31 |
ITV Play was a short-lived 24/7 participation television channel in the United Kingdom owned by ITV plc. The ITV Play name continued as a strand on ITV1 during the overnight hours until December 2007.
It was launched as a standalone channel on Freeview (taking on the slot which was previously occupied by the Men & Motors channel) on 19 April 2006 and started broadcasting on the Sky platform on 24 July 2006.
The ITV Play channel was created in response to and hoping to cash in on the popularity of late night quiz shows on ITV1 and ITV2 such as Quizmania and The Mint that had first launched in December 2005. ITV Play also offered additional gambling services on their website.
It cost at least 75p per call to participate. This charge was made even if the caller was not put through to the studio. A free entry route was available through the website. Users were restricted to 150 calls/web entries in a 24-hour period. At peak times callers had a 1 in 8500 chance of getting through to the studio to play. [1]
The 75p per call cost of a chance of involvement in shows, higher from mobile phones. Callers were charged for each call they made, whether connected to the studio or not. ITV had promised to make its programmes with higher production values than quiz programmes on other quiz channels, but with little evidence of such. Many of the callers were kept on hold and unable to connect. [2]
Restrictions put on the number of attempts to call, 150 per day, meaning that in a 24-hour period, BT callers could still spend a maximum of £112.50 per day. This changed in February 2007 to 100 calls per day, so the maximum was £75 a day on BT.
In January 2007, Ofcom found ITV guilty of breaching its broadcasting code for making answers to one of its quizzes too obscure. Viewers complained after two answers to the question "what items might be found in a woman's handbag?" were revealed to be "balaclava" and "rawlplugs". The 21 September 2006 quiz was found to be in breach of the rule that "competitions should be conducted fairly". Ofcom warned ITV Play that there must be no further incident. [3] Ofcom stated that this was the first formal breach of the code recorded against ITV Play. [4] For its part, ITV Play described it as a "one-off" incident of poor judgement. [5]
The genre of interactive quiz TV shows has also been heavily criticised by the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. They stated that call TV programmes "generally look and feel like gambling", have "a lack of fairness and transparency" and that they encourage people to call more times than they can afford. Had ITV Play been classed as a gambling channel, it would have been forced to give 20% of its profits to good causes. [6]
Labour MP Paul Farrelly went further in his criticism of channels in the participation quiz TV genre, describing them as "tantamount to theft." [7]
On 5 March 2007, ITV announced that all premium rate phone competitions and quizzes, including the ITV Play channel, would be suspended while an audit took place. [8] Programmes ended in the early hours of 6 March 2007.
The audit was announced after a number of problems with premium rate services affecting ITV, BBC One and Channel 4, all of whom were to meet with the regulator ICSTIS. ITV appointed Deloitte as independent auditors.
On 13 March 2007, ITV announced that the ITV Play channel would permanently cease transmission following the recent concerns over participation television. [9]
On 16 March 2007, the channel finally closed and was removed from the Sky EPG. The channel slot was replaced by ITV2 +1 on Freeview.
All of the shows below were shown on the ITV Play channel. Quizmania is the only one that has been revived since the demise of ITV Play.
Quizmania , was presented by Greg Scott, Debbie King, Lee Baldry and others and was produced by FremantleMedia. It was the first phone-in quiz show produced for ITV. The success of this show was one of the main reasons ITV started ITV Play. The last episode was broadcast on 14 January 2007. The series returned on 17 July 2008 as an online-only programme, co-produced by ScreenPop Ltd. and Illumina Digital.
The Call, presented by Tim Dixon, Dave O'Reilly, Zö Christien and Emma Lee, had a feature called the Phrase that Pays and a winner could be made simply by answering saying "ITV is the Place to Play" and not anything else. It ended on 22 December 2006. The series was produced by ITV Productions (Granada) in Manchester.
The Common Room aired for half an hour in the early evenings. The Common Room's main presenters were Tim Dixon, Emma Lee and Zö Christien. It launched on ITV Play on 31 July. Unlike the rest of the ITV Play games, this was more of a chat show with minor prizes. The show aired for its last time on 10 November 2006. The series was produced by ITV Productions (Granada) in Manchester.
The Daily Quiz! , presented by Kat Shoob, launched on 13 March 2006 and was produced by Big Game TV Productions. On 19 May 2006, officers from the Fraud Squad raided the offices of Big Game TV, makers of The Daily Quiz! after a BBC Radio 4 investigation for the You and Yours programme found that receptionists were told to ignore all incoming calls for long periods of time while 150–200 calls per minute were clocked up at 75p a time.
The Debbie King Show was a magazine-style quiz show shown on the 10pm – 12:30am slot on ITV Play. It began on 5 March 2007 and ended on 6 March 2007, lasting only for one show due to ITV Play being taken off the air the day after the show was launched. The programme was produced by Hamma & Glamma Productions.
The Mint was a quiz show featuring celebrity guests in a large Mansion-like set. A £100,000 Jackpot was given away twice. The show was presented by Brian Dowling, Kat Shoob, Craig Stevens, Cat Porter, Beverley French and Mark Rumble and co-produced by Ludus and E:TV. The Mint in which over £6 million was given away, finished on 14 February 2007.
The Mint Extra was a spin-off from the main show The Mint. The presenters included Milo McCabe, Brian Dowling, Craig Stevens, Mark Rumble and Cat Porter.
ITV Playalong was a presenter-less text-in game show that was usually shown as a filler during most of the day.
Play DJ was a text-in quiz show which was similar to ITV Playalong, except with hosts and a studio instead of a "static" screen. Presenters of the show included Nigel Mitchell, Ruth Frances, Amy Garcia, Emma Lee, Mark Ryes, Tim Dixon and Greg Scott. It ended on 6 March 2007. Two Way TV produced the series.
Playdate was a dating programme. The programme began exclusively on ITV2 late at night, but later had a slot on ITV Play in an early evening slot. The show's presenters included Brendan Courtney, Dave O'Reilly and Kate Lawler. It ended on 17 December 2006. It was produced by Hamma & Glamma Productions.
The Rovers Return Quiz was a Coronation Street inspired pub quiz, based on the fictional public house, presented by Rachel Bullen (Roberts). The Rovers Return Quiz aired for the last time on 13 October 2006. It was replaced by an extended version of This Morning Puzzlebook. The series was produced by ITV Productions (Granada) in Manchester.
The School Run aired everyday between in the early evening (and on Mondays at 9pm) it was hosted by either Tim Dixon, Emma Lee or Lawrie Jordon until 30 July 2006. It was replaced with The Common Room. The series was produced by ITV Productions (Granada) in Manchester.
This Morning Puzzlebook was a quiz show with large cash prizes first broadcast on ITV Play, then later as part of the daytime magazine programme This Morning. Presenters included Zö Christien, Tim Dixon, Emma Lee, Dave O'Reilly, Allison Hammond and Ben Baldwin. It aired for the last time on 22 December 2006. The series was produced by ITV Productions (Granada) in Manchester.
Make Your Play was the first in-house ITV Production to go out on the main ITV channels. The show started off at weekends on ITV, with shows airing on the ITV Play channel the rest of the week. The show had larger cash prizes than most other ITV Play shows, as a result calls were put through to the studio on a much less regular basis.
In the later end of its run the show was broadcast seven nights a week on ITV Play and ITV. The series was produced by ITV Productions (Granada) in Manchester.
Make Your Play was also the last ITV Play show to be broadcast before the brand was ditched by ITV. However it was announced that ITV Play would not be returning in 2008.
The Zone was only on air for six programmes. It was an interactive gameshow that began on 26 February 2007, on ITV Play and Men & Motors in the 3pm – 6pm TV slot. Presenters included Anna Fowler and Dave O'Riley. The show ended on 6 March 2007. The series was produced by ITV Productions (Granada) in Manchester. The show was generally a Make Your Play clone, with a different colour theme and lower cash prizes.
Glitterball was introduced as a replacement for The Mint. The show was broadcast by the same company that produced The Mint, and featured one of the show's main presenters. Unlike other ITV Play shows, the games were shown on a giant screen in the studio rather than by graphics on the viewers own screens. The show also had a double presenter format, usually male and female.
The show also survived the Ofcom investigation into ITV Play, after a few nights break they returned to ITV and ITV Play at the same time, with some callers saying, ' It's good to have you back.'
Glitterball Extra, much like The Mint Extra, was shown on the ITV Play channel earlier in the evening, prior to the main shows broadcast. Due to bad publicity from the Ofcom investigation, call volumes dropped, so the show was ditched after seven episodes.
In addition to its slate of quiz programmes, the channel also aired delayed repeats of both Love Island and I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! .
ITV, legally known as Channel 3, is a British free-to-air public broadcast television network. It is branded as ITV1 in most of the UK except for central and northern Scotland, where it is branded as STV. It was launched in 1955 as Independent Television to provide competition, eliminating what had been the monopoly of BBC Television. ITV is the oldest commercial network in the UK. Since the passing of the Broadcasting Act 1990, it has been legally known as Channel 3 to distinguish it from the other analogue channels at the time: BBC1, BBC2 and Channel 4.
ITV plc is a British media company that holds 13 of the 15 regional television licences that make up the ITV network, the oldest and largest commercial terrestrial television network in the United Kingdom.
ITV Nightscreen was a scheduled programme on the ITV television network that was broadcast from 1998 to 2021. It consisted of a sequence of animated pages of information about ITV's upcoming programmes, features and special events, with easy listening music in the background. The programme was used to fill the station's overnight downtime, where a closedown would have once been used at the end of programmes. The programme was generally shown seven days a week with the typical weekday show airing from 4:05 am to 5:05 am daily. However, on ITV's digital channels, the amount of Teleshopping affects how much Nightscreen is broadcast. The programme was also broadcast on all of ITV's +1 channels.
BrainTeaser was a British game show based on the original Dutch format of Puzzeltijd. The show was broadcast live, with phone-in viewer puzzles being announced and played during the show in addition to the studio game. During its run from 5 August 2002 to 7 March 2007, it aired on Five Mondays to Fridays, usually for an hour around lunchtime, and was fronted by various presenters rotating with one another. Beginning in August 2005, a version of the show that exclusively focused on viewer participation was broadcast in a four-hour long block on YooPlay TV every day after the Five broadcast, as part of a thirteen-week trial.
Quiz Call was a TV quiz channel. It was broadcast in the United Kingdom and owned by Ostrich Media. It was also a late night / early morning phone-in quiz TV show, produced by Ostrich Media and broadcast on Five, Five US / Five USA, Five Life and Ftn.
CITV is a British children's morning programming block on ITV2 and formerly a free-to-air channel owned by ITV plc. CITV, then Children's ITV, launched on 3 January 1983 as a late afternoon programming block on the ITV network for children aged 6–12. It replaced the earlier Watch It! branding and introduced networked in-vision continuity links between programmes. These links were originally pre-recorded from a small London studio up until 1987, when Central won the contract to produce live links from their Birmingham studios. In 2004, presentation of CITV was relocated to Granada Television in Manchester, which saw the demise of in-vision continuity. Nine years later, the operations moved to ITV Granada's MediaCityUK studios in Salford.
The Mint was a live, late night, interactive quiz show with celebrity guests and live studio contestants filmed on a large extravagant set designed to look like the inside of a mansion. The programme, which was dogged by criticism that its questions were ambiguous and arbitrary, aired on ITV and ITV2, Sunday to Wednesday. On 26 February 2007, ITV announced that The Mint would return to screens later in 2007, however an announcement on 12 September 2007 confirmed that the show, along with similar late night phone ins, would not be returning.
Big Game TV was a live phone-in quiz channel that was broadcast via Sky Broadcasting in 2005. It released a spin-off, The Hallmark Channel Quiz on 6 March 2006, which was shown on The Hallmark Channel. The show used only three of the presenters.
A quiz channel is a television channel that focuses on phone-in quizzes. The quizzes usually focus on puzzles, such as filling in blanks, identifying subjects, or other forms of word puzzles. The channels make money by encouraging viewers to call a toll phone number for the chance to play.
Quizmania is an Australian phone-in quiz show, based on the British program of the same name, and broadcast on the Nine Network in the late night time slot (post-midnight). The show was produced from Nine's Richmond studios in Melbourne. Its main director was Rick Maslan.
Make Your Play was a live, interactive quiz show, showing in the UK on the ITV Network, from Monday to Saturday, beginning after midnight. The show was launched on Friday 29 September 2006 on ITV and ITV Play.
Glitterball is a live, late night, interactive television quiz show in the United Kingdom. It was broadcast under the ITV Play branding on ITV a few nights a week from around midnight (usually), and from 1.00am on ITV2. The show launched on 19 February 2007. Both Glitterball and Make Your Play alternated their days of broadcast. Glitterball's final show broadcast on the morning of Sunday 30 September 2007.
Bingo Night Live is an interactive television programme featuring a free-to-play bingo game, broadcast in the United Kingdom on ITV. It aired between 4 June 2008 and 29 November 2008.
Quizmania is a British interactive game show. The show was devised by Chuck Thomas, Debbie King, and Simone Thorogood and produced by FremantleMedia for Information TV and ITV. Similar to other premium-line call-in shows, viewers on the TV version of Quizmania were encouraged to phone a premium-rate number in order to provide an answer to a quiz question.
The Daily Quiz! was a live, phone-in quiz channel, previously a TV programme, which was showing on ITV Play and also on Men & Motors from 3pm-6pm seven days a week. Two presenters were in the studio simultaneously and took it in turns to answer calls, the second presenter waits by the jackpot board or front desk and is brought in every so often to chat. The Daily Quiz! had a newspaper/gossip theme running throughout the show and at regular intervals, the presenters sat at their desk, related celebrity news stories from the day's papers and discussed them in a light-hearted manner. Viewers could win up to £5000 in the jackpot game.
This is a timeline of the history of the British television network ITV.
This is a timeline of the history of Granada Television, and of the television interests of its former owner Granada plc.
This is a timeline of the British company ITV Digital Channels and its predecessors Granada Sky Broadcasting and Carlton Communications, and digital channels of other ITV-related companies. The timeline does not include events related to ITV network's flagship channel.
The 2007 British premium-rate phone-in scandal, sometimes referred to in the press as simply the phone-in scandal, relates to a series of controversies regarding the use of premium-rate telephone numbers by several British television and radio broadcasters. The first revelations began in February 2007 regarding the Channel 4 television programme Richard & Judy. However, over the following weeks, more allegations emerged regarding misconduct by major British broadcasters, including the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5. The programmes affected included phone-in competitions and public votes conducted over several years, dating back to 2001. As a result, adjudicators Ofcom and ICSTIS conducted several investigations, resulting in millions of pounds worth of fines and a reform in the use of PRS by broadcasters.
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