INCORPORATED TELEVISION COMPANY
The Incorporated Television Company was born following an initially failed bid for one of the first ITV franchises. In 1954, Lew and Leslie Grade went into partnership with Prince Littler and Val Parnell of the Moss Empires group to set up the Incorporated Television Programme Company (ITP). Having been turned down for a franchise, the company became a supplier of programmes instead, capitalised to the tune of £500,000. Its first project, The Adventures of Robin Hood (ITV, 1955-59), was a considerable gamble, as the 39 half-hour episodes were budgeted at £10,000 each, tying up most of its annual budget in a single project. Fortunately it was a huge success, effectively setting the template for most of its subsequent output.
Belatedly, Grade and his partners joined the Associated Broadcasting Distribution Company consortium to run the weekday Midlands and weekend London franchise, their combined company eventually named Associated TeleVision (ATV). ITC, as it was soon known, became a wholly-owned subsidiary of ATV in 1957, providing filmed drama (and occasionally comedies) for the ITV network.
ITC under the leadership of Lew Grade specialised in generating action and adventure series aimed at the broadest possible international audience, which made the programmes often very successful but also open to the criticism that they were too bland and formulaic, didn't take risks and, in their adoption of a determinedly transatlantic style, lacked any real national identity. Clearly aspiring to the high production values and polished surface sheen of American productions, ITC shows were often set in exotic locations (though rarely straying from the backlot) and were glossily shot on 35mm film, not on 16mm as was then, and indeed is still, the norm in the UK. Even the lead actor was frequently either American or someone acceptable to the US networks, where the programmes were frequently pre-sold.
ITC usually stuck closely with one genre and format at a time, and so followed the success of Robin Hood with many other historical swashbucklers, including The Count of Monte Cristo (1956), The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (1956-57) and The Buccaneers (1956-57), the last starring Robert Shaw, mostly shot at the small Nettlefold Studios at Walton-on-Thames. By the time it made their last excursion in the genre, Sir Francis Drake (1961-62), ITC was operating from the much larger ABPC studios at Elstree, having successfully turned to such contemporary crime dramas as Danger Man (1959-60), starring Patrick McGoohan as NATO agent John Drake.
With Ghost Squad (1961), ITC switched to hour-long series and had its biggest hit with The Saint (1962-68), made by the producing team of Monty Berman and Robert S. Baker. This paved the way for the return of a sixty-minute version of Danger Man (1964-67), as well as two shows derived from the novels of John Creasey: the unusually gritty Gideon's Way (1965-66) and The Baron (1966-67), the UK's first hour-long drama series made in colour. At its height, ITC (which also distributed in-house ATV productions internationally) had offices all over the globe, some of which even produced local efforts such as New York Confidential (USA, 1959), Whiplash (Australia, 1960) and The Forest Rangers (Canada, 1964-67).
Up to this point most ITC live-action series tended to focus on one (usually male) central character, a formula which reached its zenith in the hard-boiled Man in a Suitcase (1967-68) and which was stunningly deconstructed in McGoohan's The Prisoner (1967-68). When Berman and Baker parted company, Berman joined with writer Dennis Spooner to launch a new format, featuring three main protagonists, two men and a woman, one of which would almost invariably be an American. The first such series was The Champions (1968), quickly followed by Strange Report (1968), Department S (1969-70) and finally The Protectors (1972-74), made by Gerry Anderson.
Anderson's company was bought by ITC after Supercar (1961), leading to Stingray (1964) - the UK's first half-hour series to be shot entirely in colour - and, most successfully, Thunderbirds (1965-66). Anderson moved into live action with the science fiction extravaganza U.F.O. (1970), which, with an overall budget of £2.5 million, was ITC's most expensive television series to date.
ITC shifted increasingly towards feature film production in the 1970s, as its trademark light-weight escapist fare seemed out of tune internationally following such expensive star-driven flops as The Persuaders (1971-72), with Roger Moore and Tony Curtis, and the Shirley Maclaine vehicle, Shirley's World (1971). It found much greater success with such one-off miniseries as Moses the Lawgiver (1976/77) and Jesus of Nazareth (1977).
The company's cinema venture started very well with Return of the Pink Panther (d. Blake Edwards, 1975), while The Eagle Has Landed (d. John Sturges, 1976) and especially The Muppet Movie (d. James Frawley, 1979), based on ATV's popular series The Muppet Show (1976-81), were also highly profitable. Most of ITC's other theatrical releases, however, were expensive box office failures, even such star-packed efforts as Voyage of the Damned (d. Stuart Rosenberg, 1976), Michael Winner's misguided remake of The Big Sleep (1978) and the risible Escape to Athena (d. George P. Cosmatos, 1979) in which Roger Moore was miscast as a German Nazi officer. The notorious Raise the Titanic (US, d. Jerry Jameson, 1981) was a financial catastrophe of such magnitude that Grade reputedly quipped that "it would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic".
After a somewhat lacklustre attempt to recapture old glories with The Return of the Saint (1978-79) and the cult classic Sapphire and Steel (1979-82), ITC wound down its British TV production arm. By then ATV had been restructured as Central Independent Television with its expansionist tendencies curtailed, while it and ITC's parent company, ACC (Associated Communications Company), was embroiled in a protracted series of takeover bids and boardroom reshuffles. In 1982 Lew Grade himself was forced to leave the company, which continued to operate in the US for several years. Having been absorbed by PolyGram, in 1995 ITC's huge library was sold to Carlton.
Some of the most popular series included:
The Baron. 30 x 60-minute series.
The Buccaneers. 39 x 30-minute series.
The Champions (shown on NBC in the USA). 30 x 60-minute series.
Danger Man (Secret Agent in the USA, shown on CBS). 39 x 30-minute series, 47 x 60-minute series.
The Forest Rangers (made in Canada). 104 x 30-minute series.
Fury (made in the USA and shown on NBC there). 114 x 30-minute series.
Hammer House of Horror. 13 x 60-minute series.
Man in a Suitcase. 30 x 60-minute series.
The Persuaders (shown on ABC in the USA). 24 x 60-minute series.
The Prisoner (shown on CBS in the USA). 17 x 60-minute series.
The Protectors. 52 x 30-minute series.
Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased). 26 x 60-minute series.
Return of The Saint (shown on CBS in the USA). 24 x 60-minute series.
The Adventures of Robin Hood (shown on CBS in the USA). 143 x 30-minute series.
The Saint (shown on NBC in the USA). 114 x 60-minute series.
The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (shown on NBC in the USA). 30 x 30-minute series.
Space 1999. 48 x 60-minute series.
Thriller. 43 x 75-minute films.
William Tell. 39 x 30-minute series.
Thunderbirds. 32 x 30-minute series.
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The wondefully atmospheric score to one of my favourite films, the New Zealand sci-fi classic "The Quiet Earth" from 1985. The film was directed by Geoff Murphy and starred Bruno Lawrence as the "last man on Earth", based on the novel by Craig Harrison.
