This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

The critics are gushing about the pneumatic naked tennis. Mrs Ned is agog at Aidan Turner’s fecund facial furniture. Me? I’m salivating over the business deals: the new screen adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s 1980s novel Rivals brings to life an important chapter in Britain’s commercial history.

With larger-than-life characters, appalling behaviour and enormous fortunes won and lost, the ITV franchise battles created great headlines for the pink pages. But they also cast a shadow over our culture and media industry, from which we are still suffering today.

The fictional Cotswold TV station Corinium, overseen by David Tennant’s petulant, bullying Lord Baddingham, lies at the intersection of three real-world ITV franchises. Each of these businesses’ colourful leaders may have been fuel for Cooper’s fertile imagination.

There was David Ormsby-Gore, 5th Baron Harlech, the swaggering founder of the eponymous Harlech Television (later HTV). His illustrious career took him first to the House of Commons and then to the United States ambassadorship, where he became a confidant to President Kennedy.

After JFK’s assassination, there were rumours of a romance between his widow Jackie and Harlech. Returning home, he brought similar glamour to regional commercial television — appointing to his HTV board both Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.

Then there was David Wilson, chairman of Southern Television, who took pique to the next level after he lost the franchise in 1980 to rival consortium TVS. First, he forced the incoming team to work out of temporary buildings in the car park of his Southampton studios. Then, for Southern’s valedictory New Year’s Eve show, Wilson commissioned Richard Stilgoe to perform a song mocking the TVS executives — it was called “Portakabin TV”.

But perhaps the closest real-life analogue for the cigar-chomping Lord Baddingham is the biggest ITV beast of them all: Baron Grade of Elstree. His rise to pre-eminence in the Seventies and declining fortunes in the Eighties is part of a wider story of a lost opportunity.

Lew Grade, a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant, began his career as a champion Charleston dancer, before becoming a talent agent. Then through his Midlands television franchise, ATV, and his ITC production house, he came closer than any Brit to rivalling the powerful broadcasting networks of the US. “No one but a fool makes television for the British market alone,” Grade remarked. “Without the guarantee of an American outlet he will lose his shirt.”

There was a distinctive transatlantic flavour to Grade’s greatest commercial successes. Thunderbirds paired an American family of rocketeers with a British aristocrat and her Cockney chauffeur. The Persuaders brought together the wisecracking drawl of Tony Curtis and Roger Moore’s clipped vowels.

The Muppet Show was fronted by an American frog but was made in Grade’s Elstree studios. Grade’s world was a middlebrow realisation of Harold Macmillan’s vision of the Special Relationship, with Britain as Greece to America’s Rome.

But then in the early 1980s, the broadcasting regulator forced Grade to break up his empire. They thought (rightly) he was more interested in dreams of global domination than their own myopic agenda of more parish pump news for the viewers of Nottingham and Northampton.

American money is financing new studios in the UK, employing tens of thousands

And for the next two decades a pattern was set where franchise bids appeased parochial interest groups by promising ever more local content. That meant, during a period when Britain under Margaret Thatcher was once again respected in the world, its broadcasting output retreated inwards. Grade’s own former hit factory began making shows like Auf Wiedersehen Pet, a dreary saga about expat Geordie brickies, which was unintelligible to anyone living south of Scarborough.

For a while, none of this mattered. The local ITV monopolies prospered as everyone from Unilever to local furniture stores had no choice but to pay the ever-rising advertising rates. But then as the new century dawned, broadcasting became a global business.

Our balkanised domestic industry was incapable of challenging first Rupert Murdoch’s Sky, then the US cable companies and ultimately the streaming behemoths, such as Netflix and Amazon.

There were moments when the British industry could have got its act together. In the Noughties there was an abortive attempt to pool ITV and BBC content for the global market, known as Project Kangaroo. Each time, regulatory conservatism and vested commercial interests prevented imaginative collaboration. Today, our largest domestic player — a now consolidated ITV — is valued at £2.8 billion, making it the 118th most valuable company on the London Stock Exchange. It’s a minnow in a sea of great white sharks.

That said, our filmmaking ecosystem is far from broken. Some of our production companies have expanded overseas and make good money from exporting show formats — Who Wants to be a Millionaire? being the best known example.

American money is financing new studios in the UK, employing tens of thousands. And, in a strange irony, Rivals itself was lavishly funded by the normally prudish Walt Disney Company.

Still, the important point is this. The great many talented Britons operating in TV and film are all now supplicants pitching to foreign tastemakers in distant courts — the pool parties of Bel Air or hackathons of Palo Alto. The big barons who made their own cultural weather — the Harlechs, the Grades and, err, the Baddinghams — are no more.