Anglia TV

Corporate body

Anglia TV

1959-2004

Anglia TV was a broadcasting franchise which served the East of England. It was owned by ITV.
In Britain, at the beginning of 1958 ITV was still expanding throughout the country. Following the Television Act of 1954 which had empowered the ITA to set up television services additional to those provided by the BBC, ITV had begun broadcasting in September 1955. When applications were invited for the franchise to serve the East of England, which was to be ITV's first truly rural region, Lord Townshend, a leading Norfolk farmer, brought together a group including The Guardian newspaper and Romulus Films, a company founded by Sir John Woolf and James Woolf at the start of the 1950s. Other members of the board of Anglia Television included people who were strongly rooted in the area but also had diverse interests. Sir Robert Bignold was an eminent Norfolk industrialist, chairman of Norwich Union and a former Lord Mayor of Norwich. Aubrey Buxton was a conservationist who had served with the Army with distinction during the Second World War and was awarded the Military Cross in 1944. Sir Peter Greenwell was a Suffolk farmer who raised prize cattle. William Copeman headed the Eastern Daily Press and other East Anglian publications. Laurence Scott was chairman of The Guardian as well as chairman of the Press Association. The other board members were Sir John Woolf, Sir Donald Albery, head of a London theatre group and two Cambridge academics: Professor Glyn Daniel (archaeologist) and Dr Audrey Richards (anthropologist).
They formed the ‘Anglia’ company and the ITA franchise for the East of England was granted to them. Anglia’s headquarters was in the centre of Norwich in a building that had been known for three-quarters of a century as the Agricultural Hall. Anglia acquired The Hall on a 75-year lease and adapted it for their use. An assembly hall at the front of the building was divided into offices while the main exhibition hall, formerly used for cattle shows, was converted into studios. In order to make these studios sound proof it was necessary to erect a new building within the old one with a reinforced concrete frame. The building was renamed Anglia House. At the same time a 1,000 foot transmitter mast was built at Mendlesham, Suffolk.
The first day of transmission for Anglia Television was on Tuesday October 27, 1959. Broadcasting began at 4.15pm with a picture of the Mendlesham mast and a voiceover announcing "Anglia Television is on the air." The first programme, Introducing Anglia, took viewers on a tour of the region with aerial views of the countryside. The station closed for the evening at 11.10pm.
Anglia's distinctive symbol, the Anglia Knight, soon became widely known across the country. Originally, the directors had thought of using Britannia as the company logo. But whilst walking along Bond Street in London, Lord Townshend saw the figure in Asprey. It had originally been modelled on a statue of Richard the Lionheart that stands outside the Houses of Parliament and was commissioned from a London firm of silversmiths by the King of the Netherlands in 1850 as a sporting trophy. It was later won by an Englishman who brought it home where it had remained in the possession of his family. After Anglia acquired it they got Asprey to make some modifications including the 'Anglia' pennon on the lance.
By 1961, Anglia's 'local' audience of 213,000 homes, mainly in Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Essex grew to 423,000 as it reached Bedfordshire and Lincolnshire. The opening of a new transmitter in 1965 also made the station accessible to viewers in Hertfordshire, Northamptonshire and much further afield. By December of that year about a million homes could receive Anglia television.
Of all Anglia's television programmes the most celebrated is Survival, which travelled the world producing six half-hour programmes a year. The basic theme of each production was the conflict between man and nature with the programme coming down firmly on the side of conservation. As he was launching Survival, Aubrey Buxton also helped to found the World Wildlife Fund along with Peter Scott and others, including David Attenborough. Prince Phillip became chairman of the British appeal of the WWF introducing an hour-long special about conservation in Africa, The New Ark, which won Survival's first international award, the Golden Nymph of the Monte Carlo Film Festival in 1963. The original series ran for 40 years during which nearly 1000 shows were produced. It was also one of the UK's most lucrative television exports, with sales to 112 countries. In its prime, it achieved the highest overseas sales of any British documentary programme and, in 1974, gained a Queen's Award for export success. It became the first British programme sold to China (1979), the first to be broadcast simultaneously across the continent of North America (1987) and its camera teams were the first to shoot a major wildlife series in the former Soviet Union (1989-91). Survival films and film-makers won more than 250 awards worldwide, including four Emmy Awards and a BAFTA. Buxton, producer of Survival for most of its life, also received a Royal Television Society silver medal in 1968 for outstanding artistic achievement, and a gold medal in 1977.
In 1974 the IBA (formerly the ITA) redefined the region for Anglia Television. Where Anglia and Yorkshire overlapped around Humberside both services were available. The IBA decided that the Belmont transmitter in Lincolnshire would be given over to the Yorkshire area, bringing the northern boundary of Anglia back to its 1965 position. In 1988 the knight ident was replaced by a quasi-heraldic stylised 'A' made of triangles, which faded in and out on a fluttering flag. In the early 1990s, this was replaced with a black background and the flag fading in slowly. This was used until 1999.
During the broadcasting franchise reviews and applications of the 1980s Anglia managed to hold off opposition from only one other applicant, but in 1992 they faced stronger opposition from two consortia: Three East and CPV-TV. Anglia bid nearly £3 million more than Three East, which had crossed the quality threshold (CPV-TV had not), and they retained their broadcasting licence. In 1993, the station took over the cartoon studio Cosgrove Hall, when it was sold off by its original owners, Thames Television. Then in early 1994, Anglia was bought by MAI (owners of Meridian Broadcasting), who merged with United Newspapers to form United News and Media. They were joined by HTV in 1996. In 2000, following United's aborted merger attempt with Carlton, Granada bought the TV assets of United. In 2004, Granada finally merged with Carlton to form ITV plc, which ended Anglia's existence as a separate brand.
Much of Anglia TV's back catalogue is now held and preserved at the East Anglian Film Archive. A number of Anglia's Television productions have been released on DVD.

The Teletronic website on the history of television: https://www.teletronic.co.uk/pages/history_of_itv_11.html