ITV cuts back on dramas
With advertising revenues declining, ITV is cutting back on some its longest running dramas.
In the past week, the company has announced that it will be cutting The Bill to one episode a week and that production of long-running ratings hit Heartbeat and the spin-off hospital drama The Royal will be suspended once the production cycle is completed later this year.
A spokesman for ITV said that Heartbeat had not been axed and that a back-log of recorded episodes needed to be cleared, but it's clear that drama budgets at the broadcaster are tightening.
ITV Chairman Michael Grade recently told Variety magazine that drama was struggling to match high profile entertainment shows.
"There is so much real-life drama in today's schedules – in sport, in reality shows like The X Factor – that it's getting harder and harder for us and the BBC to launch new drama," he said. "It is hard for scripted drama to match that emotional drain you get from these big events. Fictional storytelling is still what singles out British TV for its excellence, but dramas get harder and harder to launch."
Last month ITV announced that it had cancelled a new adaptation of E.M. Forster's A Passage Of India in order to save money.
However, a spokesperson for ITV insisted that, “We remain committed to high-quality drama on ITV1 and in 2009 have the likes of Demons, Law & Order: UK, Wuthering Heights, Whitechapel and the return of Primeval coming to screen."
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