Phoenix from the fame

So, a programme about a lump of old concrete in Brum? Well, it's so much more than that. ATV Centre was the home of the finest shows to come from the midlands, and these programmes are much-loved, not just in the centre of England, but all over the UK, and the world.

Britain's second city now has no major television studios. It's a side-effect from a couple of things that have revolutionised the media world, for better or worse.

The low-cost of modern technology means that you can get broadcast-quality hand-held camcorders, thus making outdoor filming much more attractive than the hassle of booking a studio, rigging up lights, constructing a set, organising an audience, etc.

Added to the woes of traditional broadcasters, is the fact that multichannel television is no longer the laughing stock it was in the early 90s. Gone are the jokes about the Sky TV dustbin lids on a council house, as BSkyB are now the country's biggest commercial TV business. Plus, the Freeview success story means you can pop down your supermarket to get a £15 box to add 40 channels to your telly, forever (theoretically).

With so much competition for your eyeballs, the traditional terrestrials have been emulating their digital rivals.

Reality TV, the antithesis of scriptwriting and the saviour of many a Z-list celeb's career, is ubiquitious as it takes over the schedules. You'd have thought seeing Christopher Biggins eating kangaroo testicles on primetime ITV would have been straight out of a Roger Melly comic strip.

Those cheap hand-held cameras, have created an incentive for lifestyle shows where a viewer's home becomes the 'studio'.

So where are the shiny floors, illuminated steps and roaring audiences of the TV studio? Since the merger of Granada and Carlton, the beautiful patchwork quilt of ITV regions has become decimated in the quest to make savings, and to go virtually national, leaving only the 'necessary' studios behind, and to place a lot of staff at regional outposts, on the dole queue.

In the chase to become more like Sky, ITV has squandered millions on football in a futile digital project (OnDigital) and all the conventional channels are also guilty of seeking the same cost-effective business model found from digital-only channels.

When you strive to be like Living, Bravo or Sky One, be prepared to have those kind of audience figures. In the late 1990s, Noel's House Party was a much-mocked ailing series, previously a flagship must-see show, but audiences had declined to 6 million, so it was axed. These days, any show reaching those figures on any of the five main channels, is hailed as a success.

Recently, an observation was made. If you took off Coronation Street and Emmerdale from ITV1, the ratings for the channel were almost identical to that of Channel Four. That's all the channel really has going for it at the moment.

Critics may scoff at studio-based programming, with cheesy hosts, swimsuited glamour girls draped over prize cars, house bands and sycophantic chat shows. Yet television studio shows are the ones that remain in your head. Yes, they're expensive, but that's part of the attraction. When a blonde bimbo snogs some dweeb on Big Brother, that's in the nation's conscience for only a week at best, becoming yesterday's Heat magazine.

ITV in their present format have really stripped themselves to the bone. Sensibly, they've kept open the Manchester and Leeds operations, because they know it's Corrie and Emmerdale keeping them going. In a way, I bet some ex-Central management have regretted their decision to kill off Crossroads by death of a thousand cuts.

So, going back to Birmingham, it's been home to Family Fortunes, Blockbusters, Bullseye, The Price Is Right, Spitting Image, Crossroads, and my own personal favourite, Tiswas. No matter what you think of these shows, each of them have made a mark in television history, and are more fondly remembered than current dross such as Who Dare Sings or SoapStar SuperStar.

What really spurred us on to do this project, is that the former ATV/Central studios themselves are to be literally gone pretty soon. The place is to swept under Birmingham's ongoing modernisation, to become another swish shopping centre, not unlike the Mailbox.

Earlier this year, when the Central House was undergoing demolition, we decided to re-ignite this project, in fear that the studios themselves were going to face the wrecker's ball. We've had the idea of creating a DVD about the studio complex from back in 2007, thanks to former BBC staffer Keith Jacobsen, who planted the seed for this, in the form of 'Give My Regards To Broad Street'.

In a strange twist of fate, it seems that the credit crunch has kept the studios standing for the meantime. We don't know if they'll be reduced to rubble by Christmas, but we are aiming to have our DVD out by then anyway!

Having been involved with the TiswasOnline website since founding it back in 2004 (with some healthy interest from ITV Central and BBC West Midlands at our launch), I've acquired some second-hand knowledge from folks such as Bob Carolgees, Gordon Astley and behind-the-scenes workers. We've filmed interviews with such folk, and rather than keep them confined for us to transcribe, we've found it best to use for this DVD project. Other material comes from us filming the building over the years, including the time I went on the Birmingham Wheel (think of the London Eye but much smaller!), grabbing some previously unobtainable camera angles that look practically like aerial shots.

Since the project has been reopened, I've been up and down the country doing specially filmed material. With Stephen Thwaites being a very talented designer, and my background in editing and research, we're off to a great start. But we can't take all the credit either. Local boy Lee Bannister has got his hands on some rare footage shot inside the studios in its dying days of 1997, plus we have tonnes of ATV/Central publicity material courtesy of TV memorabilia collector Matthew Gulliver.

It doesn't end there, we have photography on a professional scale from Alex Fryer, and TV enthusiasts such as Peter Raven, and Crossroads Appreciation Society's Mike Garrett on board. Dave Jefferies, a designer and animator who has worked for ITV in the past, is also helping us out.

While the irony is we're using the same low-cost hand-held technology that killed off many much-loved ITV regions, we're doing it with a sense of style. It's not a bunch of anoraks wondering round the outside of the studios for an hour with a wobbly camcorder out of the specials bin at Argos. A lot of us have been inside on official invitations in the past few years, and there's a magical atmosphere there that we're doing our best to put across in our DVD, using professional software and a contacts book that includes a lot of big names from Central and ATV.

Stay with us for the ride!

Peter Thomas
co-editor/researcher
ATVLand.productions