History
ITC was founded by television mogul Lew Grade in 1954 as the Incorporated Television Programme Company. Originally designed to be a contractor for the UK's new ITV, the company failed to win a contract when the Independent Television Authority felt that doing so would give too much control in the entertainment business to the Grade family's companies (which included large talent agencies and theatre interests) although the ITA said that ITPC were free to make their own programmes which they could sell to the new network companies.
However, the winner of one of the contracts, the Associated Broadcasting Development Company, had insufficient funds to start broadcasting, so ITC was brought into the consortium and Lew Grade came to dominate it.
From 1955–1966, ITC (known from 1954–1957 as ITP) was a subsidiary of the Associated Broadcasting Company (ABC) which soon changed its name to Associated TeleVision (ATV) after threats of legal action from fellow ITV company Associated British Corporation - and produced its own programmes for ATV and syndication in the United States. It also distributed ATV material outside of the UK. From 1966 to 1982, it was a subsidiary of Associated Communications Corporation after the acquisition of ATV.
The initials 'ITC' stood for two different things: Independent Television Corporation for sales to North and Latin America, and Incorporated Television Company for sales to the rest of the world. The American Independent Television Corporation was formed as a joint venture with Jack Wrather in 1958. In September 1958, it purchased Television Programs of America (TPA) for $11,350,000. Wrather sold his shares to Lew Grade at the end of the decade.
The large foreign sales achieved by ITC during the British government's exports drives of the 1960s and 1970s led to ACC receiving the Queen's Award for Export on numerous occasions until ITC's association with the broadcaster and success actually led to the demise of both ATV as a broadcaster and ITC as a production company in 1982. Around this time, ITC's library were in the hands of Carlton Television.
In 1989, ITC Home Video was formed in the United Kingdom, to make use of the many hours of programmes in the archive, then unseen for years. This short-lived home entertainment division would end in 1991. In the following period, ITC continued to distribute its past library. Grade once again returned to ITC to head the company one last time, from 1994 to 1998, in the last of which years he died. In 1995, PolyGram purchased the company for $156 million. In 1998 it ceased its operations after Grade's death. Its library was sold to ITV plc, which continues to release ITC's original output through television repeats, books and DVD releases.
In 2005, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the company, Network DVD released a DVD box set entitled ITC 50 featuring episodes from eighteen different ITC productions.
Read more about this topic: ITC Entertainment
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