[WillPS]

FTN was a decent proposal that only worked on paper, in my opinion. The 2-hour Thomas Cook infomercials at startup 6pm alongside 3-hour live quiz shows at 10pm they added later on: it *screams* barker channel.

It was good that they added Challenge gameshows and made an effort towards the last year - but by that point Virgin Media was their next big thing for them, inevitably it was gonna die. And whilst yes some Challenge content was on Virgin 1, it certainly wasn't as often.

A bit like Granada Plus and ITV3 really. Abruptly cut off and then ITV3 practically being its replacement, whilst not even containing half of the stuff that was on Plus. At least NOW they got Classic Emmerdale and Corrie

I don't think there were any periods where Ftn had no Challenge content - StakeOUT, TV Scrabble and Defectors to begin with, then later on (their version of) Fort Boyard and I think the first series of Takeshi's Castle were added in too.

They seemed to have a policy of only showing 'acquired for Ftn' (Jay Leno, Dilbert etc - stuff which was cheap) and 'older Flextech originals' (stuff which presumably cost almost nothing to repeat) - it felt very cheap and I think it's highly likely it was just a low commitment toe in the water at the time for Flextech.

In fairness UKTV took exactly the same approach with BrightIdeas, as did EMAP with The Hits and MTV with TMF - even Sky with Sky Travel. Channel 4 moving E4 to Freeview was the trigger in a chain of events leading to those placeholders being activated with content which might actually command an audience, and eventually all being replaced by substantially stronger offers.

I dare say the decision makers who took the punt on Freeview in those pre-launch and early days were pretty happy with how their bets turned out!