[Neil Jones]

TVS bid based on their projections for the ad revenue. As it turned out (it is said) the predictions were near enough correct. Although it become moot anyway because pretty much everybody bar Central and STV (who were both paying next to sod all as it was) went to the ITC cap in hand and had those payments reduced, in some cases by more than half. Indeed GMTV bid something like £35m (TV-am went for something like £16m) and GMTV ended up paying less than TV-am had bid in the first place. Which made a mockery of the whole system in the first place.

GMTV of course ended up copying TV-am in all but name. By I think it was 1994 it was virtually identical to TV-am. If TV-am had survived into 1993 it would have looked exactly as it did before, with dated titles, graphics, clock and whatever else, because they were spending sod all in 1990 before the new bids, so I suspect it would have stayed like it did looking like a time capsule, for a while at least.

Of course its open to interpretation whether TVS leaving ITV was for the best; we'd probably have a lot more material on the likes of Challenge and ITV3 more of its archive would be out on DVD as well (though as we've seen before the issue with the archive in this reality isn't entirely unsurmountable), though whether that's a better outcome is up for debate.