[Critique]

I don't think this has resulted in a cut of ITV Wales content though. Sharp End has been lengthened in the last 12 months, Coast and Country is almost ever present in the Friday 7pm slot, and there's been a few other regular series airing after the News at Ten on Mondays, Tuesdays, and at around 7pm on Sundays (plus slots in primetime other days of course).

In recent years it’s appeared to me that ITV Wales don’t get the credit they perhaps deserve when it comes to local output, producing a level of output very similar to UTV (and from the looks of it, frequently more than STV manage in a given week) but without the same level of attention.

Looking at a typical week in Wales of late and you’ve got a mix of local politics, a local Panorama/Tonight-type programme, a local features series and a local arts and culture show. The mix is slightly different in Northern Ireland but isn’t too dissimilar, whilst in Scotland this week’s local output appears to be limited to two hours of local politics and nowt else - STV don’t even appear to have opted out of the second half hour of tonight’s ITV Evening News when both Wales and Northern Ireland did so for local programming.