| CITV |
| CITV (short for Children's ITV) is the brand name used for the majority of children's television output on the British Channel 3 television stations, including ITV1, breakfast broadcaster GMTV and the ITV plc-owned CITV Channel as well as non ITV plc owned regions. The flagship CITV strand is currently broadcast on weekday afternoons across all ITV regional stations (normally referred to as ITV1) between 15:30 and 17:00, and also on Saturday mornings between 06:00 and 11:30 and on Sunday mornings between 07:25 and 10.00 (all referred to as CITV on ITV1), however recent rumours have been circulating that the afternoon weekday slot is to be scrapped altogether and therefore have it only run on weekend mornings on ITV1. It also has its own channel on Freeview channel 75, NTL:Telewest channel 734, Homechoice and Sky Digital channel 624. Children's ITV began on 3rd January 1983. |
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| CITV - Early History |
| Produced by Central Independent Television, Children's ITV first went on air in January 1983, and consisted of programmes with recorded links in between, initially featuring a different presenter each month. Recorded links continued until 1987, when it started to be broadcast live, echoing Children's BBC which had started two years earlier. Before being known as Children's ITV the timeslot was briefly branded as Watch IT! In 1989, a company called Stonewall Productions won the contract to produce Children's ITV, and it did so until April 1991, when Central won it back.
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| In February 1993, in-vision presentation was dropped, with Steven Ryde providing the voice-overs for out-of-vision links featuring a wide variety of animated characters. A few months later the Children's ITV name was changed to the more youth-friendly Citv, having been used in some form or another since the previous year (the arrangement of upper- and lower-case letters matches that of the logo used at the time). However, the "Children's" wasn't removed from the logo until September 1996, the same month a Digital On-screen Graphic (DOG) was introduced. |
| The CiTV logo between September 2003 & March 2006This continued until May 1998, when a new in-vision service was introduced, fronted by presenters Stephen Mulhern and Danielle Nicholls. A new logo was introduced, and henceforth the service had been referred to as CiTV (until another new logo was introduced in March 2006 and the service became simply known as CITV). The studio space available was initially very small, but in September 1999, CITV started sharing studio space with Central News, allowing room for a large stylised set created by a company called Dorans Propmakers. |
| The service remained fundamentally the same, with occasional changes to the set and presenter lineup, until September 2004, when an out-of-vision service was re-introduced, most likely due to budget cuts laid down by ITV management. |
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| CITV Today |
| CITV is broadcast weekdays between 3.30pm and 5.00pm. The long running Saturday morning slot from 9.25am, until recently filled by the show Holly and Stephen's Saturday Showdown, was axed from its ITV1 slot and was replaced by Saturday Cooks! on June 10, 2006. Saturday Cooks has now disappeard from the Saturday morning slot and CITV is now back on ITV1 on Saturday mornings at 9.25am showing repeats of classic CITV cartoon such as Spongebob Squarepants, and children's shows continue to be broadcast before that time on the Saturday morning (GMTV), and of course, it has its own Channel. As of the new channel's launch, Channel 3 breakfast broadcaster GMTV now also uses the CITV brand across its children's output between 6am and 9.25 on GMTV1, GMTV2 and the CITV Channel. The ITV1 weekday afternoon service from CITV was also updated to reflect the new look as of March 13. CITV on ITV1 is now in a timeslot of 3.30pm - 5.00pm. |
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| CITV The Future |
| ITV discussed with Ofcom the possibility about massively reducing its children's programming on ITV1, with one of the options being to cut kids output from eight hours a week to just two. A formal request was made to the watchdog but was rejected, Ofcom stating that ITV had an obligation to continue to broadcast children's' TV on their main, terrestrial channel |
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| CITV on GMTV |
| Since 11 March 2006, the breakfast-time broadcasting company GMTV, which is partially owned by ITV plc and shares its frequencies, has also adopted CITV branding, although its children's programming remains technically distinct from that produced by ITV plc in that it is bought and controlled separately by the breakfast station, so is not 'True CITV'. The use of the CITV logo and graphics (a move previously avoided by GMTV) was adopted in order to simplify the simulcast of GMTV's programmes on the CITV Channel, which is a joint timeshare venture between the two broadcasters. Where kids' output is not simulcast, GMTV tends to retain its own GMTV Kids branding, especially in the case of its Preschool programming. |
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