"ITV is brought to you by Granada."
"…and don't you forget it!"
"…and don't you forget it!"
—Matthew Harris finishing off a Continuity Announcement on the channel.
Franchise: North West England
Companies: Granada
Provides examples of:
- Artifact Title: Granada as a company may only be a dormant subsidiary of ITV, but the North West region is still known as "ITV Granada" for local news purposes.
- Birthday Episode: One ident made to celebrate Granada's 30th anniversary was much more animated than any of its predecessors and featured a "G" logo made out of birthday candles.
- Brief Accent Imitation: Harris gets in a couple of brief imitations of the typical "Granadaland" accent in the narration:"We don't need no bloody objects-flying-through-space up `ere. We’ve got the name and the logo, and that’s enough for us!"
- Cash-Cow Franchise (In-Universe):
- The success of Coronation Street is cited as a major factor in Granada becoming one of the biggest and most powerful companies in the ITV network.
- The success of Brookside was what gave Phil Redmond the means to turn its production company, Mersey Television, into a viable bidder for the franchise.
- Channel Hop (In-Universe): In the event that it lost the 1990 franchise auction, Granada had planned to sell off Prime Suspect, Cracker, World in Action and "some ongoing drama about drama about a street or something" to satellite television.
- Copiously Credited Creator (In-Universe): The "Setting the Standard" idents were "designed, directed, produced [and] probably catered" by Peter Phillips.
- He Also Did (In-Universe): Like a few of the other original ITV franchises, Granada had a cinema chain and an electronics rental business that ran alongside its TV operations. It was, however, the only ITV company to also run a chain of motorway service stations.
- Network Decay: Harris cites the cancellation of World in Action as a sign of Granada's transition from reputable elder statesman of the ITV network to a company obsessed with populism in the pursuit of boosting its bottom line.
- Nice Guy: Colin Weston, the most likeable of all of Granada's in-vision continuity announcers.
- Oop North: Although it was originally a London-based company, Granada became so synonymous with the North of England that the region acquired the nickname "Granadaland."
- The Place: Averted. While other ITV franchises typically gave their stations a name with some sort of tie to their location (save for the breakfast television franchise for obvious reasons), Granada was named after the cinema chain the Berensteins ran before branching out into television, which in turn was named after the city in Spain because the word sounded vaguely exotic.
- Sex Sells: Harris points out that Granada's TV rentals adverts seem to have featured a lot of gratuitously jiggling breasts. The ad's Tagline ostensibly promised "great service, great sets" while leaning into some Fun with Homophones on that second one.
- Tagline: Granada's original and typically forthright Tagline seen on some of its first idents was just "from the North."
- The Stinger: A clip of Jim Pope wishing the viewers goodnight and audibly turning off his microphone.
