TV Times

TV Times is a UK television listings magazine. First published on 20th September 1955 in the London area only to coincide with the launch of ITV, it was for many years the “official” magazine of the network.

During that period, TV Times and its BBC counterpart Radio Times (first published in 1923) were the only television listings magazines in the UK as the profits they generated meant that the companies involved continued to hold strict copyright on the listings of their programmes with embargo times close enough to transmission to ensure publicity from daily newspapers but not far enough away from transmission to mean that they lost their guaranteed monopoly on the first publication of forthcoming programmes. This situation generated huge sales with the Christmas 1988 edition of Radio Times generating sales of 11,220,666 copies - a record for magazine sales in the UK and recognised as such by the Guinness Book of Records. Increasingly, the BBC and ITV faced legal action to force them to remove the copyright and provide details upon request. The 1990 Broadcasting Act removed this monopoly and from 1st March 1991 newspapers were allowed to print billings in advance and other independent magazines - usually aimed at the cheaper end of the market - were also launched. Commensurate with that change, both Radio Times and TV Times went “multi-channel”, a situation with exists to this day, although each has a subtle preference for its original station loyalty, with arguably Radio Times demonstrating this to more effect that its long-standing rival.

Inevitably the change in 1991 meant that sales were heavily reduced for both magazines. Today Radio Times sells just under one million copies a week of its non-Christmas issue (down from a peak of almost nine million in 1955) while TV Times has a circulation of just under 300,000 issues, down from ten times that figure in the early 1970s.

Since 1989, TV Times has been published by IPC Media under licence from the ITV group of companies.

TV Times in the regions
In 1955, the magazine was originally published by Associated Rediffusion Ltd who held the weekday London franchise although ATV who broadcast at the weekend chose to use it also as their listing magazine. As each new ITV station launched across the country, there was no compulsion for them to avail themselves of using TV Times and several chose to issue their own publication. The following listings magazines, aside from TV Times, were therefore in circulation in the 1950s and 1960s:


 * Scottish Television - TV Guide (until May 1962, then The Viewer until September 1965 then TV Times)
 * Ulster Television - TV Post
 * Tyne Tees Television - The Viewer
 * Westward Television - Look Westward
 * Harlech Television - Television Weekly
 * Channel Television - Channel Viewer

In September 1964 ATV in the Midlands also chose to issue their own magazine and viewers in that area purchased TV World instead of TV Times for the next four years.

This situation all but ceased in August 1968 when the Independent Television Authority held its franchise renewal and insisted that each of the successful stations joined in with TV Times in creating a single journal for almost the entire network. The exception was in the Channel Islands where Channel Viewer (later CTV Times) provided much-needed income for the small broadcaster there and it was agreed that they alone could continue to publish their own magazine. This situation changed again in October 1991 when the end of the listings monopoly meant that that magazine was no longer commercially viable and it ceased publication for good.

Prior to the 1968 change, TV Times was published in seven regional editions - London, Scottish, Border, Grampian, Southern, Anglia and Northern, the latter covering Granada Television (weekday contractor until 1968) and ABC Television (weekend contractor until the 1968 loss of franchise).

TV Times and Coronation Street
TV Times is therefore the only listings magazine to have an uninterrupted run of coverage of Coronation Street from the programme’s launch until the present day. Although published centrally from London, the magazine came under great pressure from the various contractors to favour coverage of its own programmes in the regions where the magazine was sold and Granada Television went so far as to insist that its company credit at the base of a billing of a programme they had made was in the company’s recognised font rather than the generic type used for the other contractors (see examples on this page). This pressure meant that coverage of Coronation Street in its early days was noticeably stronger in the Northern edition than elsewhere and, for this reason, this article concentrates on publicity in that edition rather than the larger-selling London issue.

Coronation Street was given minimal publicity on its launch, even in the Northern edition. A small billing for the programme gave no cast details and the one page feature concentrated on Tony Warren and his research for his scripts. It even referred to Ena Sharples as a “kindly pensioner”! The following week introduced cast billings although these were not comprehensive for the first few weeks of the show. Episode synopsis or "blurbs" only began proper in July 1961 and ceased entirely between June 1967 and March 1968.

The billing for the third episode carried the first-ever uncredited illustration of what the full street looked like although strangely it concentrated on the side of the thoroughfare on which the Mission of Glad Tidings and Elliston's Raincoat Factory stood rather than the terraced side. The first cast pictures - of William Roache and Noel Dyson - appeared the week after.

The first major feature on the programme was in the issue of 1st to 7th January 1961 when a double-page spread presented all of the major characters and cast over a schematic plan of the street showing where each person lived. For this reason Minnie Caldwell/Margot Bryant and Martha Longhurst/Lynne Carol were omitted. Ages were given for most of the characters (some slightly inaccurately) as well as the actors playing them and perhaps the article is most memorable for stating that Doris Speed was 43 years of age whereas in reality the actress was a month short of her 62nd birthday at the time.

The following week, the first letter about the programme appeared when Mr MacDonald Davidson of Bromley Crescent, Ashton-under-Lyne said:
 * "What an excellent and controversial serial Coronation Street has turned out to be. One national newspaper critic questions the authenticity of Tony Warren's writing by citing what to him is an original situation – "Someone mending a bicycle puncture in front of the living-room fire."
 * Who is out of touch?
 * From personal experience, I would say certainly not Tony Warren. That lad's got his facts reet!”

…and one week later A. Atkins of Roxburg Avenue, Higher Tranmere, Birkenhead echoed this praise stating:
 * My thanks and admiration for the serial Coronation Street. I really enjoyed it. It's real down-to-earth and good acting.

A note of criticism came the next week when Mrs E Slater of Norbury Street, Hyde said that although she enjoyed the programme, "because it is so true to life" Ena Sharples "makes my blood boil" because she, "is a spiteful gossip and a busybody" who was not at all like the people in the mission hall that she had belonged to for twenty-five years.

The week after that, the first major cast interview appeared. Violet Carson, already starting to be recognised as playing the most compulsive character on the programme was pictured under the heading, "I'm no dragon, says the terror of Coronation Street” and spoke of how she was already recognised on her daily train ride from Blackpool to Manchester and that she had been surrounded in a shop in Manchester a few days before by curious viewers.

As the year wore on and the programme gained larger audiences, it generated a steady stream of publicity and had its first cover with the issue of 23rd to 29th April 1961 with Violet Carson and Patricia Phoenix pictured in a composite photograph made to look as though Ena was lecturing a fed-up Elsie Tanner in the Rovers as Martha looked on (this cover featured in all regions that used TV Times for its billings except Anglia who chose to publicise an edition of their award-winning natural history show Survival instead).

Bv the end of the year, the programme was solidly at the top of the ratings and this was reflected by the publication of special eight-page pullout on the programme which was issued in two parts in the Christmas and New Year editions. Thereafter, coverage was steady with at least one cover about the programme for most years in the first few decades (although these were more sporadic in the 1970s and greater publicity and more covers as the soaps began to dominate the airwaves in the 1990s.

The magazine also published four “specials” devoted to the programme as follows:


 * Coronation Street Wedding Souvenir in 1967 for Elsie Tanner’s wedding to Steve Tanner.
 * 1000th Episode Souvenir in 1970 to mark that milestone for the programme.
 * There’s a Wedding in the Street to mark the 1977 wedding of Len Fairclough and Rita Littlewood
 * Coronation Street 2000 in 1980 to mark the passing of that episodic hurdle.

Further information
The following links give information on the coverage in the magazine in more detail. Not every mention of the programme, either in small single paragraph features or letters, is given although feature writers who themselves later contributed to the programme are credited where known, in the main Brian Finch, James Bryant and Tim Aspinall.


 * TV Times coverage in the 1960s
 * TV Times coverage in the 1970s
 * TV Times coverage in the 1980s
 * TV Times coverage in the 1990s
 * TV Times coverage in the 2000s
 * TV Times coverage in the 2010s