Farewell, Then, Tyne Tees?

I am not too happy that the franchise might instead go to a consortium which seems to be largely American-backed. But it also includes the dear old University of Durham, so that's all right, then...

Tyne Tees has been going off the boil for quite a while. But then, so has ITV generally. ITV is commercial, yet somehow not quite part of the private sector, exactly. It has a unique position in the nation's life and hearts, hence that 3 button on every remote control in the land. To which it has no divine right. Which is to say, no divine right to exist at all.

Just how many people watch television on the Internet compared to the number of people who watch television on the television? Just which digital channel has anything remotely approaching ITV's viewing figures? And has no one noticed how massively dependent on terrestrial television is digital television for its content? Yet this immensely privileged commercial network expects public money to provide such basics as regional news, and children's programmes.

It is very high time to re-regionalise ITV under a combination of municipal and mutual ownership, and to apply that same model (but with central government replacing local government, subject to very strict parliamentary scrutiny) to Channel Four. I say again, there is no divine right to that 3 button. Nor, come to that, to the 4 button or the 5 button.

Meanwhile, it would be wrong to ignore just how influential Tyne Tees was in its day. The Tyneside-based media had a fit in June 2008 at the publication of Regional Identities in North East England, 1300-2000 (Boydell Press, £50), by Dr Adrian Green of Durham and Professor Tony Pollard of Teesside. Probably because it was only saying what everyone knew anyway: that the very term "the North East" did not occur before the nineteenth century.

Most significantly, it was only the creation of Tyne Tees Television in 1959 that even began to overcome the previously very sharp division at the Tyne between the two entirely distinct counties of Durham and Northumberland (each of which contained, and contains, significant local loyalties). Never mind, of course, that the "North East region" also contains Middlesbrough and its environs, complete with Yorkshire accents and a Yorkshire country cricket ground.

But unfortunately, Green and Pollard seemed rather taken with the dreadful "city regions" idea, although if one good thing might come out of the creation of unitary local government in Northumberland and in County Durham, it is that that effectively renders the city regions impossible. What those who want them mean is that they want the Cleveland and Tyne & Wear Metropolitan County Councils back. So why not just say so?