CITV

» see itv.com/citv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

CITV is older than I am, which is not something I get to say about much of what ends up on this site. It was also never available to me in any form. British terrestrial children's programming was a licensing question and a transmitter question, and neither of those reached Ankara. What I had after school was TRT, and later the private Turkish channels with whatever cartoons they had bought that year.

The name covers two different things. From 29 December 1980 ITV ran its children's output under a strand called Watch It!, renamed Children's ITV on 3 January 1983 and shortened to CITV later on. For twenty-three years it was not a channel at all. It was a continuity identity: a set of idents and a block of hours on the main network, held together by a presenter talking to camera between programmes.

The standalone CITV Channel launched on digital on 11 March 2006. Its opening week averaged 33,000 viewers with a 2.5 percent share of the children's audience, peaking at 51,000 in the half hour after four thirty, and that is roughly the shape it kept for seventeen years. The largest number it ever posted was 578,000, for a Danger Mouse special on 6 January 2013 marking thirty years of the brand.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

The commissioning record is the part that traveled. Horrid Henry came out of CITV, along with Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids and the animated Mr. Bean. Thunderbirds Are Go was a CITV commission in 2015, and Sooty moved there after decades elsewhere. Some of that turned up on Turkish television years afterward, dubbed and stripped of any indication where it had come from, which is how most foreign children's programming arrived.

That is the honest shape of the distance. I have no memory of the channel, the idents, or the voice between programmes, which is the part British people my age actually mourn. What crossed the border was the catalog, late and unattributed.

~ the day it died ~

ITV announced the closure on 10 March 2023 and framed it as a move rather than a cut, with children's content going to streaming. ITVX Kids launched on 22 July. The last regular children's slot on the main ITV channel went out on 27 August. The channel itself closed on 1 September 2023 at nine in the evening, after an episode of The Rubbish World of Dave Spud called Moonbreaker.

A CITV block appeared on ITV2 the next morning and ran until 10 April 2026, which is when the name stopped being attached to anything scheduled. The reasoning behind all of it is not mysterious. A children's channel is a promise that something good will be on at a particular time, and the promise stopped being worth much once the audience could summon any episode it wanted from a menu. Forty years is a long run for a promise built that way.

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