New Stamps For ITV’s 50th Birthday
ITV is 50 this year. Relatively, half a century isn’t all that long, but the mark the station has left on our 
culture is indelible.
Think back to 1955. Where were people getting their spoon-fed, slack-jawed entertainment from? The BBC? No, back then the BBC was presented entirely by relatives of The Queen, with their hair super-glued down and their spines replaced with metal rods. They had shows called things like The Discombobulating Hour and Now You Listen Here.
So when ITV came around with it’s flashing lights and shiny suits everybody loved it. Dumpy housewives from Cleethorpes could try and shoot a juggler in the knee with a bow and arrow to win three pence in their most popular gameshow, Give Me Cash.
And the formula hasn’t changed. 50 years later, the ITV schedules are full of screaming nonsense like Celebrity Love Island and Celebrity Wrestling and I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here.
We’re being unfair. ITV has produced some decent enough television in it’s time. Inspector Morse, The Sweeney, um, My Parents Are Aliens.
And to celebrate the birthday, the Royal Mail has commissioned a range of ITV stamps. But they’re mostly for shows that simply don’t reflect the channel. Emmerdale, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, Rising Damp, The Avengers. Where are the stamps for the huge, flashy, empty-souled programmes?
Can you think of more appropriate stamps that should have been commissioned? Catchphrase? The Young Doctors? Morecombe And Wise After They Left The BBC And Got Rubbish? Leave your suggestions below.
What about 22 differing stamps to showcase the america’s somethingest something programmes that ITV have shown over the years: Americas Funniest Home Videos, America’s Hardest Criminals, America’s Fastest Badgers, Americas Most Coked up Pimps etc (I may have made some of them up)
And always with that Sheriff John Rocket or whatever he’s called. You know. Looks like he might be from ‘back yonder’. Always doing traffic shows. I bet he can’t drive either after a bottle of bourbon. Smug bastard.
Not as bad as Alastair ‘LOOK AT THIS IDIOT’ Stewart, who, tanked up, drove his jag into a bush. PS – this fact assumes my memory is working correctly, but I think it was a Jag.
Lynching is too good once you crossover into the criminal fraternity in such a dastardly manner, as Stewart, arch-prodder, once did. Who said onanism was dead?