Media Forum: Are ITV plans an alarm call?(Channel 4)(Five)

Should ITV's merger proposals rattle the industry, Alasdair Reid asks.

So it has come to this. By rights, ITV's Armageddon proposal should have been wildly entertaining. Last week, the results of some executive blue-sky thinking, namely that ITV merge with both Channel 4 and Five to create one huge commercial broadcasting corporation, began filtering out of the office of the executive chairman, Sir Michael Grade.

In the normal course of events, we might have gleefully seized on such a notion as an excuse to imply that the poor old thing was surely in danger of losing his marbles. Or that his executive team had been partaking of a recreational smoking mixture.

But these are extraordinary times. The proposal would, of course, comprise the biggest shake-up in the UK TV business since ... well, the start of commercial broadcasting itself. And clearly, any sort of triple alliance of this nature would pose huge cultural and regulatory problems.

But desperate times call for desperate measures. ITV, one could argue, faces a scary future. Channel 4 is talking about co-operation with the BBC, while Five is part of a powerful multinational in the form of RTL.

ITV's friends and well-wishers tend to be based in the investment community of the City of London. And with friends like these, it has every right to feel nervous. So perhaps we should welcome the outrageously exotic nature of Grade's proposals.

Because they might help drive home the point that, if we don't embrace a bit of radical thinking while we still can, we could be on the verge of losing mainstream commercial broadcasting in this country, once and for all.