Kevin Lygo lifts lid on ITV masterplan

Head of factual entertainment Sue Murphy is now in place, enabling director of television Lygo to meet with all three of his new non-scripted lieutenants for the first time on Monday (16 May).

Lygo, Murphy, head of comedy entertainment Peter Davey and head of entertainment Shu Greene are mapping out the channel’s strengths and weaknesses, and Lygo said he was planning to shift the channel’s non-scripted tone.

“I see ITV as primarily an entertainment channel. An enjoyable, happy experience is always a good thing. After a hard day’s work, you want ITV to be uplifting.”

He said entertainment would begin to bleed into the midweek schedule and that it could be given prestige slots.

“We never play entertainment at 9pm in the week – why not? We haven’t got enough money to run drama every night. We’ve tried lots of factual and it’s really tough.”

Those weekday shows will largely be the responsibility of Davey, while Greene is tasked with strengthening or reinvigorating ITV’s existing entertainment juggernauts, and handling the launch of The Voice.

Another focus will be establishing confident non-scripted returners. Lygo highlighted the job that shows such as Hell’s Kitchen and Holidays From Hell have done in the past, and summed up the challenge: “If you went onto the street and asked people about ITV shows that play before 9pm and aren’t soaps, they would struggle to latch onto distinctive, returning series.”

Lygo is keen to find the ITV equivalent of pre-watershed BBC1 shows such as MasterChef, The Great British Bake Off and Watchdog, and said he is prepared to “take some bigger bets”.

“We need to give shows longer runs, to test them, to try to make them work. In the plethora of choice facing a viewer, it’s really hard for a nice thing tucked away on a Monday night to cut through.

“If we say to viewers ‘this is what we want to do, it’s here for eight weeks, look at the trails’, then the confidence of the channel behind these shows transmits to the viewer.”

Lygo’s strategy is to revisit classic areas with a modern approach and to reimagine emerging trends through the prism of a mainstream British channel.

In the first case, he pointed out: “ITV doesn’t have a food programme. That’s fine if you’ve lifted every rock in the country and can’t find one – but I don’t suspect we’ve done that.”

On finding ITV’s take on topical moments, he added: “Take crime docs, and the success you see on the fringes of things, like The Jinx and Making A Murderer – what is the modern way of doing that for ITV? Is it through Trevor McDonald or Piers Morgan? How are we going to tell these stories of everyday hideousness? Let’s get a plan together, pick our producers and run with it in a coherent way.”