ITC Entertainment

Kermit the Frog strumming a banjo in a swamp, and a decrepit ocean liner heaved out of the Atlantic on a budget so vast its own owner joked it would have been cheaper to drain the sea — both belonged to the same company. ITC Entertainment was the film-and-television empire of Lew Grade, a Ukrainian-born former Charleston champion turned impresario who ran it like a market trader: charm, instinct, and a cigar the size of a rolling pin. For a quarter-century it was the most aggressively international outfit British entertainment ever produced, and its ambition on the cinema screen is exactly what destroyed it.

Grade co-founded the Incorporated Television Programme Company — the seed of ITC — in 1954, amid the scramble around the launch of British commercial television. From the start his genius was export. While rivals made programmes for Britain, Grade made them for America, shooting glossy filmed adventure series built to sell across the Atlantic. Through the 1960s ITC became a factory of transatlantic hits: The Saint with Roger Moore, Danger Man, the confounding cult classic The Prisoner, and Gerry Anderson's marionette spectaculars Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet. In the 1970s Grade did what no British network would risk, bankrolling Jim Henson's The Muppet Show after the American networks passed, and turning a cast of felt puppets into a global phenomenon.

The leap to the big screen

Emboldened, Grade pushed ITC into feature films, determined to build a British studio that could beat Hollywood at its own game. For a while it worked spectacularly. The Muppet Movie (1979) was both a delight and a hit; On Golden Pond (1981), whose financing Grade himself largely raised, won Academy Awards for Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn; ITC's slate also carried Alan J. Pakula's harrowing Sophie's Choice (1982) and Henson's The Dark Crystal (1982). These were serious, star-driven pictures — proof that a television man could make cinema of real weight.

But film financing is a gambler's trade, and the instinct that never failed Grade in television deserted him at scale. The catastrophe was Raise the Titanic (1980), a lumbering adventure whose costs swelled past thirty-five million dollars against a return a fraction of that. The wound was mortal, and Grade's own verdict became one of showbusiness's most quoted epitaphs.

It would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic.

The long absorption

The film losses hollowed out ITC's parent, the Associated Communications Corporation. In 1982 the Australian financier Robert Holmes à Court won control of ACC in a boardroom coup, and Lew Grade — the empire's founder and its soul — was pushed aside. ITC survived, but no longer as its own master. Over the following years it changed hands as a valuable but rootless catalogue, its real worth now the library rather than any new ambition. In 1995 the ITC Entertainment Group went to PolyGram for $156 million; when Universal's parent Seagram swallowed PolyGram in 1998, ITC went with it. The final act came in January 1999, when the library and the ITC name were sold to Carlton Communications, ending the company as an operating concern.

Carlton merged with Granada in 2004 to form ITV plc, and so the ITC vault — the Saint, the Prisoner, Thunderbirds, the Muppets' first cinema outing, an Oscar-laden drama on a New England lake — now rests with ITV Studios. ITC still matters because it proved a contrarian's point: that British television could conquer the world by refusing to think small. Grade's reach exceeded his grasp on the cinema screen, but the reach itself was the legacy. Few companies have failed so grandly, or left behind a catalogue so loved.