Timing is everything in television. As they contemplate leaving their Norman Foster-designed headquarters in Gray’s Inn Road for the old 1970s LWT building on the South Bank of the Thames, senior executives of ITV must wish they could go back in time as easily as they go across the river.

The heyday of the UK’s main commercial broadcaster saw it unchallenged, its franchises all effectively monopolies. As Roy, later Lord, Thomson said when discussing his Southern Television franchise, it was “a licence to print money”.