ITV News at Ten
flagship evening news programme on British television network ITV, produced by ITN and founded by news editor Geoffrey Cox in July 1967
ITV News at Ten (or more commonly News at Ten) is the flagship evening news programme on British television network ITV, produced by ITN and founded by news editor Geoffrey Cox on 3 July 1967. The bulletin was the first permanent 30-minute news broadcast in the United Kingdom, and although initially scheduled for only thirteen weeks due to fears that its length would turn viewers off, the bulletin proved to be highly popular with audiences and became a fixture of the ITV schedule.
News at Ten rose to popularity for its winning combination of in-depth, analytical news coverage and populist stories, as well as for its use of Big Ben's chimes to separate news headlines in its opening sequence. It simultaneously helped popularise newscasters such as Alastair Burnet, Andrew Gardner, Reginald Bosanquet, Sandy Gall, Anna Ford, John Suchet, Mark Austin, Alastair Stewart and Trevor McDonald into well-known television personalities.
When the bulletin was axed in 1999 in order for primetime entertainment programming to air uninterrupted, there was a public outcry. ITV reluctantly brought the programme back – under the name ITV News at Ten – in 2001, airing it at 10 pm for a minimum of three nights per week, but eventually replaced it with the ITV News at 10.30 in 2004. It was not until January 2008 that News at Ten was reinstated to the ITV schedule. The programme has been anchored by Tom Bradby since 2015.
History
1967 to 1999: the original run
ITN had been ITV's news provider since the channel's launch in September 1955. News updates from ITN tended to run 14 minutes in length at most, with no fixed broadcast time.
The public source identifies “ITV News at Ten” as flagship evening news programme on British television network ITV, produced by ITN and founded by news editor Geoffrey Cox in July 1967. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around News, flagship and evening.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q12957499. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1967, 1999, 2001 and 2004.
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This entry incorporates text from “ITV News at Ten” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.