Channel 5

Channel 5 is a British commercial television network. Which launched on 30 march 1997, and was the fifth national terrestrial analogue network in the United Kingdom. Originally the channel was supposed to have been launched much earlier but a lack of bidders (including one from Thames Television and the Italian politician and media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi) along with difficulties with the project lay in use of television broadcast frequencies that had been allocated to RF outputs from domestic videocassette recorders. Which meant to achieve national coverage, a large numbers of domestic video recorders had to be retuned or fitted with a filter, at the bidding company’s expense.

The channel’s launched at 6 pm featuring the Spice Girls singing a re-written version of Manfred Mann’s hit “5-4-3-2-1” as “1-2-3-4-5”. Presenters Tim Vine and Julia Bradbury introduced the nation to channel with half-an-hour of previews. In 2002 the channel rebranded as “Five” as part of the evolution in the channel which underwent a revised line up of programming which lead to many originally programmes being dropped.

In 2010 Richard Desomd – Northern & Shell, become the new owner and subsequently made it clear he prefer Channel 5 to Five. Which resulted in the new brand appearing on 14 February 2011. In 2015 Desmond sold off the company at a profit to Viacom who introduced new branding on 11 February 2016.