We’ll increase the spin-offs from ITV1, continue use of Champions League [football] and use it as a second chance to see popular soaps. From next year, ITV2 will show more movies.”Freeview, the successor to ITV Digital, will add 1 million multichannel homes when it resurrects digital terrestrial television this week, providing more than 20 free extra stations, including ITV2 but not Sky One, to anyone willing to buy a £99 decoder box. The aim of the BBC, which now runs digital terrestrial, is to have 5 million homes in the next five years. In addition, ITV2 and Sky One are available to Sky’s 6.3 million subscribers and all homes with cable.A recent research report from Neil Blackley, a Merrill Lynch analyst, said: “There is room for a fourth commercial network, which could be done by Sky forging closer links with Channel 5, or ITV2. The benefits to ITV from cross marketing are considerable, and if ITV doesn’t do it, then their single channel could be a lot more vulnerable in the future.”ITV2 has a programming budget of just £30m a year.
This will be increased for next year, though, as the channel does not show original programming, the figures will not be large The station instead depends on repeats It also has Champions League until the end of 2006.. PAUL WELLSTONE came across as a natural Minnesotan politician, staunchly liberal, close to the union movement, and possessed of a burning sympathy for the less fortunate in life. In fact, he was a transplant, son of an immigrant father who had fled Russia to escape the persecution of the Jews, and raised in the suburbs of Washington DC. Paul David Wellstone, politician: born Washington DC 21 July 1944; US Senator 1991-2002; married 1963 Sheila Ison (two sons, one daughter); died Eveleth, Minnesota 25 October 2002. But in that land of German and Scandinavian immigrants, steeped in Nordic civic-mindedness and decency, he quickly felt at home.By the time of his death, the diminutive, voluble and unquenchably energetic Wellstone had established himself as linear descendant of those liberal Minnesotan titans Eugene McCarthy and Walter Mondale (who might well be enlisted as his emergency replacement as Democratic Senate candidate on 5 November) – not to mention the original “Happy Warrior” of American politics, Hubert Horatio Humphrey.HHH, Vice-President during Wellstone’s college years at the height of the civil-rights movement, was a massive influence on the future Senator.
More than any of his Senate colleagues, Wellstone was recognisably a child of the 1960s. Like Humphrey he was a happy warrior, modest and with an unflagging, self-deprecating sense of humour. He also shared Humphrey’s habit of talking too much.But he was a brilliant campaigner – a skill never more evident than when he pulled off one of the great upsets in modern Congressional history to beat the sitting Republican Senator Rudy Boschwitz in November 1990, on a shoestring budget. Wellstone’s campaign ads were some of the funniest in memory, and fitted perfectly the quirky, independent spirit of the North Star state.In the Senate Wellstone was its most liberal member, as he liked to put it, “from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party”, who did not hesitate to accuse Bill Clinton of selling the party’s soul. Soon after he was elected, he described Jesse Helms, the curmudgeonly Republican conservative from North Carolina, as “everything to me that is ugly and wrong and awful about politics”.Over the years, Wellstone would mellow. He led some notable bipartisan initiatives with ideological foes like Sam Brownback of Kansas, and was one of the most liked and respected members of the Senate club – “a decent, genuine guy”, in the words of the former Republican majority leader Bob Dole.
A tower of strength was Wellstone’s wife Sheila, his high-school sweetheart and the other half of one of Congress’s most admired domestic political partnerships – and who died with her husband and their daughter in a plane crash on Friday, on the way to a funeral.Never did Wellstone lose the courage of his convictions. Hardly had he arrived in the Senate in 1991 than he was voting against the Gulf War to drive Saddam from Kuwait. This month, he was the only Senate Democrat facing a tough re-election fight to vote against authorising President George W Bush to use force against Saddam Hussein. Predictably, Wellstone’s adopted Minnesotans were not bothered in the slightest.Rupert Cornwell. IT’S APPROPRIATE that of the not infrequent – and he admitted – terrible movies of Richard Harris’s non-stop career, one of the most memorable titles should be Wrestling Ernest Hemingway (1994).
