Men & Motors

First Men & Motors logo, used from 1 October 1996 to 31 August 1998.

From its launch, Men & Motors was only available with subscription television services and for its first two-year on air, it shared space with Granada Plus and was on air each night from 11pm until 2am.

It was part of the original line-up (as a "primary channel") for ITV Digital, a Digital terrestrial television service part-owned by Granada. This saw its broadcast hours expand and it came on air at the earlier time of 9pm, with motors content before 11 pm, and adult content thereafter.

When ONdigital closed, Men & Motors left DTT, and was then available only via satellite and cable.

Second Men & Motors logo, used from 1 September 1998 to 11 August 2001.

The channel really took off after the appointment of Gary Shoefield as director of programming. He quickly set about changing the presenters and the look and feel and took responsibility for both the acquisitions and the newly produced programmes.

Shoefield brought Jordan (Katie Price) to the Adult part of the channel along with Jo Guest, Catherine McQueen, Mike Reid, Roy "Chubby" Brown, Garry Bushell and James Whale.

Names that joined the Motors team included Gary Numan, Vanilla Ice, Ginny Buckley, Richard Hammond, John Inverdale, Foo Foo Lammar (in a section titled Hot Agony Aunt)[2] and Princess Tamara. The channel saw huge growth under Shoefield's control, and Men and Motors became a household name until November 2004, when ITV acquired GSkyB and rebranded the ill-fated Plus as ITV3.

Many years after the closure of ITV Digital, ITV (the company formed by the merger of Carlton Television and Granada) successfully bid for a slot on digital terrestrial (DTT) multiplex D. It was announced that Men & Motors would be launched on Freeview on 2 May 2005. To coincide with this launch, the channel was re-vamped, and its late night, risqué adult content was replaced by archive drama, comedy and documentaries. The channel also dropped its Videoguard encryption on Sky Digital on 1 July 2005, switching to free-to-air status.

ITV's plans to launch a channel aimed at men (the target audience of Men & Motors) were considered by many to be the end for Men & Motors. It seemed logical that Men & Motors would simply "become" ITV4, with much of the channel's programming simply being shown under the ITV brand. With capacity on the Freeview platform limited, and to avoid being in competition for the same genre of viewers, this seemed the inevitable conclusion.

However, available to a much wider audience, Men & Motors enjoyed a (slightly unexpected) sharp increase in viewing figures. ITV were faced with the conundrum of replacing a channel with a well-known brand and enjoying a new popularity with a new, seemingly identical channel. ITV4 instead replaced the ITV News Channel on Freeview (between its broadcasting hours of 18:00 to 06:00), with Men & Motors still available on its own 24-hour slot. The News channel closed soon after, due to major competition from Sky News and BBC News 24 and heavy financial losses. It was replaced fully by ITV4 and the CITV Channel.

Men & Motors closedown slide on Freeview.

After less than a year on Freeview, Men & Motors had now been replaced. At 06:00 BST on 12 April 2006, Men & Motors ceased transmissions on digital terrestrial television. This was to allow ITV to launch the "participation television" channel, ITV Play, which has since been closed down itself. With limited bandwidth on the platform, and a desire to keep the entire ITV "family" (i.e. all channels carrying the ITV brand) on the free platform, Men & Motors was only available on satellite and cable television at the time of its closure.

A possible merger with ITV4 had been on the cards, but in September 2007 ITV confirmed that it planned to dispose of Men & Motors.[3]

On 2 April 2010, ITV1 HD launched on Sky Digital channel 178, replacing Men & Motors. As a result, Men & Motors closed on 1 April at 6 a.m. on both Freesat and Sky Digital. On Virgin Media, Men & Motors was removed from the EPG on 25 March 2010 for "operational reasons" to add an ITV HD launch information screen. Most of the programmes that were shown on Men & Motors moved over to ITV4.[4]