CITV is dead. As of today, it has been collapsed into a streaming submenu and renamed ITVX Kids. It is only right that things should move with the times, but it is an ignoble end for one of ITV’s most enduring brands.
Introduced in 1983 as Children’s ITV, first as a slab of daily after-school programming and then as a standalone channel, CITV was always smaller and scrappier than its BBC counterpart, CBBC. But that was its charm. For years, schoolchildren could easily be identified by whether they watched CBBC or CITV at home; the former may have been better behaved, but the latter were always more fun.
