Following a tip-off from Andy Bennett, we’ve discovered that very, very sadly, the Student Television Of Imperial College is reported to have shut down in 2021.

This seems to have been as a result of the closure of college during COVID, and when it reopened, there just weren’t the existing members to introduce the new students to keep it going.

We’re grateful to Amanda Hertzberg who runs the ICTV Facebook page who gave us some updates. She told us that the ICTV members who were running it at the time of the COVID outbreak had graduated by the time college got back to normal, so there were not enough new people to keep it going. Jamie John, editor  of Felix 2023, confirmed that it is currently inactive:

It was active up until last year and played an important role in student events such as ICHack.

We heard from Matej, the last ICTV station manager. He said:

The reason ICTV shut down was that we were not able to find core officers for the year 22/23. I managed to convince 2 people but it was after the deadline, they were not members the previous year, and when I tried talking to the union about it, their response was that the club was shut down and the only thing we can do is to start a new club through their society incubator programme.

Since I came to Imperial in 2018 we were struggling with attracting people, we usually had about 3 active members. We had some events with good responses but we didn’t manage to keep people interested. It felt like whenever we got any momentum either the people who signed up were busy or we on the committee were really busy.

Somehow we survived but when covid came it all crumbled apart. We couldn’t do any in-person events and that was the only way we got the few people we had until then. We weren’t good at marketing our society on the internet or organizing online events and so ICTV withered away.

Up until 2021, it seems to have been involved in a variety of activities that will be all too familiar to alumni of the nineties as this news update shows:

The equipment and studio at the time looked to be pretty good.

With thanks to Amanda, DH and Matej for helping us with this update. Amanda and Matej are pictured here in a group photo in 2019

Matej added that recent programme making had been a lot of live coverage and making vids for other societies:

As far as I know ICTV stopped being a College TV and became more of a filmmaking society way before I or the station manager before me came to Imperial so we don’t really have programming or any real archive for the past while. We did live streams for ichack and varsity, worked for the union, filmed other societies events, and some short ads for student companies… most of that should be on youtube or a drive somewhere.

He added:

The old servers are still in the west basement and tapes are in Imperial Archives

 

 

RIP STOIC 1969 – 2021