Mick Desmond, joint managing director of ITV, said it was a great appointment.”He has a wealth of experience in commercial broadcasting plus a successful track record in both children’s and multichannel television, two of the most competitive areas of the business,” he said.Sources at ITV say executives soon realised that talks to recruit Sky’s new manager Dawn Airey had diverted them from the task of finding someone to sort out programmes – a job that many regarded as a poisoned chalice given the turbulence likely to be caused by the long-awaited Carlton-Granada merger.”They went back to basics and Nigel was very much their first choice. They approached him about three weeks ago,” one insider said.Nick Elliott, ITV’s head of drama, said he was genuinely delighted that Mr Pickard was returning and dismissed suggestions that Mr Pickard did not have the necessary experience “Children’s is a little network of its own They do entertainment, they do drama, they do daytime He’s ideal. I’m amazed that his name didn’t come up before,” he said.”He is very much his own man. He might give the impression of being shambling but he’s got his own opinions, which is terribly important.”ITV hopes Mr Pickard will start work early in the new year, with daytime television likely to be one of the first areas to be addressed.He will be swiftly thrust into the limelight, tackling the demanding task of reassuring advertisers and producers that ITV is on the way back up.His appointment was being billed as a welcome addition to the partnership of David Bergg, ITV’s well-respected scheduler, and Jim Hytner, its marketing guru who is about to unveil a new image for the network.Yesterday’s announcement ends a saga that began three months ago with Mr Liddiment’s decision to quit.ITV identified Ms Airey, then chief executive of Channel 5, as the person they wanted to succeed him. But she made clear that the job was not big enough and immediately began talks about the vacant chief executive’s chair at ITV instead. ITV was then forced to start the search all over again after she unexpectedly accepted an offer from Sky.. A more negative picture of family life is shown by EastEnders than any other soap opera, because it shows “warring” characters frequently engaged in serious conflict and rarely having a happy moment, research says today.

Other soaps tend to consign youngsters to the background, or refer to them as burdens.The Archers has the most upper or middle-class characters, more married couples than the national average, and the least amount of family conflict out of the four soaps studied during one month. The report says most scenes in EastEnders portray families in some kind of conflict, with members at odds with each other as well as other families.”Almost all the characters were strongly predisposed to negativity and showed little restraint in giving vent to ill-temper or in pursuing anti-social courses of action.” Conflicts spread and often led to violence.It adds: “While some conflicts did appear to be resolved, resolution was rarely complete or permanent. At the slightest hint of a ‘happily ever after’ ending, it was as though a bad fairy lurking in the workings gleefully sprang back to life and steered the warring family back to their customary game of ‘unhappy families’.”Childless couples were under-represented by all the programmes and only Coronation Street showed a realistic number of single people.. One of the boys expelled for making death threats against a teacher has agreed not to return to the school. A spokesman said: “Our members are very angry at the thought that these two boys could be readmitted to the school.”We hope the local authority will take note of the anger on the ground over this case. The threats made by the boys were completely inexcusable.”The council refused to comment on the threat of industrial action by the GMB.

“What eventually happens will depend on the course of action agreed between the local education authority and the parents,” a spokesman said.The education authority has yet to allocate a place to the boy who has agreed not to return to the school.The second family still want their son to be readmitted.The boys – now in their GCSE exam year – were expelled in June for making a series of abusive phone calls, including death threats, to Steve Taverner, a teacher who had disciplined them for throwing stones at a window.But their parents appealed to an independent panel which ruled last month that the boys should return. The panel concluded that the headteacher had not followed the expulsion procedures correctly, that the threats had not been serious and that it was important that the boys’ studies were not disrupted.The school’s teachers refused to have the boys in their lessons when they returned this month.Instead the pair had to be taught in a separate classroom by a supply teacher.The boys are now being taught at home after Estelle Morris, the Secretary of State for Education, intervened and demanded the boys be removed from the school.Mr Taverner’s union, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, has voted to take industrial action if the teenagers are allowed back.. An elite group of “Ivy League” universities would be allowed to charge top-up fees of up to £6,000 a year to students under government proposals for a shake-up of higher education to be unveiled next month. The universities, which have argued for a huge increase in state support to meet government targets on student numbers, will anxiously scrutinise the document to see if their appeals for extra funding have succeeded.Most contentious among the options would be allowing institutions to charge extra tuition fees. While a graduate tax would raise substantial sums, it would take years for the Treasury to recoup the extra money spent on students.