Looking back, it's safe to say that UK-produced history programming was booming in 2000. Producers were tapping into newly available technologies and creating innovative ways to tell stories from the past - and they were drawing big audiences. But, as quickly as programs started to illustrate history with expensive dramatizations (such as Elizabeth), impressive CGI recreations (like the BBC's Pompeii) and reality-style formats (Wall to Wall's 1900 House), some producers and broadcasters began to sense the market had become oversaturated with cheaper reproductions, and disillusioned audiences began to disappear.

Now, six years later, both terrestrial broadcasters and producers are looking at different approaches to bring back the excitement. Thing is, the broadcast landscape has changed somewhat. Consider ITV's recent move to shutter its Bristol-based history office for what a channel spokesman called "commercial reasons." Granted, the corporate ups and downs at this top UK terrestrial have been well documented over the past few months (from an attempted buyout last year by Greg Dyke to its chief executive Charles Allen's departure this past summer), and the broadcaster appears to be reorganizing its priorities in order to stay alive in the competitive British market. But it is telling that ITV's history department was one of the first items on the chopping block.

Like most British producers, Anthony Geffen, EP at London-based Atlantic Productions, plays down the affect of ITV's departure from the history scene, saying producers in the UK have known for a while that the broadcaster was looking for more commercially viable one-offs, such as last November's The Gunpowder Plot. (The program used CGI to recreate Guy Fawkes' plan to blow up the British Houses of Parliament.) "ITV was really only known for its sensational history telling," says Geffen.

But this development does reduce the number of available commissioning opportunities for local producers, who must now look for more innovative ways to break into fewer broadcasting hours. Mark Fielder, executive producer at Bristol-based Quickfire Media, admits there has been some tailing off in commissioning, and that broadcasters are increasingly interested in reaching broad audiences with iconic topics that can carry the show. "In a way, I think that's a dangerous thing," says Fielder. "It tends to limit the range of programming that can be made, as well as the potential of a story."

Although he hasn't been scaling back on commissions, Ralph Lee, history commissioning editor at Channel 4, says he's stripping back on some of what he calls "clichéd approaches to history," such as dramatic recreations, which have been underfunded and under-realized in the last three or four years. He's still eager to work with dialog-driven drama, but only in larger form where money is spent on the acting and the scripts so it's created "at a level where it isn't embarrassing."