Liddiment steps down after five years in the job. The former Granada UK Broadcasting managing director succeeded Marcus Plantin.
Commenting on his decision, Liddiment said: "It's well known that I have loved this job more than any other in my career. It's the job I always wanted and I have enjoyed it immensely. To give it up has been has been an extremely difficult decision, but after five years I feel that it is time to hand over the reins and move on."
He added: "I am incredibly proud of the team at ITV and I shall miss working with them enormously. Quite simply, I believe we have the best commissioning and scheduling team in British television, and I am leaving ITV in extremely capable hands. I am also proud to have been associated with some of the most exciting, high-quality and creative programmes of recent years and for that I thank the many producers, writers and performers who have contributed so much during my time at ITV."
Liddiment was responsible for commissioning and scheduling ITV's network programming, as well as being responsible for ITV's performance.
During his time at ITV, he has overseen the commissioning of major hit shows including 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire?', 'Popstars', 'Pop Idol', 'Bad Girls', 'At Home with the Braithwaites' and 'Cold Feet' and award-winning critical successes including 'The Murder of Stephen Lawrence', 'Bloody Sunday', 'Kelly and Her Sisters', 'Tonight with Trevor McDonald' and 'Othello'. Over the past five years, he has worked with his commissioning team to bring a host of new talent to the channel, including Des Lynam, Robson Green, Sarah Lancashire, Ross Kemp, Martin Kemp, Harry Hill, Frank Skinner, Lily Savage and Ant and Dec.
His departure comes after years of constant attack as advertisers and the industry complained about ITV's declining audiences, which have fuelled inflation in the TV advertising airtime market.
Speaking earlier this year to Marketing magazine, he said: "For ITV the network, it's been a challenging year -- a year of great programming, great creativity, and rich with its particular challenges. As the market gets more complex and the behaviour of our competition changes, the ironic thing is that it makes the job even more interesting."
He is the second senior departure this year, following the exit of Maureen Duffy, ITV1 controller of daytime, who fell on her sword over the network's lacklustre performance in daytime.
At the time, Liddiment said he was not about to follow Duffy's example and quit, but admitted that ITV's performance in daytime was not good enough. He told Marketing: "Our decline in daytime is driven by two factors. One, we lost 'Home and Away' two years ago and to date we've not found the programme with the capability to deliver comparable performance. Two, we have been losing audience over the past two years, but that has accelerated since we lost Richard and Judy early in the year. So we're putting a lot of energy into restoring some of our losses in daytime, but we're not doing so at the expense of maintaining a competitive proposition in peak."
Liddiment has a background in TV production, having worked as the head of light entertainment at the BBC, as well as director of programmes at Granada and executive producer of 'Coronation Street'.
He played a key role in delivering series such as 'Band of Gold', 'Mrs Merton' and 'Stars in their Eyes'.
Last year saw ITV1 narrowly beaten by BBC One for the first time as ITV failed to meet any of its own performance benchmarks for 2001 and continues to perform poorly in daytime schedules.
Mick Desmond, ITV joint managing director, said: "We entirely understand David's decision to move on after five years in one of television's biggest jobs. The careful timing gives us the opportunity to put in place the right structures and processes that will drive the ITV fight-back forward in the coming years. David's successor will build on the strong autumn 2002 schedule and the significant additional investment in original programming for 2003 that has been committed."
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