Greg Dyke, the BBC director general, said that he wanted them to join with the BBC along with Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB, according to an interview in The Observer newspaper.
"We'd have happily brought ITV into the deal, but they didn't want to come. They wanted to control the channel line-up, which was unreasonable, and we didn't want that. We would have offered them two or three slots. You could say they cut off their noses to spite their face," Dyke told the paper.
Earlier this year, Dyke laid into his commercial rivals about their failure to act over the collapse of ITV Digital. Dyke said at the time that Granada should not take all the blame for what happened to ITV Digital -- just half of it.
"We are living in funny times. In the old days, if they lost an awful lot of their shareholders' money, generals fell on their swords. These days it's much more common for the generals to award themselves more share options while thrusting their swords into trusted lieutenants," he said.
There is no love lost between Dyke and Granada. As the former managing director of the London weekend ITV franchise LWT, he failed in his bid to fend off a hostile Granada takeover bid in 1994.
The LWT chief executive at the time was Sir Christopher Bland, who last year as outgoing BBC chairman helped secure Dyke the top job at the BBC.
According to sources quoted by the paper, the ITV companies turned the offer down because they would have been given too few channels under the consortium arrangements. The ITV firms wanted to run their own show.
The ITV companies also disagree on a strategic level with the BBC. The corporation was proposing, initially at least, a free-to-air service while the ITV/Channel 4 bid included some pay-TV elements.
Prior to the new licence being awarded, Dyke said that the downfall of ITV Digital showed clearly that the future of terrestrial digital television was in offering a free-to-air service rather than a pay one.
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