Christine Bleakley, could have had it all at the BBC, but went off to a disastrous breakfast show and an ailing dancing show.
By 'all' I presume you mean still presenting The One Show and probably some rubbish Saturday Light Entertainment. She'd probably have done Britain's Brightest.
Christine Bleakley, could have had it all at the BBC, but went off to a disastrous breakfast show and an ailing dancing show. The woman is like a presenting version of Julie Graham, noted for the ratings flop Bonekickers, messing up The Survivors and seeing it killed off, and then joining The Bill and seeing it being axed.
I suspect in all the cases you quote it actually had nothing to do with Julie Graham but the writers and producers and programme schedulers. I doubt one actor could have that much influence on a single programme.
In the case of Christine Bleakley she flew in the face of advice from her experienced agent (in fact sacked him) who advised against the move, had no journalistic experience and was just the wrong sort of person for a breakfast show but I think you can blame the ITV management for that.It didn't help that she was always complaining about getting up early and sported a huge engagement ring which probably did not go down well with single mothers on sink estates.
I imagine that ITV have a larger proportion of 18-49 year olds than BBC1 in their ratings.
Would be interesting to see the actual demographic breakdown since a straight numbers comparison of such radically different channels no longer makes any sense.
I don't have 18-49 ratings, but apart from that there are any number of ways of slicing and dicing the figures. Any particular requests? Here are some some demos for the rugby and Britain's Brightest yesterday:
I suspect in all the cases you quote it actually had nothing to do with Julie Graham but the writers and producers and programme schedulers. I doubt one actor could have that much influence on a single programme.
In the case of Christine Bleakley she flew in the face of advice from her experienced agent (in fact sacked him) who advised against the move, had no journalistic experience and was just the wrong sort of person for a breakfast show but I think you can blame the ITV management for that.It didn't help that she was always complaining about getting up early and sported a huge engagement ring which probably did not go down well with single mothers on sink estates.
The BBC were lining her up for the Olympics, The One Show was catching up Emmerdale in the ratings, but she blew it by going to Daybreak. However, Julie Graham does seem to be curse.
C4 have won the rights to the 2014 Winter and 2016 Summer Paralympics, pledging 45 hours of the former and 500 of the latter (200 of which will be on C4 and it's other stations).
Yes, and as Adam Hills pointed out on The Last Leg (which was far better as a fifty minute show as it actually seemed to have time to actually do stuff in depth, but still suffers from going at all the same subjects as 8 Out Of 10 Cats right before it), that's the first time any British TV channel has ever covered the Winter Paralympics. Be interesting to see how they cover that, the Winter Olympics themselves don't get that much coverage. I assume it'd probably get three or four hours in daytime then a highlights show.
Sure, Pointless has regained the teatime crown as expected but with BBC1 so far in front of ITV in terms of audience share now, you wouldn't expect an ITV daily to be beating a BBC daily from the same genre in a head-to-head, especially when you factor in the effect of the commercials and also BBC News at Six viewers tuning in early. Even if The Chase is the better show of the two and of course that's open to debate anyway, those two factors are always going to make it difficult for them to win these kind of battles in the long-term.
Well, you may be interested to know I did the Robbie test while walking to the chippy on Friday teatime and I can confirm that on my street, The Choice is beating Pointless 2:1, albeit based on three houses that had their curtains open and a telly you could see from the street. I don't see why The Chase would be doomed to always come second, though, especially at teatime when surely adverts don't have much impact because you welcome breaks to get the tea on and stuff.
Universal dislike for Mark Wahlberg on The Graham Norton Show tonight. Be intersting to see the AI figure to see if he creeps down towards Daybreak territory. And a breakdown of the ratings to see if there was a lot of going to bed early.
I don't see why that would be the case, Wahlberg was clearly a bit pissed but not to the extent he dominated the entire programme or made it unwatchable. And surely any dip you got from people turning off because he was a bit of an arse is offset by those staying tuned to see if he got even more pissed. Graham dealt with it perfectly well. If there was a dip in the ratings it might well be because none of the guests were really that famous.
I can see a strong night for BBC1 next Tuesday with ITV networking a football match of little interest to viewers in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Celtic, no interest in Northern Ireland? Half of Northern Ireland, maybe. That's not right, I know Celtic vs Rosenberg didn't do much at the start of the season but Celtic were playing the least glamorous opposition imaginable, Juventus are a massively famous club. And there's interest in Celtic across the UK, when they used to show the Old Firm games on the Beeb a decade ago they got very good ratings. As mentioned, Man U and Liverpool fans, especially the latter, probably have more affection to Celtic than they do to Chelsea or Arsenal.
He's still really to break out on ITV but something like Catchphrase could work for him - I think people forget that compared to his peers Roy Walker was a bit bland, bordering on charmless.
Yeah, it's worth remembering the game shows hosts in the past were not particularly famous, and that was the case with Roy Walker, he was a stand-up who'd been on The Comedians and variety but he wasn't a big star, and rightly so because in those days the format was the star, not the host. And Walker was pretty bland, I mean "It's good but it's not right" sums it up, it's hardly "nice to see you", is it? Mulhern is pretty useless, though.
Thanks - that was what I was kind of thinking but surely there is room for both in the market and basically if a show is funny, it's funny - regardless of how many cameras they use.
League of Gentlemen had a laughter track before dropping in series 3,
Series one of League of Gentlemen was fimed in front of a studio audience. Of course today's writers all want to do single camera stuff because multi-camera audience fare is considered vulgar and simplistic, and everyone wants to pretend they're making films, but like there are good and bad panel games, there are good and bad multi-camera sitcoms.
And many shows with obvious jokes suffer from not having audience laughter, people moan that they're getting "told when to laugh" but if there are obvious laugh lines in the script they benefit from the atmosphere of a live audience. In David Mitchell's autobiography he talks about the sitcom pilot they made for C4 in 2000 - which was broadcast but went no further - and he says that when they did it at the C4 Sitcom Festival it had a live audience and worked, but when they did it on the telly it didn't and didn't work, because it was broad and silly and so needed it.
But is that a healthy philosophy for ITV to have? Should they really be continuing to play Dancing on Ice to ever diminishing returns rather than trying to strike out with something new? Its not like they couldn't revive Dancing on Ice a year or two down the line if things go horribly wrong. If they just run it into the ground now that won't be an option.
Indeed, and it's something they used to do. I'm sure they could have got a couple more years out of Gladiators but they decided to axe it while it was still puling in OK but declining figures. I've said this before too but in 1998, they moved Blind Date from starting in September to starting in November so they could use the slot where it used to be to try some new shows out to eventually replace it, like Moment of Truth. Of course, they couldn't find any, but the thought was there.
It's also a bit like when Game For A Laugh ended in 1985 - only four years after it started - because it was clearly flagging but rather than flog it until nobody was left watching, they revamped it and it became Beadle's About.
Well if it comes out of the programme budget I can immediately save the BBC £50,000. Surely licence payers' money should not be spent on giving people prizes in tacky quiz and game shows ?
As mentioned, £50,000 over a six week series is nothing, about eight grand a week which is about as much as they give away on an average week of Pointless.
Anyway, though I've stuck with the whole run I don't think it's been that good, it hasn't been as spectacular as it should have been or thinks it is (here's a round for series two, count how many times Clare Balding says "sensational" in an episode).
If it reminds me of anything it's Friends Like These in terms of the range of games it includes - in fact, that show had the round when they'd be trained up to improve their memory or identify different wines, which would have fitted in alright in this format. And too many of the games, especially in the last two shows, seemed to be very easy to win via guesswork and luck rather than intelligence. The match the couples round last night was a great example, it had nothing to do with "emotional intelligence", they'd have got the same result just picking numbers.
There have been too many unsatisfying aspects - even the multi-tasking game, which was the most interesting in the early shows, was less sensational (as Clare would have it) as it went on as people started getting used to it.
That said, I thought it was always going to beat Nanny McPhee as I don't think that was big enough a film for primetime. I didn't even know it existed.
I cannot put into words how anti-moving the soaps back to Sunday I am. I can see that there's logic to it but at the same time it feels so counterproductive and lazy.
But I don't see how much lazier it is compared to now when you've got the traffic jam of soaps on a weeknight. If you moved an hour of soaps to Sunday then the huge benefit is that you're losing an hour midweek which provides far more variety and choice for audiences. If you lost the Thursday 8pm Emmerdale and the Friday 8.30 Corrie not only would there be scope for ITV to put something different there but also it would mean BBC1 could put something substantial in opposition rather than just fillers. It's a win-win. And ITV could be more daring on a Sunday too as they have the soaps providing a better lead-in for new shows.
Clearly it would better to move an hour of soap from a weeknight and not put it anywhere but rather put it on Sunday where there's space than keep it on a weeknight and write off the entire pre-watershed schedule. The lazy thing is doing six episodes of Emmerdale a week in the first place.
Well, you may be interested to know I did the Robbie test while walking to the chippy on Friday teatime and I can confirm that on my street, The Choice is beating Pointless 2:1, albeit based on three houses that had their curtains open and a telly you could see from the street. I don't see why The Chase would be doomed to always come second, though, especially at teatime when surely adverts don't have much impact because you welcome breaks to get the tea on and stuff.
I'm sure when we've seen the breakdowns for The Chase and Pointless we have seen that Pointless gets a big boost in the last five minutes as people tune in for the Six O'Clock News. Tune in early and they can see the jackpot round at the end of Pointless. It's like when Magic Roundabout and the like used to get big ratings at the end of Kids' TV because the adults were tuning in early for the News (and enjoying a comedy that was a lot funnier and more intelligent than most grown-up sitcoms - a bit like Shaun The Sheep today.:D) Also, the last five minutes of The Chase rates lower than much of the rest of the episode because it's mostly commercials.
The Game For A Laugh comparison is interesting as it was attracting 17 million viewers at its peak and was still attracting over 10 million when it ended, but it fell victim to ITV's attempts to move upmarket that saw World of Sport killed off in the same year. However, Beadle's About became a huge success with a format partly based on GFAL and YBF has GFAL DNA.
Saturday
18:00 - You've Been Framed!
19:00 - Dancing on Ice
20:30 - Take Me Out
21:30 - The Jonathan Ross Show
Sunday
18:15 - All Star Family Fortunes
19:00 - Dancing on Ice: Skate Off
19:30 - Splash!
21:00 - Mr Selfridge
Do what Strictly does, record Dancing on Ice's Skate Off on Saturdays. Move Splash! to Sundays to bring in the younger viewers versus the old skewing Call the Midwife.
I'm not sure DOI is strong enough these days to cope with being stretched across two nights. Thinking back to The Voice, didn't some of its Sunday shows rate quite badly? I think you probably need a huge show to pull it off. DOI has always struggled to hold its audience for the results show on the same night!
With Splash! I think Saturday night was a far better option with easier competition giving it a chance to get started. Remember, CTM still picks up some younger viewers and then you've got Top Gear too which is huge in that demo IIRC. And generally ITV appear to be selling 16-34's on Saturdays and ABC1's on Sundays.
If series 2 of Splash! can perform well next year and DOI continues to slide then I think Splash could move over to Sundays. But that's a more long term outlook.
Take Me Out's figures are, let's be honest, a bit rubbish. If Splash! had had TMO's ratings these past five weeks, it would probably have been axed, even with the large skew towards the 16-34 audience (the factor that saves TMO from the axe).
It's looking a bit lower the past few weeks - but it has been on a lot in the past few months. Worth remembering that when Splash was on, Take Me Out was still getting the higher 16-34 figure every single week.
£2756 is an insane price. How on earth can they justify that? Surely they might acquire more revenue by significantly lowering their prices, but promoting to a wider audience. If it was £100-150 I would have thought the price steep, but may have considered a subscription. At nearly three grand it's unaffordable for the vast vast majority.
There's probably not a large mainstream audience available for it. Hence they're limited to people who need it for business purposes.
A few weeks ago I saw Dragonfly TV - a big production company - asking the UK TV Ratings Twitter account if they had ratings for one of their shows!
I don't think dreadful and exploitative is a fair description of the Extraordinary People series at all. Have you ever watched the show? Admittedly the rather sensationalist programme titles don't do the show any favours, and that aspect is regrettable if it gives off the wrong impression to potential viewers. But the stories themselves are always sensitively handled, well told and highly moving. It's been a C5 favourite for a long time because viewers have identified this and all feedback I've seen on the programme over the years has been very good. If there are viewers of the "look and point" mindset watching, I strongly feel they are very much in the minority as the programme clearly doesn't share those values or encourage that kind of stance in the way it is presented, and so it probably tells us more about those few viewers as people than it does about the programme makers and/or Channel 5.
To be fair, Extraordinary People has been running a long time, and it started out with a wide variety of subjects, some of which I saw, a lot of which were handled well, but I feel the focus has turned very much to severe injuries in the last few years, presumably because they're the editions which attract the highest viewing figures. As you say, the titles have become sensationalist (again, they weren't at the start), and the trailing has resorted to shock tactics, which gives a bad impression of the show. As an example, the edition they're repeating on Tuesday was trailed for its first screening in October 2011 with audible screams and photos of a woman whose face had been torn off, and they saw fit to trail that during Neighbours!
And this quote from someone who was approached for the series is rather worrying:
I dont watch it.Five years back I was approached by one of their researchers with a view to them making a program about my son-who suffered 60 % burns-and that includes his entire face-in a house fire.He was 5 years old.They wanted to film dressing changes that were so traumatic we could hardly endure them ourselves and featured him in great distress-couldnt understand why anyone would want to watch that if they didnt have to.I refused permission for that and low and behold they lost interest and decided against it.Reason given-and this is verbatim-He wasnt injured badly enough.Well you know what-he was-Im proud of him and it sickens me that all they wanted was to film the suffering-were never interested in the extraordinary courage he showed after -to my mind their loss
On the plus side, the problems with this series are the only black mark I can think of against Channel 5 over the last few years. I can't see anything wrong with anything else they do. Obviously, there are lots of things they can't do because the channel's budget is so small, but of the things they actually do, very little of it is wrong.
BBC One - daytime
06:00 - Breakfast: 1.49m (31.6%)
10:00 - Saturday Kitchen Live: 2.36m (27.7%)
11:30 - The Good Cook (r): 1.93m (22.0%)
12:00 - BBC News: 2.00m (22.3%)
12:15 - Football Focus: 1.73m (17.9%)
13:00 - Bargain Hunt (r): 1.67m (15.6%)
BBC Two (exc HD)
15:30 - The Mary Berry Story (r): 551k (4.0%)
16:30 - Final Score: 1.39m (8.4%)
17:30 - Culture Show Special - Ice Age Art: 773k (3.9%)
18:30 - Dad's Army (r): 1.57m (7.2%)
19:00 - Top Gear (r): 1.11m (5.0%)
20:00 - Natural World - Giant Otters of the Amazon: 1.56m (6.9%)
21:00 - Howard Goodall's Story of Music: 770k (3.4%)
22:00 - Dancing on the Edge (r): 414k (2.5%)
23:35 - FILM: Milk: 148k (2.2%)
Channel 4 (exc +1)
18:55 - FILM: "Crocodile" Dundee II: 1.37m (6.1%)
21:00 - World Without End: 1.05m (4.7%)
22:05 - FILM: Kiss the Girls: 678k (4.6%)
Channel 5 (exc +1)
19:25 - NCIS (r): 682k (3.0%)
20:10 - NCIS (r): 882k (3.9%)
21:00 - Law & Order (r): 774k (3.5%)
22:00 - Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: 980k (5.1%)
22:55 - Law & Order: Criminal Intent: 740k (5.6%)
BBC Three (repeats not indicated)
19:00 - Merlin: 273k (1.2%)
19:45 - Doctor Who: 359k (1.6%)
20:35 - FILM: Superman Returns: 733k (3.5%)
23:00 - Family Guy: 553k (3.9%)
23:20 - Family Guy: 517k (4.1%)
...
24:05 - American Dad: 520k (6.5%)
24:25 - World's Craziest Fools: 400k (6.4%)
24:55 - Way to Go: 240k (5.6%)
25:25 - Pramface: 175k (5.4%)
My access has been limited so I haven't been able to post +1s for Channels 4 and 5.
BBC One scored an all-day share of 24.3%, compared with 25.8% last Saturday when England played rugby. They are currently playing Ireland, so that should be an interesting rating tomorrow.
BBC Two had a rather poor 4.1% across the day, Channel 4 recorded a figure of 5.7% including +1 (4Seven achieved a very good 0.5%) and Channel 5 bagged 3.9% including +1. ITV's all-day figure is still stuck at 0% on Channel 4 Sales. :rolleyes: I can say that their daytime was again poor - Jeremy Kyle's 5.2% (exc +1) was the best share they had until teatime.
NeilvW did more Welsh people in numbers and share watch yesterdays Rugby match or the 2011 Rugby world cup semi final?
I think I've used my daily allowance and cannot get much info until tomorrow (I hope!).
However I had a quick look earlier at the Rugby World Cup in 2011 on ITV and the best rating in Wales I could find was 600-odd k consolidated. I'll have another look tomorrow if Attentional let me.
Silent Witness was a bit low last night. Has been running for many years now though so hard to complain about it rating lower than it used to.
I've watched the two episodes now, and it really has jumped the shark a bit this week, especially the second of the two, but even the Thursday episode is enough to explain the Friday drop.
I think I've used my daily allowance and cannot get much info until tomorrow (I hope!).
However I had a quick look earlier at the Rugby World Cup in 2011 on ITV and the best rating in Wales I could find was 600-odd k consolidated. I'll have another look tomorrow if Attentional let me.
Out of a population of 1.5 million, this is about 40 pc of the population. While the North aren't as hot on the sport, they tend more to football, the South is the sport's heartland and has an appeal across the board.
Must admit I can watch it, but prefer league.
Channel 5's Law and Order night seems to be picking up, SVU rose in share points but not in viewers (exc +1) whilst Criminal Intent's ratings improved by around 30k (exc +1)whilst the share grew massively, raising from 4.7% last week to 5.6% this week.
Hopefully these ratings continue to improve.
Will be interesting to see +1 added to these figures.
Last week SVU had 992k (exc +1) and a (4.8%) share.
Last week Criminal Intent had 715k (exc +1) and a (4.7%) share.
This week SVU had 980k (exc +1) and a (5.1%) share.
This week Criminal Intent had 740k (exc +1) and a (5.6%) share.
The BBC were lining her up for the Olympics, The One Show was catching up Emmerdale in the ratings, but she blew it by going to Daybreak. However, Julie Graham does seem to be curse.
Looking back it's very difficult to see what role Bleakley would have played for the BBC in the Olympics, certainly not as a sports presenter and there were howls of protest when Mishal Hussein (who is a journalist) was brought in.I suspect it was a promise that would never have been kept.
A couple of years ago, Radio Times reported about £500K-£600K as the average cost for an hour of BBC One drama.
Doctor Who is not your average drama.
I suspect we are starting to see the true price of cost cutting at the BBC, not just cost cuts to programs, but also the hiring of people who make poor decisions, because they cant afford to pay anybody good.
Can I ask the ratings boffins on here, how is BBC One doing in the afternoon from 3.00pm to 5.15pm without CBBC and their new daytime lineup and BBC Two in the morning without CBBC and CBEEBIES repeating BBC offerings the day before or sign zone
Although it will be interesting to see how they cope with sticking to that budget, when they were rumoured to have much difficulty sticking to the old one.
Comments
By 'all' I presume you mean still presenting The One Show and probably some rubbish Saturday Light Entertainment. She'd probably have done Britain's Brightest.
I suspect in all the cases you quote it actually had nothing to do with Julie Graham but the writers and producers and programme schedulers. I doubt one actor could have that much influence on a single programme.
In the case of Christine Bleakley she flew in the face of advice from her experienced agent (in fact sacked him) who advised against the move, had no journalistic experience and was just the wrong sort of person for a breakfast show but I think you can blame the ITV management for that.It didn't help that she was always complaining about getting up early and sported a huge engagement ring which probably did not go down well with single mothers on sink estates.
Not familiar with how the first film rated then, even on repeat?
McPhee rated okay last night but let's not get carried away. I was expecting more based on past performances.
I don't have 18-49 ratings, but apart from that there are any number of ways of slicing and dicing the figures. Any particular requests? Here are some some demos for the rugby and Britain's Brightest yesterday:
* overall TVR of 6.1
* gender skew: 61.5% male
* Adults 16-34: 627k (26.9% share, 18% skew, TVR = 4.2)
* Adults 35-54: 1.02m (27.9% share, 29% skew, TVR = 6.0)
* Adults 65+: 1.12m (33.0% share, 32% skew, TVR = 10.8)
* ABC1 skew: 54%
16:30 - Six Nations (Fra/Wal): 4.71m (24.9%)
* overall TVR of 8.2
* gender skew: 60% male
* Adults 16-34: 861k (27.05% share, 18% skew, TVR = 5.8)
* Adults 35-54: 1.41m (26.05% share, 30% skew, TVR = 8.3%)
* Adults 65+: 1.45m (27.7% share, 31% skew, TVR = 14.0)
* ABC1 skew: 58%
19:20 - Britain's Brightest: 5.15m (22.7%)
* overall TVR of 8.9
* gender skew: 57% female
* Adults 16-34: 608k (15.5% share, 12% skew, TVR = 4.1)
* Adults 35-54: 1.34m (20.0% share, 26% skew, TVR = 7.9)
* Adults 65+: 2.07m (33.8% share, 40% skew, TVR = 20.1)
* ABC1 skew: 51%
5.6m (26%) - Sunday 30th March 2008 for premiere of Nanny McPhee
The BBC were lining her up for the Olympics, The One Show was catching up Emmerdale in the ratings, but she blew it by going to Daybreak. However, Julie Graham does seem to be curse.
Also there were bigger viewing figures for the World Cup Rugby Union Semi in 2011.
Yes, and as Adam Hills pointed out on The Last Leg (which was far better as a fifty minute show as it actually seemed to have time to actually do stuff in depth, but still suffers from going at all the same subjects as 8 Out Of 10 Cats right before it), that's the first time any British TV channel has ever covered the Winter Paralympics. Be interesting to see how they cover that, the Winter Olympics themselves don't get that much coverage. I assume it'd probably get three or four hours in daytime then a highlights show.
Well, you may be interested to know I did the Robbie test while walking to the chippy on Friday teatime and I can confirm that on my street, The Choice is beating Pointless 2:1, albeit based on three houses that had their curtains open and a telly you could see from the street. I don't see why The Chase would be doomed to always come second, though, especially at teatime when surely adverts don't have much impact because you welcome breaks to get the tea on and stuff.
I don't see why that would be the case, Wahlberg was clearly a bit pissed but not to the extent he dominated the entire programme or made it unwatchable. And surely any dip you got from people turning off because he was a bit of an arse is offset by those staying tuned to see if he got even more pissed. Graham dealt with it perfectly well. If there was a dip in the ratings it might well be because none of the guests were really that famous.
Celtic, no interest in Northern Ireland? Half of Northern Ireland, maybe. That's not right, I know Celtic vs Rosenberg didn't do much at the start of the season but Celtic were playing the least glamorous opposition imaginable, Juventus are a massively famous club. And there's interest in Celtic across the UK, when they used to show the Old Firm games on the Beeb a decade ago they got very good ratings. As mentioned, Man U and Liverpool fans, especially the latter, probably have more affection to Celtic than they do to Chelsea or Arsenal.
Yeah, it's worth remembering the game shows hosts in the past were not particularly famous, and that was the case with Roy Walker, he was a stand-up who'd been on The Comedians and variety but he wasn't a big star, and rightly so because in those days the format was the star, not the host. And Walker was pretty bland, I mean "It's good but it's not right" sums it up, it's hardly "nice to see you", is it? Mulhern is pretty useless, though.
Series one of League of Gentlemen was fimed in front of a studio audience. Of course today's writers all want to do single camera stuff because multi-camera audience fare is considered vulgar and simplistic, and everyone wants to pretend they're making films, but like there are good and bad panel games, there are good and bad multi-camera sitcoms.
And many shows with obvious jokes suffer from not having audience laughter, people moan that they're getting "told when to laugh" but if there are obvious laugh lines in the script they benefit from the atmosphere of a live audience. In David Mitchell's autobiography he talks about the sitcom pilot they made for C4 in 2000 - which was broadcast but went no further - and he says that when they did it at the C4 Sitcom Festival it had a live audience and worked, but when they did it on the telly it didn't and didn't work, because it was broad and silly and so needed it.
Indeed, and it's something they used to do. I'm sure they could have got a couple more years out of Gladiators but they decided to axe it while it was still puling in OK but declining figures. I've said this before too but in 1998, they moved Blind Date from starting in September to starting in November so they could use the slot where it used to be to try some new shows out to eventually replace it, like Moment of Truth. Of course, they couldn't find any, but the thought was there.
It's also a bit like when Game For A Laugh ended in 1985 - only four years after it started - because it was clearly flagging but rather than flog it until nobody was left watching, they revamped it and it became Beadle's About.
As mentioned, £50,000 over a six week series is nothing, about eight grand a week which is about as much as they give away on an average week of Pointless.
Anyway, though I've stuck with the whole run I don't think it's been that good, it hasn't been as spectacular as it should have been or thinks it is (here's a round for series two, count how many times Clare Balding says "sensational" in an episode).
If it reminds me of anything it's Friends Like These in terms of the range of games it includes - in fact, that show had the round when they'd be trained up to improve their memory or identify different wines, which would have fitted in alright in this format. And too many of the games, especially in the last two shows, seemed to be very easy to win via guesswork and luck rather than intelligence. The match the couples round last night was a great example, it had nothing to do with "emotional intelligence", they'd have got the same result just picking numbers.
There have been too many unsatisfying aspects - even the multi-tasking game, which was the most interesting in the early shows, was less sensational (as Clare would have it) as it went on as people started getting used to it.
That said, I thought it was always going to beat Nanny McPhee as I don't think that was big enough a film for primetime. I didn't even know it existed.
But I don't see how much lazier it is compared to now when you've got the traffic jam of soaps on a weeknight. If you moved an hour of soaps to Sunday then the huge benefit is that you're losing an hour midweek which provides far more variety and choice for audiences. If you lost the Thursday 8pm Emmerdale and the Friday 8.30 Corrie not only would there be scope for ITV to put something different there but also it would mean BBC1 could put something substantial in opposition rather than just fillers. It's a win-win. And ITV could be more daring on a Sunday too as they have the soaps providing a better lead-in for new shows.
Clearly it would better to move an hour of soap from a weeknight and not put it anywhere but rather put it on Sunday where there's space than keep it on a weeknight and write off the entire pre-watershed schedule. The lazy thing is doing six episodes of Emmerdale a week in the first place.
I'm sure when we've seen the breakdowns for The Chase and Pointless we have seen that Pointless gets a big boost in the last five minutes as people tune in for the Six O'Clock News. Tune in early and they can see the jackpot round at the end of Pointless. It's like when Magic Roundabout and the like used to get big ratings at the end of Kids' TV because the adults were tuning in early for the News (and enjoying a comedy that was a lot funnier and more intelligent than most grown-up sitcoms - a bit like Shaun The Sheep today.:D) Also, the last five minutes of The Chase rates lower than much of the rest of the episode because it's mostly commercials.
I'm not sure DOI is strong enough these days to cope with being stretched across two nights. Thinking back to The Voice, didn't some of its Sunday shows rate quite badly? I think you probably need a huge show to pull it off. DOI has always struggled to hold its audience for the results show on the same night!
With Splash! I think Saturday night was a far better option with easier competition giving it a chance to get started. Remember, CTM still picks up some younger viewers and then you've got Top Gear too which is huge in that demo IIRC. And generally ITV appear to be selling 16-34's on Saturdays and ABC1's on Sundays.
If series 2 of Splash! can perform well next year and DOI continues to slide then I think Splash could move over to Sundays. But that's a more long term outlook.
It's looking a bit lower the past few weeks - but it has been on a lot in the past few months. Worth remembering that when Splash was on, Take Me Out was still getting the higher 16-34 figure every single week.
There's probably not a large mainstream audience available for it. Hence they're limited to people who need it for business purposes.
A few weeks ago I saw Dragonfly TV - a big production company - asking the UK TV Ratings Twitter account if they had ratings for one of their shows!
To be fair, Extraordinary People has been running a long time, and it started out with a wide variety of subjects, some of which I saw, a lot of which were handled well, but I feel the focus has turned very much to severe injuries in the last few years, presumably because they're the editions which attract the highest viewing figures. As you say, the titles have become sensationalist (again, they weren't at the start), and the trailing has resorted to shock tactics, which gives a bad impression of the show. As an example, the edition they're repeating on Tuesday was trailed for its first screening in October 2011 with audible screams and photos of a woman whose face had been torn off, and they saw fit to trail that during Neighbours!
And this quote from someone who was approached for the series is rather worrying:
On the plus side, the problems with this series are the only black mark I can think of against Channel 5 over the last few years. I can't see anything wrong with anything else they do. Obviously, there are lots of things they can't do because the channel's budget is so small, but of the things they actually do, very little of it is wrong.
06:00 - Breakfast: 1.49m (31.6%)
10:00 - Saturday Kitchen Live: 2.36m (27.7%)
11:30 - The Good Cook (r): 1.93m (22.0%)
12:00 - BBC News: 2.00m (22.3%)
12:15 - Football Focus: 1.73m (17.9%)
13:00 - Bargain Hunt (r): 1.67m (15.6%)
BBC Two (exc HD)
15:30 - The Mary Berry Story (r): 551k (4.0%)
16:30 - Final Score: 1.39m (8.4%)
17:30 - Culture Show Special - Ice Age Art: 773k (3.9%)
18:30 - Dad's Army (r): 1.57m (7.2%)
19:00 - Top Gear (r): 1.11m (5.0%)
20:00 - Natural World - Giant Otters of the Amazon: 1.56m (6.9%)
21:00 - Howard Goodall's Story of Music: 770k (3.4%)
22:00 - Dancing on the Edge (r): 414k (2.5%)
23:35 - FILM: Milk: 148k (2.2%)
Channel 4 (exc +1)
18:55 - FILM: "Crocodile" Dundee II: 1.37m (6.1%)
21:00 - World Without End: 1.05m (4.7%)
22:05 - FILM: Kiss the Girls: 678k (4.6%)
Channel 5 (exc +1)
19:25 - NCIS (r): 682k (3.0%)
20:10 - NCIS (r): 882k (3.9%)
21:00 - Law & Order (r): 774k (3.5%)
22:00 - Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: 980k (5.1%)
22:55 - Law & Order: Criminal Intent: 740k (5.6%)
BBC Three (repeats not indicated)
19:00 - Merlin: 273k (1.2%)
19:45 - Doctor Who: 359k (1.6%)
20:35 - FILM: Superman Returns: 733k (3.5%)
23:00 - Family Guy: 553k (3.9%)
23:20 - Family Guy: 517k (4.1%)
...
24:05 - American Dad: 520k (6.5%)
24:25 - World's Craziest Fools: 400k (6.4%)
24:55 - Way to Go: 240k (5.6%)
25:25 - Pramface: 175k (5.4%)
My access has been limited so I haven't been able to post +1s for Channels 4 and 5.
BBC One scored an all-day share of 24.3%, compared with 25.8% last Saturday when England played rugby. They are currently playing Ireland, so that should be an interesting rating tomorrow.
BBC Two had a rather poor 4.1% across the day, Channel 4 recorded a figure of 5.7% including +1 (4Seven achieved a very good 0.5%) and Channel 5 bagged 3.9% including +1. ITV's all-day figure is still stuck at 0% on Channel 4 Sales. :rolleyes: I can say that their daytime was again poor - Jeremy Kyle's 5.2% (exc +1) was the best share they had until teatime.
I think I've used my daily allowance and cannot get much info until tomorrow (I hope!).
However I had a quick look earlier at the Rugby World Cup in 2011 on ITV and the best rating in Wales I could find was 600-odd k consolidated. I'll have another look tomorrow if Attentional let me.
Out of a population of 1.5 million, this is about 40 pc of the population. While the North aren't as hot on the sport, they tend more to football, the South is the sport's heartland and has an appeal across the board.
Must admit I can watch it, but prefer league.
Hopefully these ratings continue to improve.
Will be interesting to see +1 added to these figures.
Last week SVU had 992k (exc +1) and a (4.8%) share.
Last week Criminal Intent had 715k (exc +1) and a (4.7%) share.
This week SVU had 980k (exc +1) and a (5.1%) share.
This week Criminal Intent had 740k (exc +1) and a (5.6%) share.
Looking back it's very difficult to see what role Bleakley would have played for the BBC in the Olympics, certainly not as a sports presenter and there were howls of protest when Mishal Hussein (who is a journalist) was brought in.I suspect it was a promise that would never have been kept.
I suspect we are starting to see the true price of cost cutting at the BBC, not just cost cuts to programs, but also the hiring of people who make poor decisions, because they cant afford to pay anybody good.
Although it will be interesting to see how they cope with sticking to that budget, when they were rumoured to have much difficulty sticking to the old one.