I think Strictly were on a suicide mission tonight. The Press Officer must've been having a fit. First Len mentioned another potential romance between Ali and Brian which'll overshadow their dancing and then Lynda bought up Brendan's antics with a catapult, Bruce mentioning affairs just before Flavia had to dance...not having a great year so far.

Benidorm did brilliantly last night, with Jonathan Ross losing out. Am I surprised? Not a bit. Autumnwatch did well, though. I watched the repeat tonight, and it was a good show.

What I meant was Brucie and Tess having to explain why Anton's not there anymore.

"Sadly, Anton can't be with us tonight as he's got his foot stuck in his big, fat mouth."

Seriously, they wouldn't mention it. They'd just hope that the average Strictly viewer wouldn't notice the difference. That or say Anton is 'injured'.

more to do with the guest IMO

I coulden't name you 1 Barbara Streisand song, she is completely irrelevant to a modern audience, and I do believe the majority of her record sales were in America.

there are very few guests in the world he should devote a show too...even his special with Madonna 6/7 years ago felt a bit odd with her being the only guest.

it was a very strange decision by the Beeb and one I suspect we won't see again.

The BBC wouldn't sack Anton Du Beak, he's being groomed as Mini Brucie. Besides it would mean messing with two Saturday night shows as Hole in the Wall would have to be scrapped.

The Strictly marathon really dragged with about 30 minutes of filler again before the result. Impressed though that they actually managed to find a star guest of a similar age to the presenter in Andy Williams. Playing to their key demographic again.

Next week, Val Doonican

I reckon we'll see a big shift in viewers to XFactor during this period, as XFactor had the draw of Kylie helping her sister pick her acts in expensively shot scenes in Dubai. Which will be more of a draw to many viewers than 'filler' on the other side I reckon.

Though turning that figure around 22 of the 45 9pm episodes must have rated over 5m then.

I think also cutting down to one episode a week has stripped away some loyalty amongst the fans. Twice a week with continuous storylines people would tune in - once a week with what I understand are often self-contained storylines and fans are losing the connection with the show, and just not bothering.



Fingers crossed hey. Tony Beak has to be the most irritating thing to come out of Strictly Come Dancing.

I'm not really surprised at JR's ratings on Friday night. I watch Jonathan most weeks but my flatmate and I turned it off after 10 minutes last night. First of all, Babs didn't seem to be a good interview, but also, Jonathan was all over the place. He managed to talk about the early part of her career, her latest album and her film career in the first ten minutes. I just thought to myself, "Where to from here?"

Despite this, I can still see JR possibly getting the 9pm slot. As has been mentioned, the guest didn't really appeal to the usual demo, but I do think if that was a normal show last night I could have pulled in at least 4m (possibly more if it had been up against a drama repeat).

Also, a bit of a request here for one of the elder statesmen of the thread (rzt possibly?). If just caught one of Flashforward's seven weekly showings on Fiver tonight (verdict - not gripping, but I'll give it a few more episodes). Anyway, any chance we could have a total figure for all the showings sometime next week?

At a guess, Fiver's showings would equate to about 500,000 to a million viewers - so you'd have a potential 'reach' of 4 million.

Sat 3/10/09

15 min averages:

The Cube 4.4m / 19%
X-Factor 10m peaked 11.1m / 38% pk 44%

Merlin 5.4m / 28%
SCD 8.4m pk 9.6m / 34% pk 40%

Not good for The Cube.

Good for Strictly and The X Factor.

Wow, I didn't expect X Factor to hit 10m against Strictly! It was actually up on last year which shows how strong a show it is. SCD did well too, but it's 0.9m down on last year. Merlin got its best rating of the series which is great too. The Cube did OK considering this week it had no head start on SCD - it ran against it for the entire hour. It's been recommissioned anyway, and is capable of about 5m when not against SCD.

Do these ratings take into account the 5 minute extentions on both SCD and X Factor?

4.4m against Strictly doesn't seem too bad to me, considering some of the ratings ITV were getting o Saturday night prior to the return of X f Actor, I guess they will be happy with the Cube's performance.

Last year's 7.00pm slot had All Star Family Fortunes receiving similar numbers but SCD had a 15 minute head start.

Strictly Come Dancing - 18:45, 9.66 million
All Star Family Fortunes - 19:00, 4.66 million

Just shows that I know nothing. I would have put money on Merlin dipping below 5m because of the earlier start and I wasn't expecting Strictly to average over 8m because it was a hell of a slog last night. Great figures once again for X Factor. 10m average is excellent. I still think Sunday nights are going to be huge once the live shows start next week.

Anyone know what the ratings were for the Autumnwatch repeat, 6.15 Saturday 3rd?

4.4m for The Cube against one of BBC1's top rated programmes, and for a new show I think is pretty good. Not many new shows on ITV1 can sustain 4-5m against SCD.

10m for XF, when its not even the live shows against SCD is excellent and it justs shows there are 18.5m people who want to watch both!! Amazing really that theres probably over 20m people watching terrestrial at one point last night. Same goes for the Sunday 8pm slot. The XF is really pulling in the crowds, improving year on year!

I can see BBC1 going down slightly next week with Harry Hill hour back on followed by the first live XF show.

EDIT: Just realised XF is up over a million on last Saturday...could we see 12m figures tonight??

Saturday 3rd October Overnights
BBC One
17:25- BBC News: 3.42m (23.4%)
17:45- Hole in the Wall: 3.33m (21.1%)
18:15- Merlin: 5.41m (28.4%)
19:00- Strictly Come Dancing: 8.42m (33.9%)
21:20- The National Lottery Draws: 4.81m (19.0%)
21:30- Casualty: 5.61m (25.7%)
22:20- BBC News: 4.59m (23.4%)
22:35- Match of the Day: 3.53m (25.3%)

ITV1
19:00- The Cube: 4.38m (19.1%)
20:00- The X Factor: 10.12m (38.9%)

Those were the top 10 programmes yesterday. Thanks to MattJ for the figures.

So glad Merlin's audience isn't dipping, and is slowly increasing like last years series did Not too bad for the Cube, and no where near a disasterous figure

next week XFactor has Robbie Williams giving his first live performance for a few years. Love him or hate him he is one of the country's biggest stars. So I think they will see an uplift in viewers from that.

also the return of Harry Hill on the saturday should provide it with a decent lead-in

I notice that the first episode of Merlin gained 690,000 viewers between the overnights and the officials, so looking good for last night's episode to crack 6m in the officials. And, as we'd expect its ratings to increase as we move deeper into Autumn, I'd say confirmation of a 3rd seris should be imminent. I wonder, though, if it will lose some momentum when it takes a week off for the motor-racing.

I wonder how much of a hit Casualty will take against the longer X Factor next week. If it can stay above 5m that would be a result (Casualty I mean, not X Factor.), but I don't think it will.

The Cube's performance has been steady and healthy, particularly when you compare it with the performance of The Colour Of Money. ITV will have breathed a heavy sigh of relief. No wonder they recommissioned it so quickly.

And now that the X Factor's taken a bigger audience than the equivalent show last year, perhaps we can all shut up about "how disgusting it is that the BBC scheduled Strictly against The X Factor".

Good ratings on the whole for BBC One yesterday evening nd good %-shares as well.

So happy that Merlin sustained its audience even with the earlier start. The Cube is keeping its audience against SCD better than I'd have thought too.

We watched SCD and XF at the same time last night pretty bored by both, tbh. Lots of crying versus Brucie's jokes. I think the XF will grow and grow once we are into the real shows and leave SCD even further behind.

There is not much they can do with that.

They open the lines as soon as the final person dances and they deliver the result five minutes after lines close.

Yes its filler, but at least they are not padding the show to make it longer, they are just padding a little bit in the middle so they can do the results in one show.

It would be a lot worse if they did a seperate 45 minute or 1 hour results show again.

I was going to suggest scheduling The Cube inbetween Dancing on Ice might be an idea next year, but then remembered Schofield hosts both and that might be too much for the average ITV1 viewer to get their head around.

Brainwave: The Ice Cube


As for The X Factor - I was disappointed with last nights show to be honest. The extracts of each performance seems particularly short, especially compared to Boot Camp and from what I remember of previous years too. Though The Xtra Factor did kind of explain why for the boys at least they probably had just a few lines from each song they could actually use.

Anyway, based on last night Simon seems to have the strongest category performance wise, but whether that'll translate to votes is another question. The boys didn't seem too strong - I think Danni may have got lucky this year - two potential winners there IMO.


Just a shame the storylines aren't going anywhere - the BBC really should just save some cash and repeat the same episode week after week. Nobody would notice - though that said this was the first episode I can recall where Merlin didn't save Arthur's life. Again.