I didn't know about Shrek 3. Maybe it could boil down to whether they'd rather SCD or Doctor Who up against the inevitable hour-long Coronation St. I think they'd prefer to use SCD against Coronation St.

Then again, if Shrek went against Coronation St, I'd make SCD the favourite to lose its Christmas Day berth, and Doctor Who favourite to stay on Christmas Day.

I think we're going to upset some people by talking about Christmas so soon.

Gavin & Stacey overnights for series 3.

10th Dec: 5.82m
17th Dec: 5.85m
25th Dec: 9.17m

So the notion that Dr Who is going to flop this Christmas because of a slight Springtime slump is a bit, er, something or other.

I'm predicting that Outnumbered will get a Christmas day slot this year and will come close to G&S's Xmas day ratings despite that being some way above what the recent series was getting.

Christmas Day viewing is a law unto itsself.

According to the ever-reliable ariusuk on the Broadcasting forums, all of ITV1's World Cup evening broadcasts will begin at 18:30 - one hour before kick-off.

Personally, I don't think it's necessary to have 1 hour of buildup apart from England and major knockout matches. The long buildups will definitely dent their average, and if BARB have changed the way they report the World Cup official figures, they'll definitely end up lower than the ones reported for the 2006 tournament.

Take England vs. Sweden from that tournament as an example: the entire broadcast averaged 14.4m in the overnights, but BARB reported 18.46m as they only counted the actual match. It seems as if these days BARB report just one rating for the entire broadcasts, so the officials probably won't be as high as last time.

And won't the build-up to ITV1's England games clash with Dr Who on the Saturday and Eastenders on the Friday?

A one-hour build-up for non-England games allows them to show highlights of the two earlier games alongside four commercial breaks and a preview of their live match. Plus the inevitable report from the England camp.

Doctor Who is going through a slight lull but you do expect this with a bank holiday weekend. The BBC don't need to panic yet and I'm sure the last episode will see ratings back up to 8 million.

Where is Robbie and his "tanker" today? I thought he'd be along to pronounce the last rites for BGT for not making 10m last night

Well he does not seem to be making as many appearances these days.

BGT is down on last year, but will get 10-11 million all this week and the final will attract 14 million. It's lacking the Subo effect this year, but that shouldn't put people off.

What is dog free?

Sky get huge timeshits, sometimes more people watch via timeshift than the orginal transmission, so I only bother with the officials for Sky shows.

Yeah Sky 1 certainly seems to struggle in the overnights, officials give a much better indication of the channels performance. Be interesting to see how Going Postal performs nonetheless.

I would imagine build-up will start on ITV4 from 1830-1900 and ITV1 coverage will play 1900-2200.

I think we can read into this that viewers don't consider much Sky1 programming to be appointment-to-view television. Sky themselves are at least partly to blame for this of course, as the likes of Sky+ and Anytime make it easy to watch at a more convenient time, i.e. when there's absolutely nothing else on of note.

Ah, yeah that sounds more likely to happen. Something like:

18:30-19:00: World Cup Live - ITV4
19:00-21:30: World Cup Live - ITV1
21:30-22:00: James Corden's World Cup Live/other - ITV1/4
22:00-22:35: News at Ten - ITV1
22:35-23:35: World Cup Highlights - ITV1


Correcting myself: it was the semi final which got 30m as it involved Germany. The final, of course, was between France and Italy.

Scheduling stupidity by BBC Two tonight. They went to the Tennis at 17:30 as Andy Murray's match was started, it however started raining at 19:10 so went to their scheduled programme, Richard Hammond's Engineering Connections.

The rain finished at 20:00, but instead of going back to the Tennis, they continued on with their normal schedule. Seems bizarre, if you're going to show the beginning of a match on terrestrial, you might as well end it on terrestrial!

I'll do Robbie's job because reading through the thread I've been wondering: Eurovision is 2m down on average from last year, yet at the same time Britain's Got Talent lost 0.1m instead of gaining from it. The Eurovision loss is understandable; the winner was pretty clear from the off - against all prediction - and the UK were being humiliated again after a can't-be-bothered approach from the BBC. But Britain's Got Talent seemed to have been losing steam running to the end of the auditions, and I think ITV should be thankful that BBC1 didn't decide to move EastEnders to a 7.30pm start tomorrow. At least the first live show should do reasonably well.

Doctor Who struggled more than I thought it would, but the timeshift again should allieviate any issues with a low start rating. The Whole 19 Yards bounced back excellently after it's poor showing last week.

The most intriguing ratings battle from today will be the football v Formula One - I can see the Formula One winning to be honest. The football wasn't exactly enthralling and the race would've benefited from no ad breaks and the result.

Don't forget it was that show where they decided the final 40 which took up a good half an hour. Between 21:00 and 21:30, the average was 9.55m, down on the previous 1/2 hour average.


Ha, I hope so... but its unlikely really given England football's popularity vs F1's popularity. I don't think ITV would be at all impressed if the F1 beat an England friendly, but who knows...

I can't quite recall - was last year's Eurovision episode the penultimate auditions show? Eurovision was a week earlier because there was no Champions League final standing in it's way then. I guess that was only 60 minutes long compared to the 90 that was aired last night.


I think it'll be very close. If it was the other way round (and BBC1 had the football) the gap would be enormous, but I think there'll be abotu half a million in it at the very most.

I was watching both, and I ended up watching more F1 than football-England were quite poor I thought and the match as drab as the weather at the game.

I would have thought the football would have been comfortably head during live viewing but a lot of F1 viewers would have recorded and watched it via timeshift later in the day, especially if they knew the result was a British 1,2.

It's the Sky+ effect. Apart from news and sports we don't watch any of our regular programmes off air and very rarely on the same day.

Tonight for instance we watched the final True Blood from over a week ago and last Thursday's Damages.

Tonight we're Sky plussing Lewis on ITV1 HD, 24 on Sky1 HD and Desperate Housewives on E4 HD,

We've still got last week's DH on the planner!!

I'm sure we're not alone using a PVR for the vast majority of our viewing.

There was a report in one of the papers today which suggested Myleene Klass is being lined up to join Adrian Chiles on ITV Breakfast.

Treat it with a pinch of salt of course, but perhaps not the most far-fetched idea since they previously worked together on The One Show.

Shouldn't be surprised really but schedulers seem to know how to outdo themselves with their stupidity. The news shouldn't be moved unless it has to be.

I don't think the BBC or ITV will be playing fair with highlights this year - indeed considering the BBC are running them at 10pm on BBC2 there is no need for their matches to broadcast 7-10pm - they could finish at 9.30pm if the highlights will be on BBC2 anyway.



If schedulers had common sense they'd be dangerous!

The overnights don't include Sky1HD, but the officials do. So I've been told.

With over a quarter of Sky subscribers having HD that could be another reason for the disparity.

7.30 kick-offs means the games should finish at 9.15 but football people seem incapable of telling the time these days, so late kick-offs and stoppage time means the matches probably won't finish until close to 9.30. So stopping the programme at 9.30 doesn't leave much time for post-match analysis, so makes sense to carry on until the news at 10pm.

Well it seems less likely that Christine Bleakley will be making the move-reportedly she is a bit miffed that Adrian "expects" them to work together at GMTV or somewhere in the future.