Yesterday's demographics: http://i55.tinypic.com/qqx1r5.jpg


Corrie really isn't as old skewing as people on here make it out to be. Yeah, compared to EastEnders it has an older audience, but EastEnders is an unusually young-skewing show relative to how most BBC1/ITV1 programmes skew. Yesterday, for example, Corrie skewed younger than Hustle, which itself is seen as one of the youngest-skewing dramas on BBC1/ITV1! Corrie is hardly in the same league as shows like Antiques Roadshow, Countryfile, most BBC1/ITV1 dramas, The One Show, Taggart, Casualty, Heartbeat etc, when it comes to its age-profile. Of course, in raw numbers it probably does have more pensioners watching it than any other show in the country, but that's because its total numbers are big anyway. Also people say it's got a big "C2DE" following but it's not as bad as Emmerdale, and its ABC1-skew is quite similar to the ITV1 average and how other soaps like EastEnders, Neighbours, Home & Away skew (soaps in general have a lower ABC1-skew than other genres of programming).

Well no chance at all it would air Christmas Day (I'd bet on midweek in the week running up to it) - but if it did I'd imagine it would be ITV rather than BBC1 taking the hit.

I can't work out if you're being serious here or not (I'd like to assume not) but you do realise the poisoning storyline of which you speak involved Heather Trott who is hardly a member of the EastEnders elite? Hardly a 'big week' for the soap.

And you neglect to mention that last week really was a big week for Corrie with the climax to the Peter/Leanne storyline. They are popular characters and last week's wedding episodes received endless promotion via trailers on ITV1 and in the media, which obviously had an uplifting effect on the rest of the week. So to say it was a big week for EE when it wasn't really, and not even mention that it really was a big week for Corrie, makes you look incredibly biased.

The football overran by 5 minutes, and ITV then went straight into TV Burp without any adverts or trailers, which meant it started at 19:20.

Yes I know quite a lot of younger women who watch it and I do know a few older people who have gone off it in recent years as it's become too miserable compared with the old days. There is this stereotype of a Corrie viewer being an older working class woman in the North who goes to bingo, but bear in mind its large gay and lesbian following and also 35 pc of its viewers are ABC1s so it does have a reasonable spread of viewers. However, among men and younger viewers in the South, it doesn't fare well.

Everyone forgots that due to Corrie's large audience, even a minority of the audience is larger than the whole audience of other programmes.

i.e Corrie probably has more 18-34s watching than Big Brother did.

I wouldn't go as far as ruling it out completely. Last Christmas was notable for Channel 4 making more of an effort than usual, with One Born at Christmas running throughout the day.

It's the tv equivalent of a loss leader. In the case of One Born it didn't work out, but they might have more luck with Gypsy.

Previous Let's Dance for Comic/Sport Relief series opener overnight ratings:

Series 1 (2009): 6.8m (31%)
Series 2 (2010): 6.3m (27%)

Tonight's show started half an hour later than both those episodes. Probably looking at another 6m+ (maybe even close to 7m) launch rating for tonight.

isnt Lets Dance for Sport Relief, just an excuse for guys to drag up?

Well ratings tomorrow will be interesting to see how Let's Dance For Comic Relief fares against TV Burp and Push The Button.

I'm just interesting to see how much Push the Button drops, because, boy it will...

Last year, Let's Dance for Sport Relief's opener also clashed with TV Burp. It beat TV Burp's 5.3m by a million or so. They also clashed a few more times last year and dented TV Burp to the high 4's/low 5's.

Ant & Dec's Push the Button also clashed against Let's Dance last year - ratings for PTB varied week by week, although it fell as low as 4.9m up against LD for one of its episodes. Might give some kind of indication of how they'll rate tonight..

TV Burp tends to do worse when it airs after football. The TV Burp episodes that clashed with Let's Dance that didn't air after football got between 5.1-5.5m, whilst the episode that did air after football against Let's Dance had 4.8m. The episode of PTB that fell below 5m against Let's Dance was on the night of the Let's Dance Final which did better than the other episodes. It has 40 minutes to recover after Let's Dance tonight so my predictions are:

Wipeout: 5.0m
Let's Dance: 6.7m
Secret Fortune: 6.2m

TV Burp: 4.6m
Push The Button: 5.0m
TMO: 4.3m

Yeah, I'd agree with those predictions. Wipeout's done pretty well against the football in the past IIRC, Let's Dance was good tonight and had a big name (reality TV wise) competing in it - Katie Price - that with the later timeslot should mean 6-7m I reckon. Secret Fortune's breakdown rose throughout last week and with a better lead-in tonight, I wouldn't be surprised if its rating is higher than last week's.

Not too sure how low TMO will go - 10:15pm is an awfully late finish for this kind of show. Definitely won't rate as well as last week so I can see all of ITV1's 7-10pm lineup down week-on-week. The football match, however, was tighter than I expected so I think it'll rate better than the 4.7m average prediction on the RPG.

Did it overrun, or was it ITV not giving a toss about any meaningful post-match analysis, which sends the ratings dropping like a stone anyway, and therefore scheduling TV Burp too soon after the likely full time whilstle - you don't schedule something at 7.15pm if you have a football match with a 5.15/5.20pm kick off.

It's not rocket science, and ITV knew exactly what they were doing.

Bigger question is why the BSI didn't schedule Let's Dance for 7.10pm instead of 7pm.

Actually, I answered my own question there...


Remind me, did the 2009 and 2010 series debut 10 minutes before the end of the thrilling climax of a big FA Cup tie where the biggest club in the world was in grave danger of being forced to a replay by a non-league side of minnows from deepest Sussex?

Just checking...

It was only for 8 minutes when it was up against the football, match proper. Even if those 8 mins averaged as low as 3m (which is unlikely - but just giving an extreme example), it would still average 6m+ if the rest of the show averaged ~6.5m as it was an 80 minute programme.

You might as well not bother with all this preamble, and just cut straight to writing your summary of tonight's ratings.

We all know what you are going to say tommorow, the same as you say after every ITV football match.

But aren't you incredibly Eastenders biased and anti- Coronation Street? In fact, didn't you rate Coronation Street's Tram Week Episodes as 1/10?

Sorry if I don't take your opinion on this matter as valid.

And that's coming from someone with a username named after a Coronation character and his location is "Weatherfield Arms".

Sorry if I dont take your opinion as valid too.

Do you not think it odd that ITV paid so heavily for the FA Cup, and made a real job of promoting tonight's big tie, and then insults those who tuned in, particularly plucky Crawley Town's fans, by barely giving the match any meaningful analysis at full time?

Why not schedule TV Burp for 7.30pm and at least give the game 15 mins of post-match analysis?

As for the ratings, I think it will get a 5.4m average from 4.45-7.15; peak about 8m around 7pm. No over-predicting there.

Of course we all know why you'd want extra analysis, because it rates poorly and creates a poor lead out for the next show.

He hasn't given an opinion.

To be fair, the Saturday teatime games didn't have much more post-match analysis when the FA Cup was on the BBC either. Looking at the timings on BARB, they often used to do about 10 mins, that's it, and for England matches which began at 8pm they used to about 7 mins of analysis which is less than what ITV offers these days as they postpone the news till 22:10.

The presenters were dire though and had minimal chemistry.

Alex Jones was very wooden and out of her depth

Steve Jones is like a poor man's Vernon Kay, and that's saying something. He shouldn't be on BBC1.

If it didn't have the 'comic/sport relief' tag it'd probably rate much lower.


Both PTB & TMO are 7/8pm types of shows so it does seem late. Having said that though, I'm not sure what a 9pm type of show is on a Saturday and nothing seems to stick, so it's no surprise they've just comissioned two 7/8pm shows instead.

There's a world of difference between ten minutes of BBC post-match analysis and ten minutes of ITV post-match analysis!