no it is not. ITV have been running country themed shows in primetime since at least 1960.

Countrywise was originally just a collection of clips from those shows which surely proves my point.

Don't panic, there are only two remaining eps,. of Candy Cabs. Jo Joyner did it while she was on ''maternity leave'' from EE and she's back there now.

Oh, I don't dispute that. But why did Place in the Country, Out of Town, Down Your Way, or whatever plodding regional guff ITV filled the difficult opposite EE slot with, suddenly get networked, re-brand itself "Countrywise", with a well-known (ex BBC) presenter anchoring it, and as a one hour show too?

It's a remarkable coincidence, dontcha think?

I'm sure they will recommission it without her if it's a (ratings) success and she wants to stay in EE.

They'll just recruit someone else with magnificent baps in their, sorry her, place.

Tuesday 5th April Overnights
BBC One
20:00- Holby City: 5.76m (24.3%)
21:00- Candy Cabs: 5.48m (22.5%)
* above slot average of: 5.26m (20.68%)

BBC Two
18:30- Great British Menu: 1.48m (7.7%)
19:00- The Great Rift: Africa's Wild Heart: 1.62m (7.5%)
20:00- Lambing Live: 1.7m (7.2%)
21:00- Filthy Cities: 2.43m (10.0%) inc HD
22:00- Later Live with Jools Holland: 860k (4.5%)

ITV1
19:30- Grimefighters: 2.72m (12.1%) , +1: 108k (0.5%)
20:00- Countrywise: 2.7m (11.4%) excluding HD
* likely to be 2.8/2.9m including HD
21:00- Smugglers: 3.25m (13.4%) , +1: 252k (1.5%)

Channel 4
18:00- The Simpsons: 1.53m (inc +1)
20:00- Supersize vs Superskinny: 2.29m (9.7%) , +1: 192k (0.8%)
21:00- Katie: My Beautiful Friends: 1.46m (6%) , +1: 267k (1.5%)
22:00- Campus: 610k (3.7%) , +1: 108k (1.2%)
* below slot average of: 1.85m (10.7%)

Channel 5
19:30- Extraordinary Dogs: 615k (2.7%)
20:00- Tsunami: British Search & Rescue: 986k (4.2%)
21:00- CSI: Crime Scene Investigation: 2.27m (9.3%)
22:00- CSI: Miami: 1.24m (7%)

Primetime Shares
BBC One: 24.5%
ITV1: 14.5% (+1: 0.5%)
BBC Two: 7.4%
Channel 4: 5.8% (+1: 0.8%)
Channel 5: 5.6%

Sources: Attentional, Broadcast (1) (2), C4Sales, DS

Ratings include HD and are tape-checked where necesary, unless stated.

Multichannels
Alibi
20:00- No Ordinary Family: 284k
21:00- Murdoch Mysteries: 270k

BBC Three
21:00- Don’t Tell the Bride – Brides’ Revenge: 538k (2.2%)
22:30- White Van Man: 845k (5.6%) inc HD

BBC Four
21:00- Crime and Punishment – The Story of Capital Punishment: 258k (1.1%)

Dave (inc +1)
22:00- Mock The Week: 367k

E4 (inc +1)
19:00- Hollyoaks: 524k
21:00- 90210: 394k

Film4 (inc +1)
18:45- Batman: 162k
21:00- In Her Shoes: 311k

ITV2
21:00- Benidorm: 303k (1.2%)

More4 (inc +1)
18:45- Come Dine with Me: 434k
21:00- Grand Designs: 380k

Sky Living
21:00- Katie: 275k (1.1%) , +1: 104k (0.60%)

Yesterday (inc +1)
22:00- Who Do You Think You Are?: 159k

It's strange because it's Tuesday 8pm that is becoming a problem for ITV more than 9pm, I think the 9pm rating has improved on the 8pm rating quite a few times in the past few months has it not?

A 14.5% share for them on Tuesdays is also slightly better than usual.

Probably deserves more credit than it is getting. Say what you like about Will Mellor sitcoms, but they rate fantastically well.

A fantastic start for BBC's new comedy 'Candy Cabs', hopefully the ratings will hold up or even increase for the remainder of the series.

not really. ITV was moving towards a networked structure anyway and Countrywise has been placed against Eastenders for the last several years.

Its strong ratings in that difficult slot is why it is being extended.

And no, nobody expects its automatically going to get 4m on Tuesdays just because it was doing that in a 30 minute Coronation Street sandwich on Mondays.

At least the ITV show doesnt seem to chuck out presenters once they reach age 30 and isn't as preachy as the BBC show so I think you are just getting confused because the names are similar... Perhaps you should watch the show maybe before commenting

It is astonishing how ITV came up with a name so "similar" to Countryfile. At least that makes sense, what does "Countrywise" actually mean? Is it even a word?

They might as well have called it "Countryflies" or "Countryfillie" for all the sense its current name has...

Reminds me of Asda and its Puffin bars:

http://www.brandrepublic.com/news/54...CMP=ILC-SEARCH

I must say I do like White Van Man, glad it's doing well.

Yeah the Tuesday 8pm slot is becoming a bigger problem for ITV than 9pm. 8-9pm is rating poorly and that's also having a negative effect on the 9pm slot due to the low inheritence. For e.g. if they had a programme getting 3.5m at 8pm last night, Smugglers might've got few hundred thousand more viewers too. Axing regular episodes of Millionaire which were averaging ~3.3m has made it even more difficult in that slot as now they have to fill up about 18 hours of replacement programmes and most of these aren't even hitting 3m. It's difficult to see what they can do in that slot to get ratings of 3.5m (ideally more) with programmes that have to be cheap due to budget restraints. Programmes that get higher ratings like dramas can't air there because dramas are reserved for the Sunday/Monday/Thursday 9pm slots and the money isn't there to have another hour of drama especially pre-watershed. I suspect ITV feels moving the soaps around is a no-go as it just weakens another night and the soaps themselves which would suffer against Holby City. So it's hard to see what they can do - it's not simply about "showing better programmes" because Countrywise is a decent enough factual show, from what I've seen, but they're still flopping.

Recently, only The Betty Driver Story, the Trevor McDonald factual series and London Zoo have done alright at 8pm. If I were at ITV, I'd instantly recommission another Trevor McDonald and London Zoo series for 6 episodes each which would get 3m+ and maybe a few more of those Corrie '... Story' specials which could air once in a while. Maybe they should look at moving some of the 9pm programmes back an hour to 8pm like Police Camera Action, Homes From Hell, 71 Degrees North, which would probably continue getting 3.0-3.5m like they have done at 9pm. But apart from that I can't really see what they can do. The best way is probably to launch some factual shows post-Corrie on Thursday nights, hope they become a hit for their first series (~4m), and then moving them to Tuesday 8pm for their 2nd/3rd series once they're established where their audience would inevitably drop due to no Corrie lead-in (to about 3.0-3.5m) but still be above that slot average. Or maybe they could try some shiny floor shows there, but as been said previously, I'm not sure if ITV would have the money to spend £300k on a light entertainment show for Tuesday nights (on top of what they spend already on Friday/Saturday/Sunday nights) as their strategy seems to be airing all the "cheap stuff" all on Tuesday nights rather than spreading it around the week like what other channels do.

That might be true, but what about showing programmes that are unique, or bring something new to the table? Countrywise, along with most of the recent travelogues with various celebrities, have all been done before (and better, arguably) elsewhere.

ITV is never going to turn around Tuesdays with such base programming ideas. They need to think outside the box a bit and do something different.

Yeah that's definitely true too. They don't have the commissioners to think outside the box. I can't think of one successful factual strand ITV has had (excluding Corrie sandwich programmes) under current Head of Factual Alison Sharman. She's been pretty useless (isn't she the one who commissioned Daybreak )! Channel 4 has had much more factual success in recent years with shows like Undercover Boss, Secret Millionaire, One Born Every Minute, Big Fat Gypsy Weddings (admittedly some of them like SM are rating lower now, but the first few series were doing really well). One Born Every Minute, especially, is a really good relatively cheap format with a simple concept which can run for 12 episodes per series and would've worked well for ITV. Channel 5 has had the Hotel Inspector and Royal Navy Caribbean Patrol come through in recent years getting 2m (probably the ratings equivalent to almost 4m on ITV1) whilst ITV has lagged behind in that department, with no successful returnable hour long factual shows currently under their books which began in the last 5 years!

Now that The Chase is over, The Weakest Link is back to its winning ways in the competitive 5pm slot. Here's Monday's tea-time overnight ratings (all include HD):

The Weakest Link (BBC1): 2.0m
Escape to the Country (BBC2): 1.8m
Britain's Best Dish (ITV1): 1.8m
* 17:15-18:00: 1.9m
Fern (CH4): 1.0m

Aahh didn't even realise when I read it back either!



Fern seems to have stabilised at around 1m. The share seems to be around 7% which isn't bad in terms of how Ch4 performs on the whole, but it's coming last in its slot probably and below what other programmes are capable of there.

Or - put extra eps of EmFm and Corrie there.

I still think that will happen. Solves their problem and kills off BBC1's winning EE-Holby-9pm drama triumvirate. It did the trick on Thursdays.

Corrie and Emmerdale are already at saturation point with 5/6 episodes per week. I would hope they don't add an extra episode per week to that. It's unlikely I reckon as surely they would've done it by now (Tuesdays have been a flopzone since 2007/2008)? The Thursday move was forced by the Champions League switch to Wednesdays rather than them actively seeking out to move the soaps to Thursdays - they would've kept Corrie on Wednesdays at 7:30pm if they could as it used to be one of its best rated episodes of the week.

How well has Van Damme held up on itv 4 anyone

22/3- 348k
29/3- 169k

Episode 2 experienced a big dip, only half of what the first episode got. That could, however, have been due to the male-skewing England match on ITV1 on the same night which might've taken away a lot of viewers and it might rebound for future episodes. We won't know until perhaps tomorrow when I'll post the episode 3 ratings.

While it will go up in the officials (first episode went up to 621,000), I wonder how disappointed Sky Living will be with those overnight figures for 'Katie'?

It's not looking like the kind of show that could anchor the schedule for the channel in the medium to long term and draw new viewers in. But then I suppose the figures are still well up on what the channel used to get, indeed since the EPG change SL has been boosted significantly.

Would be fascinating to know what they were hoping for ratings wise with Katie - the deal was signed before the Sky takeover but presumably they are paying her a lot of money.

Big thanks rzt..

The Football on Sky Sports 2? A lot watched it. Last year, it peaked at 2.44 million (9.8%).

Very surprised at how Candy Cabs did. Around 1m higher than I was expecting to be honest. I suppose it attracted a very similar audience to Holby City (females) and the Holby audience just decided to keep BBC1 on for the night.

White Van Man deserves a mention too. Up from its debut rating a few weeks ago and must be one of BBC3's highest new sitcoms in the last couple of years.

960k for C4 Hollyoaks last night.. going into crisis zone again. It's quite good at the moment but just can't pull in the viewers.