Lewis did OK although taken out of context it would look a bit low. However there were 1.4 million less people watching TV between 8pm and 10pm last night compared to last week and indeed the same applies to the 2 weeks before that too. Easter weekend is always down in terms of ratings though regardless of the weather so I think ITV should be content. Having said that, I would have liked to have seen the share higher for yesterday's Lewis.


Previous overnight full slot Lewis ratings:

2006
10.7m (46%)

2007
7.4m (31.6%)
7.3m (31%)
8.4m (37%)

2008
8.0m (35%)
7.7m (35%)
7.5m (33%)
8.0m (35%)

2009
ITV1
6.8m (30%)
6.4m (25%)
6.2m (25%)
6.0m (25%)

2010
ITV1 [inc HD]
7.449m (31.4%)
7.21m (29.1%)
6.28m (25.4%)
6.2m (28.4%)

2011
ITV1 [inc HD] -------- ITV1 +1
6.33m (24.7%) --- 196k (0.9%)
5.5m (22.3%) ----- 128k (0.6%)
6.2m (25.1%) ----- 245k (1.1%)
5.66m (24.2%) --- 240k

As nearly everything was down, here's the week-on-week declines for last night's returning shows:

BBC1: Countryfile: -16%, Antiques Roadshow: -3%, Britain's Royal Weddings: -11%
ITV1: The Cube: -12%, Lewis: -9%
CH4: CDWM: -9%, The Hotel: -28%, Country House Rescue: -15%
CH5: The Walking Dead: -24%

Antiques Roadshow held up very well, barely down from last week's figure - the best performer of the night in terms of holding onto its previous episode's audience. Countryfile, as expected, was down quite a bit due to the early evening weather and going up against Corrie. The Cube down over 10%, perhaps due to the 30 minute earlier start. The Hotel posted a very sharp decline. The Walking Dead was down quite a lot too, although I think it would've been effected by United airing on BBC2 which must've taken a few of the male viewers away, so I wouldn't be surprised to see it recover next week.

BBC1 a bit plain today: 3 films for kids followed by NEW Total Wipeout.

Good C5 rating at 22:00.

I know I keep saying this, but why oh why haven't ITV split Britain's Got Talent (and for that matter, Dancing on Ice this year).

Worked wonders for X Factor and I think BGT would work pretty well for an hour on a Sunday evening, followed by another youngish-skewing one-hour drama maybe.

Save Lewis and Vera for the summer months - the archive indicates to me that two-hour Sunday dramas work the best for ITV during the summer months (remember 6.2m for Midsomer Murders in 2008 and Lewis's strong performance last year).

With Britain's Got Talent and other stuff, it's difficult for these big dramas to stand out in the schedule, and I mean I don't think Lewis has had the promotion it should've done.

Your argument is that Vera stands a much better chance in the spring...but I'm not sure it makes a difference. I'd actually premiere it in the summer, and then if it's well above 5m, move it to winter.

It'd be nice to see ITV premiering some big scripted shows in the spring and winter on Sunday nights after X Factor, BGT and DOI - comedy dramas, for example - it could've been the desination for a second series of Married, Single, Other. Perhaps it could also be the destination for some pilots (Cold Feet debuted on a Sunday night many years ago in a late slot after the news).

Given that ITV's the only major commercial broadcaster in the UK, I feel Channel 4 is the only network to really find success in the kind of drama I'm on about (i.e. Shameless, This Is England '86).

Woah! Steady on. Is it really professional for a Digital Spy reporter to be expressing such opinions on here?

And that aside, I'm willing to bet that BSkyB, Channel 4 and Channel 5 and the vast numbers of people that watch and enjoy the programmes they broadcast each week are going to disagree with you on that point.

It does seem that there is a completely different version of the article on page 5 of today's Daily Mail compared to that online one last night. The print version is, as you say, actually quite kind to Dr Who and doesn't attack it but actually explains the reasons why it was down. It does have a little bit of a dig a BGT at the end though.

Some interesting schedules today. E4's is made up almost entirely of 3 shows which could all well disappear from the network in the next year or so - Friends (confirmed), Glee (Sky keen) and Hollyoaks (ratings drop). Still, can't blame them for making the most of these shows whilst they've still got them. It should add up to a good audience share for the network.

Personally I've settled on Quest's Dirty Jobs marathon. A simple show, but strangely addictive for some reason.

not great? your being very kind.

I think it maybe a bit soon to say Hollyoaks is leaving E4 however, same for Glee.

E4 wil also have lost Smallville, not a big deal, but its another show to add to the list.

In the Mon 9pm slot, has E4 ever got more than C4?

eg. One Born Every Minute v Glee

Yes, its curious how its now open season on BGT from various angles. Still huge figures but the feeling has shifted from promoting its rise to signaling its fall.
I guess after five series its starting to get samey, and there is no Cowell as a focal point of peoples emotions. If the standard isnt high people are now watching on the basis of its past triumphs which is always a bit of a tightrope.
Im amazed though that SYTYCD isnt attracting more press gloating, its almost as though they just cant be bothererd.

Britain's Got Talent as you say could easily sustain a split slot, so rather than 7 weekly shows (first and last being 90 minutes) you have 8 hour-long shows over four weekends, and then they could easily expand the callback stage to a further weekend - or with it airing the same weekend as the Champions League final just have the one hour show.

The trouble is what happens with the two hour dramas. One option is to push them to summer as you suggest, or put them back to 9pm. Another might be to put them midweek - though Midsomer Murders seems to be churning out enough episodes at the moment to pretty much fill the slot whenever there isn't football.

As for Dancing on Ice - that's old ground as far as this forum is concerned, but basically in Take Me Out ITV found a show they could build Saturday nights around without it, and moving Dancing on Ice performance shows back to Saturdays causes headaches for that, though it could easily anchor Saturday nights through Spring and Summer - but would the ratings hold?


At least though, unlike this morning, and unlike after 7pm, you can tell it's a Bank Holiday schedule. There is absolutely no justification for example of airing The One Show on Bank Holidays - the schedules would be much better off with an early evening family film in the slot.

Kenny is correct, time shift viewing audience is mapped back to the time of broadcast and the share taken against ALL viewing at the time including the time shift (even though the actual viewing was not at that particular time slot).

As mentioned yesterday by rzt I think, the problem has arisen with +1 channels that they are fragmenting their share by launching what is in effect a time-shift channel but viewing isn't being treated like time shift. Some BARB data bureux have had a go at defining what a channel/programme share should be with the +1. Some make sense, some are just daft!

I believe BARB are stating now that you can simply add the audience's together of the programme and divide by the original Total TV audience without recalculating a new Total TV. So for instance if Coronation Street got 10m viewers at 7:30 and Total TV was 30m and then another 5m at 8:30, then the share would be 15/30 or 50%. The alternative would be to create a psuedo Total TV figure for every minute of the day discounting the +1 channels actually viewing at that time and adding in all the +1 channels viewing in an hours' time, a bit of a nightmare for data processors.

See I don't really like adding the +1 to get a total, but at least its not as bad as the BBC Live +7 system which I posted yesterday where they add a million showings to get a total, the idea that The Boat that Guy built got 7.7m raw viewers over two showing (4m + 3.7m I think it was at the beginning of March). Now that's stupid.

You can't say "Oh, but 7.7m watched this" when in reality only 6.5m watched it, yet 1.2m chose to watch it twice. (of course, I'm exaggerating, but you get the point)

And I hope BARB are not going to revert to adding figures to get a Top 30 chart.

Like what BBC Three are doing: Indy at 7.05pm.

I worded it wrong...what I'm trying to say is - from a ratings point of view (and we're in a ratings thread Dan) - ITV is the only big commercial competitor for mainstream drama.

All of my views on here are my own...I'm not using my official account, I'm sorry if you're offended, I'll try to pipe down in future.

Solid for United, well in the middle of my expectations. Its also number two on iPlayer and should timeshift to around 4m too.


The Corrie figure shows that ITV are wasting their time by airing it on Easter Sundays, the episode two years got about 6m. If they have to produce yet another episode of Corrie to ram into the schedule, they may aswell do it on a night where it wont be sub 6m and get beaten by the primetime drama after it.


I agree with the share comment. I find shares offer very little to looking at ratings. Shares are an old-fashioned thing used for when overnights gave us the whole rating and there were no +1 or timeshift viewing.

Did 6.5m really watch Doctor Who at 6pm on Saturday? I highly doubt it, a decent proportion would have timeshifted later that night. Also, shares only tell us the overnight peformance of a channel in primetime. We never see the shares for official ratings which could change which channel "won" primetime for that night.

I still find the share to be important when looking at the overnights. Say for example, EastEnders got 8.5m/35% for an episode when it was cold and raining and 7.5m/40% for another episode during a hot evening, the share for the 2nd episode was quite a bit higher and help indicate that it did relatively well compared to the other episode even though the raw number of viewers was down by a million. If we were to ignore the share completely, as Kevin O'Sullivan is suggesting, it would make the rating for the 2nd episode look quite poor even though it isn't necessarily. And so share IMO is important to help give some context.

I know not everyone included in the overnights necessarily watch it 'live' as broadcast because they may do so later on the same day but because that's the case for every programme, I still see no problem at looking at the shares. So as you said Georged123, not everyone of the 6.5m of DW would've watched it live but that's the case for all other programmes in the slot too and I suspect even if you looked solely at the no. of people who watched the programmes 100% live between 6-6.45pm, DW's share would've still been 36/37% of the live total viewing audience.

Looking at the line up on BBC1 tonight I think it will all really flop tonight apart from Enders.

I agree that shares used to give overnights context is fine. The weather for the last week has reduced ratings but the shares help us see that the weather is mostly to blame. However, my gripe with shares is that they are only helpful when used with overnights and overnights are increasingly showing less of the overall picture.

For example, if BBC1 "won" primetime with 21% and ITV1 had 20% when using overnight shares that is the end of the story. BBC1 won that night and nothing more is said. But, it is very possible that the ITV1 shows increase their ratings via timeshift by 1m on average for the whole night. However, BBC1 shows only timeshift about 300,000/400,000 on average for the whole night. The extra timeshift that ITV1 shows received may actually have meant that ITV1 had a better share on that night in the offical ratings (eg BBC1 21.5%, ITV1 21.6%). However, we never know what the official share for shows are only have shares for the overnights that dont give anywhere near the full picture nowadays.

I'm predicting that Masterchef will get the better of Mr Whicher at 9pm.

how do you think the Arena on George Martin will do?

This Easter has been the latest on in the year since 1943 and it won't be this far on in the year for a very long time to come now so I don't think so many shows being considerably lower than previous Easter weekends is surprising and it certainly shouldn't be used to project a trend.

I think it will be about 4.5M or more.
But still not a great line up.

Thanks for the confirmation! So, given that the weekly channel share is able to be calculated and shown on the BARB site, when the "annual primetime shares" race is run, is it based on the overnights or the consolidated weekly figures?

K

Sad if a reality show gets the better of an expensive scripted drama.

With a two hour slot, an 11pm finish and six ad breaks, ITV's offering is definitely one for the timeshifters though.