That'll teach me for looking in the Radio Times. I forgot the regional news was delayed until 8.30pm that night.

Maybe rzt or D.M.N. can tell us the last time an edition of A Question of Sport hit 5m in one screening?


It seems they're saving it for Christmas.

I think generally it's very close but there's so many different bits of data to keep tabs on, that sometimes we don't even get, that I prefer to stick to the trusty overnights. And in that instance Corrie is generally always ahead in my experience, has been for a while. A major storyline will push EE ahead but only temporarily.

I can't remember the last time it had 5m, but the highest I can remember AQOS getting in that 20.30 slot in the last couple of years is 4.6m (21%) on the EastEnders Live episode night (19/2/10).

I didn't realise, but considering the opposition I don't think it matters that much. People will watch it as something to do before the 9pm programmes kick in.

EDIT: Reading rzt's post - Question of Sport was up against Coronation Street that night IIRC. It isn't tonight.

Phew.. found something!

A Question of Sport had 6.49m on Friday 8th January 2010 at 7pm in the officials, 6.1m (24%) in the overnights.

God - Dancc in praising C4 over C5 shocker! I'm not quite sure what I make of Ultimate BB in hindsight - I think I'm with Fudd on this one as it wasn't quite as good as it should have been.

C5 though have probably already peaked with Big Brother - apart from BB11 it's declined year on year since 2006 (and that was a 0.1m rise) and nothing I've seen so far from C5's treatment of the show suggests they'll halt the decline - so I think C5 are still quite some distance from beating C4 in primetime when you consider the rest of the line up. And even if they do put up a fight in the 9-11pm slot, C5 is still very weak from 6.30-8pm especially and that would prevent the win. (I guess really with C4/C5 comparing 8-11pm would be the best comparison for primetime)


BTW, Channel 9 reported to be reviving BB Australia next year using the Secret Story format.

X Factor provisionally down for 90 minutes from 7:30pm on Sunday 25th September which is the 2nd Bootcamp episode.

6:30-7:00 falls outside of primetime officially, so it's only really the 7pm-9pm hours where there needs to be serious improvement for them to overtake Channel 4 in prime on a more regular basis. Easier said than done, of course.

I'd like to see one major US drama series picked up for 9pm also - Person of Interest would be my top choice. 8pm is ticking along nicely with some good quality shows but they are not getting great figures in a lot of cases, with a few exceptions like Royal Navy Submarine Mission, Eddie Stobart and Emergency Bikers. 7pm is just a disaster and needs to be looked at to see if there is a better way of hitting their news quota without starting their night off on the worst possible note every night.

The cricket proves they can hit 1m at 7pm, to me the root of the problem is also OKTV but I can't them scrapping that yet.

I think they need to vary 8pm a little bit, maybe put some of the decent performers from the 7.30 slot to 8pm.

I think we can be sure that ITV will be a lot more thoughtful before ripping up the schedule in the future. Peter Fincham has gone very big on 'Event TV' in the past few years - and with some good results. But this is just a reminder that you can't simply manufacture those moments with untested shows, a bold schedule and a whole lot of promotion. You have to be very selective and in this case, you get the sense ITV were simply keen to have another event week and didn't really stop to consider whether the selected show suited it or could sustain it.

I'm not a Corrie viewer but I've been in the room when other members of the family were watching it and, as far as I can see, the only reason it's a big week for Corrie is because it's been unceremoniously ousted from its regular slots by ROB. They had a stunt car crash on Sunday but after that the main plot has bben a life-or-death situation for Stella, a relatively new character who I'm not sure many viewers have warmed to. They certainly won't give a toss about her obnoxious husband or loathsome daughter.

From where I'm sitting, and without judging the quality of scripts or acting, last night's episode look decidily run-of-the-mill and that's why it got run-of-the-mill ratings.

It's certainly not a planned big week like siege week or Stape week. Sunday's episode was simply Monday's displaced 7.30pm episode.

I wonder how many people have continued to watch The One Show, totally oblivious to the fact that Coronation Street is actually on at 7:30pm and 9:00pm today...

Although they have wangled an extra episode from somewhere.

That's true; I'd forgotten about Wednesday's episode.

guess we will find out tomorrow.

I couldn't agree more - it's difficult not to feel a certain amount of schadenfreude at what's been happening with the ROB ratings, and placing a completely new and rather weak format into a plum stripped slot just seems like pure 'they'll watch any old rubbish' arrogance on the part of ITV.

The Friday One Show usually rates the lowest of the week - nothing to do with the presence of Chris Evans I'm sure

It didn't do that great, but it was shown in the summer, during the World Cup (I know the World Cup that year was in the morning, but the evening schedules were all over the place), and it was a different show, they had things like Make Ant Laugh and Banged Up With Beadle, which were a bit dull, and the quiz - which I've always thought was the weakest bit because, like Red Or Black, you don't care who wins because you don't know them - was in several parts throughout the show. But it was better than Slap Bang, we can at least say that. In their autobiography, they say that Slap Bang was a failure because there was no point to it, it was just Ant and Dec doing things.

It was the second series that introduced bits like Undercover and What's Next and also it was on in January against a weak BBC1 line-up.


In fact I proudly told anyone who would listen that Millionaire would flop because it was up against some BBC1 big guns, Casualty on the second night as you say, and on the Monday the whole of it was against EastEnders. In that first run it was on at 8pm for half an hour every night, and the only time it really got a really cushy slot was on the last night, the Sunday, when they showed it at 7.30 and moved Corrie to eight. Other than the stripping, it wasn't a massive event in terms of flinging everything out of the way.

It became more of an event in later runs because ITV would take the opportunity to run special stuff around it, the third run in March 1999 was of course when the news moved to 11pm and they showed a load of film premieres and big dramas that week as well. There was also a week in November 1999 when they ran Millionaire every night, Emmerdale every night (which it didn't at the time), an extra Corrie at 10pm every night and a load of big dramas, purely just for a big week to get a load of pre-Christmas advertising.

The problem is that you can't do event weeks like that now because back then it was a big thing to have two Corries in a night and now it happens twice a week every week, so that's nothing special. And Red or Black is so bloated, and now the news is at ten of course, that once you've got that and Corrie in, you have no space for anything else, so if Red or Black flops, everything flops. ITV's scheduling is now so mundane they just can't do big weeks. And that's with only one more episode of Corrie a week than they had in 1999.


Well, the golf thing should never have been commissioned, that was never an ITV programme because golf is never going to be prime time ITV material. Of course it was on Sky One the year before but Ant and Dec couldn't present it because of their ITV contract.

Someone said on another forum, why are Ant and Dec wasting their talent on boring quizzes? There's no point having them on Red or Black because they don't do anything any old host couldn't do. Similarly I don't care about the public on Push The Button, I want to see Ant and Dec. We need to see them messing around.


Well you say that, but Graham Norton's enjoying great success at the moment but The Graham Norton Show is simply So Graham Norton again, which is a format over a decade old, which he only went back to after The Bigger Picture never worked out. I still reckon that next year we'll probably get The Ant And Dec Show which will be a very similar format to Takeaway just with the quiz taken out,

I've said this loads of times but I don't know why they don't do a series of Ant vs Dec, it was the best bit of Takeaway by miles and you could easily turn it into a hour on its own, watching them take on different tasks.


Funnily enough, I'm reminded here of "the new Millionaire", The People Versus, which was launched by Celador in 2000 on ITV and was also supposed not to fail, so it was shown several times a week (Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays) and had an unlimited budget (I know Celdor piloted it with their own money because they were so sure of its success) and was plugged incessantly, but then flopped because it had the most boring format of all time. Then the following year it came back, on daytimes, opposite The Weakest Link and on a budget of about fifty pence. I'm pretty sure it never completed its daytime run either.

Wasn't Slap Bang essentially SMTV in the evening, I think they even had a version of Challenge Ant which featured on SMTV and when Ant and Dec left was renamed Brian's Brain,

Totally agree. It's been quite dull.

Interestingly, it isn't actually credited on BARB as Coronation Street, it is credited as 'Coronation Street After Hours', so presumably you didn't need to watch it as it I assume didn't affect any of the normal storylines. It's 9pm line-up looked somewhat interesting though (w/e 14th November 1999 for anyone interested) ...

Monday - Grafters: 11.13m
Tuesday - Peak Practice: 10.01m
Wednesday - Men for Sale 2: 9.28m (eh?)
Thursday - Extremely Dangerous: 11.13m (what?)
Friday - under 7.90m, didn't make Top 30(!)

Two of them sound like Tuesday FlopZone material in 2011 based on the titles alone! Either the title is deceiving or two of those five shows did not deserve those ratings.


Just looking on BARB, that also went down very quickly - I think Red or Black? suffers from being on daily, should be a Saturday show in my view.

That's right, they did have Challenge Ant in it, but with old people instead of kids, but that was a rubbish idea, because if you knew the format, it had been done better on SMTV, and if you didn't, who cared? They also had Beers, which was just Chums but set in a pub, excpet the problem there was that Chums was a parody of TV comedy with crap jokes abounding, but on Slap Bang you had a studio audience there, so the crap jokes were actually being used as proper jokes. If you see what I mean. SMTV worked because it was low budget messing around, not high budget primetime entertainment.

Ant and Dec say that ever since, they've done shows where they can come on and say "This is the show where we find a singer star/a big variety act/put some celebrities in the jungle/give away an ad break", as opposed to "This is the show where we just, er, do stuff".

It was indeed billed as After Hours on screen (although it was billed in the Radio Times as Coronation Street Special), because it was set in Brighton and much hyped because it involved the return of Bet. I suppose the nearest equivalent would be Hollyoaks Later. Like that, you didn't have to watch it, but certainly it helped out the 10pm slot.

There were actually six episodes, the third was on Saturday at 7.30 to screw over the first Red Alert.

Extremely Dagerous was a drama with Sean Bean. Men For Sale was a televised version of those charity slave auctions with female celebrities bidding for famous men, which sounds a bit untelevisual but I remember there was a phone-in for vierwers to win a date with some of the men, I know it sound a bit crap but it was quite lavishly mounted.

That was actually the second time they'd done that, they did it the year before and I remember reading an odd report in The Sun a few days later which reported how it had lost more viewers over the hour than seemingly any other show, starting with a ten million plus inheritance but then plummeting to five million or something, though I duno how accurate that was, it did alright in the final ratings, and indeed the second time around.

The Friday 9pm show was Britain's Worst Cooks, of all things, which is making my argument sound a bit rubbish because that ITV line-up sounds appalling. It was up against Friends and Have I Got News For You. But you know, before 9pm it did really well, and it propped up a few other shows, Extremely Dangerous launched very well, so did Grafters. It couldn't make Lucy Sullivan Is Gettting Married (at 10.30 every night) a hit, mind.

It wouldn't be mine.

If Five are going to insist on more US imports I'd prefer to see them 'promote' some of the fantastic shows currently found on their digital channels. Son's of Anarchy and Parenthood both deserve a run on the main channel and would diversify their schedule nicely. SOA has also skewed young the US which would fit nicely with what Big Brother is doing for them.

Personally I think if they're going to run with Big Brother and chase younger viewers with it they need to break away from the procedurals that currently over populate the channel. I just don't think that many under 30's are going to stick around for NCIS, CSI etc.

They could also do with buying some comedies.


Comparing a late night talk show with a prime time entertainment format (which will have been off air for around three years by the time it returns) isn't exactly apples to apples.


Ant vs. Dec feels like a bit of a limited format on its own. I think it worked nicely as a segment in a larger show but I don't know if there's enough there to sustain multiple hour long shows over multiple series.


Yes Slap Bang was indeed just SMTV in the evening. And didn't work as a result.