Lol, at least with Masterchef they would be right.

Firstly, Friday's soaps. All soaps did poor IMO. Thought Corrie would have been over 8m for both tbh - its been the strongest week in ages so those figures are disappointing! Only Emmerdale really performing OK-ish. H&A seemed very low too.

Moving onto last night. That's not the best rating for TXF if I'm honest. Yeah 10m is great rating, but because the bar is now set so massively high with this show it just feels underwhelming. I never expected it to match last year as the ratings were HUGE for this stage of the competition, but closer to 11m rather than 10m would be better. DW continues to struggle in the overnights and is beaten by ASFF for the second week running. It's a shame they are so low because overall it's been a very strong series IMO. Next weeks finale should do much better with the SCD lead-in/Merlin lead-out so 6m should be possible.

As someone who doesn't watch the X Factor, one of the BBC's problems is how bad that lottery show is. Secret Fortune makes no sense whatsoever and despite watching it twice I still haven't a clue how it works. Add to that Nick Knowles being the most uncharismatic game show host in history and I leave BBC1 and in all honesty forget to go back. In it to win it always at least gave a fighting chance I'd stay on for Casualty.

I agree with Grenade that I think the judges are going to have some big rows at the live shows this year. Tulisa and Kelly seem much closer than Dannii and Cheryl ever were, but with that come the potential for some big rows (whereas Minogue and Cole hardly interacted with each other). Louis is never afraid of having a live TV argument either!

In terms of controversy with the contestants I agree that it needs to involve contestants that will still be in the show the following week. The Ceri incident won't have affected the ratings because she won't be appearing again (well, maybe in the final...). I think the contestants most likely to cause controversy this year are Kitty, Goldie and Frankie. Kitty in particular needs to be at the live shows, and the producers are lucky that she's 26 and therefore is in the over 25s (who are generally dreadful this year), meaning that they can have another girl in and one less over. The talent seems pretty decent too. There isn't one standout yet but they've got plenty of acts in the boys and girls (and possibly the manufactured groups) to create an entertaining set of live shows, where one or two frontrunners should emerge.

Yeah I watched it for the first time a few weeks ago. Ridiculous show. I hardly ever watch the Lottery, but this is one of the worst formats I've seen.

It's too gimmicky for my liking. I don't mind Nick Knowles and he seems to be a rising star at the BBC but the format is a bit laborious for a National Lottery show. In It To Win It works because there's a good old fashioned quiz at its heart. That's what people want to see.

With Secret Fortune I just tune into the last 7 minutes or so for the main Lotto draw and that's it. I can't be doing with a format as drawn out as Secret Fortune.

A sign of the times. There is no doubt Nick has his fans and he works well in his other genre, but if you would have said to me in the eighties that he would be hosting primetime Saturday night I would not have believed it. Back then there were many seasoned variety types who would have done it, but variety died and all we have now is adult comedians, Vernon Kay and Ant and Dec.

TV in the UK seems to have morphed into the american film industry.

Rather than aim to have a range of good programmes that rate quite well there is this total neurotic obsession with TV block-busters that get mega-ratings.


It's not even in a channels best interest to do things that way, relying on mega-hits is a very risky business plan.

The type of people who run TV nowadays just can't do it any other way it seems. Even BBC1 is going that way with "The Voice" coming soon.

The Daily Mail will run a story saying X Factor is in crisis and the Sun will have the doctor who story.

I still think Millionaire Manor was the worst-IITWI is the best imo.

Hasn't Knowles got one of those ''golden handcuffs'' deals with the BBC and they are desperately looking for work for him ? Whatever he is suited to it isn't a game show

Probably not though there has been negative reaction in the press-Tony Parsons wrote a fearfully destructive piece about the incident in the Mirror:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/columni...5875-23441716/

I think he has, but Im sure I read a while ago that he wasnt happy with it for some reason.

Great piece by Parsons. He's dead right too. But The Mirror is hypocritical printing opinion pieces like that when it's all X Factor this X Factor that. Do me a favour.

I think there's people who just hate the Cowell shows and would watch anything else. Methinks Doctor Who would have higher overnights than it does now if it was on directly against TXF every week.

I think we're going to see this with Merlin, which tends to rate very robustly opposite TXF. It's a bigger force in the overnights than Doctor Who these days it would appear anyway.

True! It is the worst of the lottery quizes, what happened to 1vs 100?

I may be a lone voice but I like Secret Fortune. It takes a while to get your head round the rules but I find it enjoyable. Nick Knowles is understated but does well enough I reckon.

It was cancelled I think but lives on in rerun form on Challenge.

It got axed after the last series in 2009 since it got slaughted against Britain's Got Talent. Also it was deemed expensive as now all the lottery shows are recorded at Pacific Quay, they had to squeeze the whole set into a studio half the size of Maidstone and Fountain Studios. Don't forget they had to recruit over 300 people from auditions and pay them travel expensives for an 8 show recording series. Compared to the other three shows (Secret Fortune, IItWI, Who Dares Wins) the numer of contestants per series barely hits 50.

This was such a hopeless show, it was just some meh celebrities - Ronan Keating being the most famous, and he's not that famous - doing some dull charity thing. If that got on the telly at all it might be a quick item on The One Show. Blue Peter have done more interesting endeavours than that. They may as well have done a documentary about Ray Stubbs doing The Great North Run, that's about the level of it.

I also note it was directly opposite Jo Brand's swimming themed show on Dave, which was a choice in the Radio Times and got way more publicity.


Well, that's how it was billed in the Radio Times, so not that late in the day. I think the rescheduling on C4 and C5 would have annoyed the viewers more, I dunno if viewers understand about stuff getting moved at the last minute to avoid other stuff. I remember when they used to move 'stEnders to 8pm to get out of the way of hour-long Emmerdales in the nineties, and I had to explain to my flatmate why Keeping Up Appearances was on at 7.30, and they were baffled.


Baby Ballroom was of course the result of trying to think of the one variation of a popular format that nobody's thought of without realising why nobody's thought of it, surely the appeal of dancing competitions on telly are a) it's a bit sexy and b) they might cock it up, which is certainly not the case when showing a kids' dancing competition. And after showing the heats at six, they showed the final 8-9.30, which is sensitive scheduling for a show full of kids. Managed to beat DanceX, mind, which tells you something about how bad DanceX was.


Well, An Idiot Abroad was the latest star of the billboard I drive past every day on the way to work which always has a Sky advert on it, and I certainly saw about a million ads on Sky Sports.


I'm sure this has been asked umpteen times on the thread now, which says something about how stupid this scheduling is. No, the primetime episodes are compilations of the daytime episodes, which seems to basically mean that Monday to Thursday is all shoved together on Friday night and Saturday's show is basically a straight repeat of Friday.

I don't know why they didn't just show this at 5.15, even if Pointless is doing well in that slot, they shouldn't be getting in the situation they got into with The Weakest Link by simply showing that week in week out for the entire year with constant repeats, even ITV doesn't do that at 5pm, and it's not as if that slot suffers with wild fluctuations anyway as the lead-in is appalling and the Six O'Clock News is the Six O'Clock News and will get an audience regardless.

And if they don't think Masterchef will do as well as Pointless at 5.15 on a weekday, why do they think it would work at six o'clock on a Saturday night?


Heh, I love that name for it. It's like my mum posting.


No they don't. The first round features two hour long shows for the dances - which given there's fourteen of them gives them well under ten minutes to be introduced, dance and be judged - and then there is a half hour results show. Even if you were to count the launch show, which presumably you are, that still doesn't make up four hours. And of course that's without mentioning the fact that the first X Factor live show is also about the tenth episode of the series.


I don't see what was massively wrong with that schedule, the obvious stinkers are Masterchef, which is just inexplicable, and Live At The Appalling which is the millionth repeat, but there's not much flexibility there with Match of the Day after it. Other than that Doctor Who is fantastic and a bloody big hit, the lottery is the lottery and no worse than Family Fortunes and Casualty is a decent enough show on its day. And Epic Win is a bit of cheap fluff at half five. If you put Total Wipeout instead of Masterchef and, oh, I dunno, Outnumbered at half nine, then it would look way better at hardly any more expense.

As I said last week, compare that to ITV immediately befoire The X Factor, flop after flop after flop.


I don't see what's wrong with Secret Fortune, it's a perfectly simple format which is easy to understand after you see it being played. It's no Millionaire, maybe, but the questions are interesting, the contestants are likeable and Knowles is a safe pair of hands. I find it a perfectly likeable way to pass the time on a Saturday.

Another vote here for Secret Fortune. I enjoy it much more than IITWI which I also watch. It's fun to play along at home. I was getting quite involved last night. Never quite understood the appeal of Nick Knowles amongst the female viewers, but he does a good job here.

And Secret Fortune against its mighty opposition rating much higher than Holding Out For A Hero does in its plum Sunday night slot.

Sky Sports has been free-to-air this weekend, which may give a boost to today's football, and an exciting end now in the Solheim Cup (womens' version of the Ryder Cup).

My favourite lottery show was The National Lottery Winning Lines (Simon Mayo, Philip Schofield). You may remember the wonderwall at the end - 3 minutes to get 20 questions right. The more you got right, the better the holiday. So if you got 1 right, it was Spaghetti Junction!

BBC One will certainly be looking forward to getting Strictly and Merlin back on air next week. Over the past few years, August-September has certainly been one of their trouble spots (perhaps alongside April-May opposite BGT) in the Saturday night roster. I suppose BBC One were rather hoping Doctor Who would spur on that slump period a little this year, but its not really happened and its pulling lacklustre overnights surrounded by a lacklustre early-evening schedule.

I don't think its any secret they need some big new ideas to inject a bit of life into Saturdays, but we should be careful about throwing out the baby with the bathwater with some of those old stalwarts. We've declared the death of Casualty or various Lottery formats for each of the three or four autumns I've been following this thread - and then by January they're comfortably winning the night again.

Looking forward to seeing how next weeks schedule does - I'm going to predict it'll be tin hat time when Merlin commits some insubordination in the family drama hierarchy!

Yeah, Jonathan's ratings are all over the place, and they will be for as long as he's bounced all over the place on Saturday nights. The shares are poor, too, and they'll only get worse without the Factor lead-in after Christmas.

Jonathan thrived at the BBC with a regular slot, and a regular lead-in, and, arguably a fresher, better show, with better guests and no adverts.

Yeah, not great for BBC One last night. BBC One's autumn Saturdays used to begin in the first week of September, but now they don't really get going until the first week of October. Then again, at some parts of the last decade, BBC One's autumn Saturdays didn't get going until mid or late October!