next week rugby matches should do very well. Ireland V Wales and England V France i predict good ratings for those matches

Steve Rider and the rugby team will be travelling to New Zealand to be pitchside for the quarter-finals onwards.

Saturday - Ireland v Wales (kick off 6am), England v France (kick off 8.30am).
Sunday - South Africa v Australia (kick off 6am), New Zealand v Argentina (kick off 8.30am).

Looking ahead to Next Week. what does everybody think Strictly and X Factor will get?

I think the BBC will be pretty pleased with their Saturday night all said and done. Strictly is low in raw terms, but you can't fault a 40% share and it was always going to suffer the worst of the weather ending at just gone 7. Doctor Who did well with the extra lead in and it'll be nice to see the finale with a near 8m official. Merlin it appears enjoys a Who lead in less than the usual Strictly one - but it'll benefit in the coming weeks, I'm sure.

X Factor did fine for ITV1 though obviously suffered like everything else. It's the shows around it that were less impressive - whereas it prospered opposite Who, Strictly is a far tougher assignment for Family Fortunes. And Ross was not impressive. There's an element of "been there, done that" with him and his shows now. I think the BBC show ended at the ruby time and clearly there's not a lot of thirst for him on Saturdays.

I predicted this last night. It will be back up to 1.1m-1.3m tonight I reckon.

I'm gonna go with 1.1m

Solid end for DW and higher than I was expecting even if it was alittle disappointing IMO. SCD suffered in the early slot due to the weather, but 7.5m is still a respectable rating and it was never going to match the 8.0m rating from Friday night.

TXF suffered due to the weather. In its own right 9.5m is a great rating but for XF standards its the lowest rating for the show since Boot Camp 1 in 2009 and a far cry away from the 11.9m that watched the same episode last year. I honestly don't know what to expect for the live shows now. Obviously yesterday was due to exceptional circumstances with a heatwave in October (warmest first day in October ever maybe), but I think tonight will do much better. Maybe looking at 11m (inc. +1). Last year the first live show averaged 12.2m and the results show got 13.1m. I don't think we can expect to see figures like that, but with 1m or so knocked off each I'd expect to see 11m and just under 12m. Just looking at the ratings for the 2009 series and the live show did incredibly well. I'll be shocked if this series beats that series now. I'd expect this series to be the third most watched series.

So if I understand this correctly ITV1 +1 may have been ahead of or at least tied with BBC2, Ch 4 and Five in the 20.30 to 21.30 hour? Dont think that has happened before?

Why this series is above the 2009 series at the moment. Yes i won't beat last year but i expect it to be above the 2009 series

rzt do you have the rating for the Ultimate Police Interceptors(fri. C5 20:00)?

TIA

Just because this years figures aren't really gathering any form of momentum yet. All the figures are around 10.5m or 11.0m inc. +1.

According to the breakdown, it looks like ITV1+1 was slightly ahead of Channel 5 between 8.30-9.30pm but behind BBC2 and C4.

I think the high ITV1+1 figures depressed the raw ITV1 figures. If the 600k hadn't watched on ITV1+1 due to it not being available like previous years, many of them would've PVRed it and watched later on the same night via timeshift and would've been counted as part of the ITV1 overnights. I'm pretty sure TXF would've had 10m yesterday on the ITV1 showing alone had ITV1+1 not been available. This is why comparisons to previous years can be quite difficult sometimes when the figures are in the same ballpark to former years' ratings, although in yesterday's case, it was comfortably down y-o-y by either measure anyway.


Ultimate Police Interceptors: 963k (4.5%)

I would imagine everyone connected with Who will be pleased and privately a bit relieved that the finale made a decent audience want to sit in and watch on a ridiculously hot day for October. What was good about the episode was that, even if you were lost with the story arc, it was spectacular enough to keep watching anyway. Some of the episodes have been a bit spartan this time around.
SCD suffered the worst weatherwise-trying to get people to tune in at 6.00pm is tough enough anyway without Spanish temperatures outside. So it did pretty well imo. Merlin ok but will hope to improve.
As for XF, well still huge but last years figures were buoyed by Cheryl Cole around this time and maybe it was inevitable there would be a series average year on year fall-especially as Miss Cole is nowhere to be seen this time.
Agree re JR, more marmite now than ever -apparently trying to make his shows more family friendly though risks alienating everyone-the legacy of Sachsgate and 18 milliongate still irks many and his old audience probably miss his adolescent outbursts. Added to that the same guests keep turning up-though presumably with the addition of the XF extended family and hangers on.

It was the same in 2009 though Bootcamp had 9.05m and 10.87m then it went down to 10.12m. All the episodes this year have been up from these episodes if you incude +1

So the ever popular Don't Scare the Hare returned yesterday with 400,000 viewers but lost out to The X Factor repeat and Channel 4 racing. Does anybody know how the repeat of Zulu Dawn fared? Whether it had more than 400,000 viewers.

Zulu Dawn had 0.4m ( 5.5%) - slightly higher share than DSTH.

That's interesting. I wonder if the film beat it in the head to head.

True - I hope tonight it makes some sort of recovery and that the live shows start well. Next weeks first live show is shorter than last years too, not by much, but I'm not convinced it can get to the 2009/2010 heights yet.

I think what will happen this year is that it will Grow as the Competion nears the end. Yes it might not get to the hights of 2009 to begin with but towards the end we could be looking at huge ratings again.

The hot weather has brought the ratings down quite a lot. In my area loads of people seemed to be having BBQs and were out in their gardens until late 10pm+ as it was so warm.
I went for a BBQ as well and didnt watch any TV last night and im guessing it was the same across the UK.
With +1 its still respectable for the XF and im sure we'll see a boost for the live shows qith cold wet weather due mid week.

Dr Who did well also all things considered, its not my type of programming but its good to see Saturday night family drama on TV.

Family Fortunes will always going to get around 3.5m when on against SCD, it held up well IMO.

Heh, despite the gloomiest plotline in the history of Christmas Day telly being Don Brennan's suicide attempt on Corrie in 1996, which everyone complained about. And in the seventies you had films like Airport and Bridge On The River Kwai on Christmas Night, hardly Strictly.


I've not heard about 56 Up being on the Beeb, not showing 42 Up made ITV look a bit stupid and they rightly decided to get it back, I don't see why they wouldn't want to show 56 Up. Of course the Beeb also did 7 Up 2000, starting the whole thing again from scratch, but 14 Up was shown on a Sunday teatime in 2007 with absolutely no publicity so I dunno if we'll ever get another instalment of that, though it was a good show.



But people don't care what was on last year, they don't remember The Royle Family was on at 9pm last year and they won't care if it's on at 9pm this year. And I'll keep saying it, the four shows are still absolutely deserving of their place - Strictly is the Beeb's biggest entertainment show, Doctor Who is a huge family success, 'stEnders is 'stEnders and The Royle Family is one of Britain's best loved sitcoms and a new episode is an event. If there is something better to put there, they'd put it there, but there is not. And there's still space for innovation, last year we got the Ronie Corbett special and Come Fly With Me and they can show other things this year too.

Suggesting BBC1 should weaken their Christmas Day line-up, the biggest day of the year for them, just because the same shows were on last year is ludicrous. Let's demand ITV put The X Factor on a Tuesday. It's been on Saturday for ages and it's getting boring. Put Popstar to Operastar on there instead.


No, and The X Factor guests don't seem that much of a big deal as we've just sat through two hours of them, and the series has been on for weeks as well so there's not much else we need to know about them. Be different if they were being relevealed or something. In any case, Ross' show is dead dull and Graham Norton has completely upstaged him.

Great to see you're still posting Dancc

Does anyone know how Friends did yesterday on Comedy Central?

It'll be interesting to see how things break down for ITV1 versus Strictly next week - because as things stand now it looks like Family Fortunes is losing 3m or so viewers vs Strictly - and I can't see The X Factor losing that many.


Ah, a 6am start for Ireland v Wales on Saturday followed by England at 8.30am. Great figures yesterday though for a great game - and be interesting to see the match figure considering the last hour of the show was basically previewing todays Ireland and Wales games, including extended highlights of the (rather fascinating) 2007 Wales v Fiji game which knocked Wales out of the tournament.

Tbh, I don't think JR would do any worse at 10.30pm than he does at 10pm. And while airing in the 10pm-10.30pm period isn't ideal for a family show, it's probably still a better option than clashing with Strictly for so long. Obviously it's now pushing into the 8pm hour, so it can't be entirely avoided, but 15 minutes is better than 45.

Piers Morgan must be enjoying seeing those ratings, though. But it probably also reflects one of the issues X Factor has at the moment - neither Barlow nor Tulisa have quite the same profile that the panel last year had. But they'll be hoping that changes once the live shows get going, maybe some rivalry and scandal, judges performing live perhaps, the whole fashion thing...

I enjoy the fact that people neglect to include +1 when discussing X-Factors "decline." If we include +1 this series is averaging better than last year significantly, and is only slightly down without it.