There has been quite a few shows on ITV, that have returned to much lower numbers on ITV in their second series. 71 Degrees North, That Sunday Night Show & Popstar to Operastar.

Whats going on there?

I agree on Homeland, I am really enjoying it - probably my favourite of the new U.S shows (although the 3rd episode wasn't as solid as the opening two).

However it does not strike me as a mainstream hit and I hope C4 have realistic expectations for it. Also think that out of the terrestrials Channel 5 would probably do a much better job marketing it and making it a focal point of their schedule. Still guess we will have to wait and see how C4 treat it and whether viewers will give it a chance or see it as yet another 24/Spooks style show (despite the fact it feels much fresher than previous 'terror/intelligence' related programmes).

It's just like I'm a Celebrity but in the Artic. It should get better ratings but maybe Veiwers want something fresh and different

E4 seems to be building up its own "Animation Domination"

The Cleveland Show, Bobs Burgers, Napoleon Dynamite & Allen Gregory.

All FOX animation, add Family Guy to that line up, and E4 basically becomes Fox, I assume there is a reason why The Simpsons is never on E4, and so cant join "E4s Animation Domination" line up.

That said if I recall correctly Bobs Burgers was lucky to get a 2nd series, whilst both Napoleon Dynamite & Allen Gregory.are new shows, and may not survive, so E4 should not be surprised if one of the 3 is axed.

BBC One were basically on a hiding for nothing last night but at least recorded respectable figures with nothing falling below the 3.4m mark. EastEnders was damaged slightly by The Betty Driver Story but bounced back with the BBC Three repeat.

It Takes Two is really taking off now with another good rating at 6.30pm. University Challenge also did excellently and I wish they would think about moving Only Connect from BBC Four to tie up with it as I think it'd do well. The night petered out slightly after University Challenge had finished.

ITV1 will be pleased to see those figures after what was apparently a poor weekend for them! Doc Martin is a steller performer at 9pm and Coronation Street and Emmerdale both recorded good figures while The Betty Driver did well. That's the first time in a while, IIRC, that News at Ten has hit 3m.

The kings of the overkill have to be Channel 4. Embarrassing Bodies isn't doing as well as it could be, possibly because people know that the next series is only a couple of months away!! Rude Tube did well again at 10pm, and they'll be pleased to get over 1m in the 8pm considering the opposition.

And maybe it was that opposition that hurt The Gadget Show; I think it'll bounce back above 1m next week. The Hotel Inspector didn't really improve and Big Brother remains steady in the 10pm slot but, as others say, it'll be interesting to see how the twist impacts on tonight's figures.

I'm quite a fan of Paddy McGuiness (though Charlotte adds absolutely nothing!) and his general piss take of the whole thing, and actually compared to other shows the starting celeb line up wasn't bad - certainly better than Celebrity Big Brother. I do wonder how regional Paddy's appeal is - he's Granada through and through.

It's a good little show IMO, but suffers from the limitations of it's location - most things this year we saw last year. It's also more challenge based than personality based, which to a fan of reality TV "formats" like myself is brilliant, but to a wider audience, especially an ITV audience, probably doesn't do itself any favours.

This really should be the death knell for this sort of show on ITV1, barring IAC. Hell's Kitchen went due to falling ratings and useless celebs, Marco was a flop and Popstar to Operastar struggled to get more than 3 million viewers. These sort of let's send some celebs on a free jolly reality show, or see how they can cook or sing, really belong on teatime Channel 4 now. While 1.5 million people will willingly tune in to see Abi Titmuss burn her dinner on Channel 4, this stuff no longer works on ITV1.
Should IAC start to tank, then ITV should drop this whole genre of shows. If they want reality hits, the new way is graft a reality element onto an entertainment show involving the general public or go back to shows like Rich Girl Poor Girl, which were quite entertaining.

I'm sure you have that pre-written to paste in everytime anyone mentions one of ITV's second tier reality/talent shows! No mention of Ladette to Lady though, shame.

Maybe ITV are hoping that Pointless will go off air at some point giving The Chase a clear run, maybe after Christmas?... 2013?

I suppose the good thing is, the more episodes of Pointless that are made, the less likelyhood of Epic Win! coming back!

Mind you, the ultimate ladette, Katie Price, has seen her newest offering massacred in the ratings, only 130,000 dared to endure Signed By Katie Price. By comaprison in her glory days, Katie and Peter was attracting nearly as many viewers as the more wholesome 71 Degrees North.
It's not that I'm totally against celeb reality, Celebrity Come Dine With Me has been a decent low budget hit, it's just the main commercial channel isn't the place for it now( barring IAC) and they have created some real stinkers over the years.

lets not forget that Katie Price has moved from Freeview channel ITV 2, to Pay TV channel Sky Living.

Still this is Sky, so obviously Katie Price & viewers should "Believe in Better"

I reckon ratings will tumble. It's an actual ridiculous twist, unfair, unjust, pathetic, everything really

maybe off topic, so PM if you want, but what is this twist?

Well now you have to pay more to watch her career fall off a cliff. However, I digress, I wonder how Man U will do on Sky's biggest channel tonight.

im not a Sky customer, is this how Sky customers define "better"?

First of all (this may be not linked to anything), Aaron won a task, and was told that he would receive a prize the next day (this prize was supposed to be given to him, it still has not).

Okay, they nominated as usual, Jay and Anton received the most votes by the HMs, they announced it to the housemates, BB then said "Please collect your suitcases", they then went into the DR and put into a room called the "Crypt", like a rehash of BB5 Bedsit. They have to wear Halloween costumes. They recorded a message shown to the others saying "we have been evicted" (no one believe dit though) They will be watched the Live Feed and see what the others are doing (even in the Diary Room). Now here comes the bad part..... BB has told them that they have the power to change who is up for eviction. People are angry because seeing as they received the most noms, they should be up, but they are supposedly aloud to pick 2 HMs to replace them (most probably Aaron and Faye, the 2 favourites).

Meanwhile, BB is playing games with teh HMs, they are being scared, images and skeletons are appearing behind mirrors, blood coming out of the taps and shower ect...

To sum up, they, the nominated HMs have the power to control the house, WHY? The twist is juts bloody awful.

Particularly high 16-34 skew for X Factor on Saturday and higher than the Sunday show as well. The 58% ABC1 skew for Jonathan Ross is one of the highest I've seen for ITV.


Funnily enough, an article in Broadcast in December 2004 says that ITV picked X Factor over the other 2 because they felt the genre may be dying and thought the safest option was to stick with the show that had "star power" in Cowell and Sharon Osbourne.


In A18-49 it has usually been around the 10% mark, I think. Perhaps slightly lower. This year it was about 5% which was seen as a big win (and included some big gains towards the end of the season). Plus it was up in total viewers.


It seemed at the time that ITV just wanted to keep it out of the BBC's hands. IIRC, someone involved said much the same and suggested that was why ITV never really had a shot at landing it.


Last season was the big problem for House, with massive losses. The fact that they planned Terra Nova as a lead-in for House says a lot! Obviously that hasn't really worked out.

From the statement NBC made after the deal was done it did sound like they felt ITV would just buy it to stop BBC getting it and so weren't really the long term partner their obviously hoping the Beeb will be

As you say ITV only really wanted to stop the Beeb getting it - I don't think anyone saw their interest as very serious.

Salv* does sound like Big B is going a bit far.

It really is an awful twist on BB. I don't think it will impact ratings for tonight/tomorrow, however if it is the case that Jay/Anton can completely switch the noms (most likely to Aaron/Faye) then I can see ratings falling.

I just do not understand why BB thought this was a good idea.

Far be it from me to praise ITV1 - but they seem to be going through a ratings boom just recently, Coronation Street doing 9m+ overnight, Emmerdale over 7m, Doc Martin along with Downton Abbey doing incredibly well, The X Factor still currently the #1 rated show. Yes they have a more than equal share of dire flops, That Sunday Night Show (2.08m), Holding Out For A Hero (2.29m), ITV News at Ten (2.1m), Mayday Mayday (2.61m), High Stakes (2.19m), 71 Degrees North (2.24m), Tonight (2.7m).

There is still a lot to fix with ITV1 but they are finding some depth, Soaps are still the backbone of the weekly schedule, if only they could find a couple more quiz formats that are not total failures, make ITV News at Ten & Tonight more appealing to viewers. I would argue that 4m viewers ought be the baseline for primetime on ITV1, I cannot imagine advertisers are queueing up to buy slots on the above flop shows - which represents more than 25% of (6:30-10:30pm) primetime.

Obviously highly likely that the BBC will get the usual 50% split of rights to Euro 2012.

But I don't think it's a 100% certainty.

DQF has reduced the BBC Sport budget by 15%. DQF has pretty much said that this saving can be achieved by the F1 saving plus dropping various lower profile events (some already announced and probably a few more to come). DQF also said that the BBC will not cut the Crown Jewels. However:

It strikes me that the BBC may have put itself in a weak position. The above statements must be based on an assumption about the renewal cost of existing contracts and I strongly suspect that the assumption is that renewals will be at broadly similar prices to existing contracts.

Now we know that both the recent Champions League and Football League contracts have seen a fall in values so on the face of it the above assumption may, initially, look reasonable.

But what about F1? Reports suggest the total value of the new Sky and BBC contracts is significantly higher than the current BBC contract.

So the BBC could face price rises for some of its contracts. If it does, can it afford to keep them? Quite possibly not.

One other point - by announcing the 15% cut, the BBC has told all other broadcasters how much money it has available for Sport. That could well be an unwise move. If Sky or ITV (ie the 2 most powerful competitors) decide to target a particular BBC contract, they could put in bids well above what the BBC is currently paying in the knowledge that it would be very hard for the BBC to respond.

Might ITV do just that for Euro 2012 (ie by putting in a large bid for the whole event)? It's certainly not impossible.

Obviously Sky is not a factor for Euro 2012 but it could potentially target other contracts - with the obvious "non A Listed" big one being the Six Nations. I personally think it's very unlikely Sky would get the Six Nations but F1 showed that surprises can happen and maybe Sky might have an outside chance of splitting the Six Nations 50/50 with the BBC.

Crisis is obviously hyperbolic but the press always lean toward hyperbole because that tends to sell more. Having said that I suspect if the press were simply ignoring the fact that The X Factor was down year-on-year and individual shows are down on '09 as well there would be people in here wondering why they were ignoring that. Especially after the way the boot was put into Doctor Who this year.

What I think is particularly interesting about this series of The X Factor is the way that expectations for it have constantly shifted throughout. Its been a very strange run of both over performing and under performing.


I imagine they were hoping he'd attract attract some of the Take Me Out audience to the show.


It doesn't really need to be a mainstream hit though. Looking at the way the 10PM slot has performed for C4 recently I think a US import can probably be considered a success if its consistently above 1 million and I'm assuming Homeland will land at 10.


Not a very good one though unfortunately. If we're being honest about it for Fox Animation Domination is a two show block (and if we're being brutally honest it is increasingly a one show block) and neither of those shows airs on E4. There's an air of them having picked up the scraps that nobody else was particularly interested in. And to this day I don't understand why they didn't make a play for Archer.

I know right now everyone has their sights on the impending bidding war for Family Guy but I think the much more interesting question might very well be where The Flintstones lands in 2013. At that point its likely The Simpsons will (finally) be coming to an end around the same time as The Flintsones arrive which I think is likely to intensify things a little.


I think that ITV wanted to keep it away from the BBC and were willing to potentially spending millions doing so possibly says more than if they'd seriously wanted the show.


Whether or not House gets another season will (I think) be the best indicator of how well Fox's season has gone. If they renew House then its probably a good sign that they've had an absolute disaster of a year especially as it'll mean getting Hugh Laurie to sign a new deal which won't be cheap. And if Fox renew Fringe as well then its probably been a catastrophically bad year for them!

F1 isn't atypical though. Its increased market value is all artificial and driven by the fact that Sky were willing to pay well over the odds for it.


I suppose it depends upon what we're classing as the crown jewels for me it would be:

-Olympics
-World Cup
-Euro Championship
-British Open
-Wimbledon
-Six Nations

I imagine those are the six core sports rights that the BBC will be looking to protect above others. Beneath those will be things like the general athletics coverage (such as the Diamond league coverage) and Premiership highlights.

The majority of the crown jewels either Sky can't bid for or it has been made abundantly clear that the BBC is the preferred rights holder (Wimbledon). So those are basically safe from Sky and I'm not convinced ITV have the cash to go for exclusive rights to Euro 2012 for example nor do I think they'd relish the chaos that would unleash on their schedule. Truth be told I think both ITV and the BBC actually prefer the shared rights for Euros and the World Cup.

Some of the lower level stuff might be in more danger but I'm not convinced. Sky might want some more of the athletics coverage although (unless they've been burnt by their experience with the World Championships) I suspect Channel 4 might be the more immediate threat. Would ITV make a play for the Premier League highlights again? I would think they're the only real danger on that front.

I think its unlikely we'll see any major shifts in the sports rights. And frankly I think its time that the BBC stopped running away from the fact that they're the BBC and started leveraging that much more in any and all buying they do. There really isn't any other broadcaster that can offer the breadth and depth of coverage that the BBC does to the national audience that the BBC does. Can you imagine Wimbledon on ITV for example?

AlexiR agreed animation wise, The Flintstones is the one to watch.