I'm waiting to see what slot it gets in Wales, as it seems we're getting another Iolo Williams (any relation? ) documentary instead.

Griff Rhys Jones is hosting the new It'll Be Alright on the Night episode. ITV has ordered three new episodes of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?. One to mark Remembrance Day, following 2 to air in Dec '11 & Jan '12 and they have commissioned another episode of Strictly Kosher, a documentary focussing on Jewish community in Manchester.

Didn't the last one get under 3m?

It used to get 20m!

In other US news apparently last night was NBC's worst ever in season Thursday night performance. You'd think they'd have to change something after that although I honestly don't know what.


I remain unconvinced by all this talk of expanding the Thursday block to two-hours although now the Monday block appears to have four hits its certainly much more likely than it was. A lot however will depend on where Two and a Half Men ultimately ends up settling. They may very well need to put Big Bang Theory back on Monday next year if the bottom falls out of Two and a Half Men by the end of the year. A big issue will also be how the midseason comedy does if that holds its own then CBS will have very little choice but to open up another hour of comedy somewhere I suppose. It would be interesting to see where the various shows land in that circumstance though. I assume they'd launch new comedies at 9:30 on both Monday and Thursday (out of Men and Big Bang) which would require a little shuffling of the deck.

However at this point I think it might be in their best interest to try and air a Big Bang Theory repeat at 9PM opposite an original Office and Grey's. That should at least give them some indication as to what to expect from original episodes in the same slot.


Disappointing figure for House although I can't say I'm surprised.

Some of the ratings are listed here - it seems it didn't fall that low. I bet this ends up on New Year's Eve as it falls on a Saturday.

That seems incredibly inappropriate.

To my surprise they haven't even been promoting Toy Story this weekend, so I would probably revise down my 2.5m prediction a little bit, if anything. Toy Story 2 in the later slot will probably get trailed and should do closer to the magic 3m.

Oh, must have been a repeat which went under 3m. I'm sure a repeat hit 20m on a Saturday night in 1992, against a sub-3m BBC1 drama series called Moon and Son.

could be worse, it could have been "Red or Black?: Remembrance Day Special"

For 29th October, Strictly is down for 6:30pm to 8:10pm with X Factor from 7:30pm to 9:30pm. Have both networks forgotten common sense?

Only provisional at this stage, there is likely to be changes as there was last week Tues/Wed.

I think Sunday would be a good night to launch a comedy block and it would help with the overrun problem and make the night younger. Another issue is I think next season will be the final season of HIMYM as the creator plan to end it although I like the show, they need to start planting the seeds to who the Mother is.

Spider-Man 2 got 2m in a 4pm slot so it wouldn't surprise me if Toy Story gets similar figures. TBH it doesn't really need promotion.

Even though I think a terrestrial premiere won't happen for a while, I do wonder how The Lion King would fare?

Yeah, the slot for XF is clearly wrong because it's longer than the previous week's show.

Well, the last one was on Christmas Day, which wsn't going to help it. I'm not sure which one you're thinking of but I do know ITV showed a repeat of It'll Be Alright Late At Night in February 1992, at ten o'clock on a Sunday night, and it got about seventeen million viewers. As that Wikipedia page says, that was first shown on C4, at the incredible time of eleven o'clock on a Thursday night, which would be completely unthinkable now. Actually the first showing of An Audience With Billy Connolly was at eleven o'clock on Channel Four as well.

The audience for number eight is quite impressive given it was up against one of the first lottery draws, while number thirteen was on a Friday as a spoiler for the second Friday 'stEnders. The one that really baffled me was the Election Night one in 2001, because it was completely unrepeatable with loads of references to Hague and Blair, which given how often they repeated the others seemed somewhat remiss. And they never did repeat it.

I used to be a massive Alright on the Night fan, I would always watch it whenever it was on, all the repeats, to the extent I knew number six, the one they always repeated, off by heart. I remember they repeated number four during Euro 96, which was made in 1984 and I'd never seen it, and it looked absolutely ancient. And I've got number three on VHS, released on the Weekend Video label in 1986, which I bought from a charity shop a few years ago.

I've probably said this before but there was also a time in September 1995 when they repeated The Utterly Worst Of Alright On The Night and then a week later repeated number six, where about 90% of the clips in the Utterly Worst came from, and the following week, when they repeated number seven, Denis did an apology before it, saying "Don't worry, none of these have been on for ages!"

Of course it was very exciting in those days because you only got it every two years, and there weren't ten million episodes of TV's Naughtiest Blunders in between.

Moon and Son was a notorious flop, it was created by Robert Banks Stewart who invented Bergerac, and was a straight replacement for it in the same slot (as the last series of Bergerac was in early 1991). But it flopped so badly they shoved it from eight o'clock to after nine, whacking Columbo on to fill the gap, and meaning that's Life ended up about half ten.

Bit late for 'same day' timeshifting. There's three people in my lounge watching it now 'ad free' on Anytime. That will help the officials. Don't watch it myself,

The one that I remember most fondly is It'll be Alright on the Night 11 in 1999. I was quite young but I do remember watching it.

BTW do you know what ratings Bergerac got in its final series in 1991? Was it not on Saturday nights at 7pm?

As regards to the BIB, did Casualty clash with It'll be Alright on the Night 8 as well as the National Lottery show?

I do remember the last episode was at 7pm, I'm pretty sure the rest of the series was a bit later in the evening. The 1991 series fails to make it into Television's Greatest Hits meaning it failed to make it into the top twenty, and I think it ran out of steam a bit and ratings declined. In the Guinness Book of Classic British TV, it says that it hadn't had much critical acclaim for a while, but could always point at its high ratings, but the last series didn't even have that.

I'm sure there was one repeated on Saturday night sometime in the first quarter of 1992, but I've no idea which it was.

It's hard for people to believe how popular outtakes shows were in the 1980s and early 1990s. I remember the BBC finally joining in with Auntie's Bloomers - the first couple of which were really popular (although Auntie's Sporting Bloomers and Auntie's Natural Bloomers soon put paid to that). I think the second AB rated around 19.5m in late 1991, and BARB mistakenly listed it as Wogan, so it is probably down as Wogan in the record books.

There's a business called Moon and Sons in EastEnders now, which must being a shiver to Jonathan Powell if he watches EE!

Er, yes, I think. I can't really remember because Casualty took a few weeks off around the first few lottery draws as well, they showed Girl Friday with Joanna Lumley one week, and the Royal Variety Performance another, while ITV showed the likes of Alright and An Audience With Doddy at 8pm, rather than 9pm as would usually be the case.

Of course, for the first lottery, ITV had Cilla popping up betwen all the programmes that night, and a documentary about Princess Diana at 8pm.

Yes i seems so. Both shows are going to suffer if they don't change things around. Did they not learn from last year?

Casualty was on the same night as It'll be Alright on the Night 8 in 1994. The 10th December episode was entitled "The Facts of Life." If they did clash, I would probably expect Casualty to have been down to 11/12 million.

I have memories of around 7m for the final series, but I might be wrong. They ruined it when Jim moved to France and became a private detective.

It was a big year-on-year decline, though, as I'm sure it reached 14m on Sunday nights in 1990.

Another part of the early 1991 Saturday schedule - Little and Large saw its ratings fall from 12m in 1990 to under 7m in 1991.

And 'Allo 'Allo was getting 9 or 10m on Saturday nights, when repeats of the previous series had reached a few million more than that on Mondays in September and October 1990.

Ouch for Bergerac - 7 million in 1991 would be absolutely appalling. Thank God for Casualty's rising popularity during 1991/1992 (I remember it hitting 14/15 million regularly during this period) or Saturdays could have been a flopzone for BBC1.

As regards to old comedy repeats on BBC1, did they not repeat Are You Being Served? from autumn 1997?