If it's a season high, it's still incredibly poor.

As for SVU, it pains me to see it doing so badly. God help them when Mariska scales back her duties.

EastEnders will probably outrate Coronation Street as it's a Thursday.

Coronation St will fare better next year in its old Wednesday slot. I think moving the soap around and adding episodes has been a bad move. I am still very much of the 7.30 episode era.

Frozen Planet has now topped every single episode of Planet Earth (2006) and is the highest rated Natural History programme since Blue Planet received a stand alone 9.80m in October 2001.

Official figures for some episodes of Blue Planet include the Sunday repeat (the highest of which is a combined 12.10m). With Sunday's overnight repeat figure taking the total reach to 12.09m, It's looking like episode 2 of FP will become the NHU's most watched show since Life on Earth got 15 million in 1979.

Awesome stuff for Frozen Planet, thanks Andy Parish.

Confirmed schedules for week beginning November 26th are out and Danny Cohen has decided that the channel needs some Ronnie Corbett and Barker to boost ratings in underperforming slots. A repeat of The One Ronnie is on Saturday at 6.10, before Strictly at 7. A Question of Sport repeats seem now to of moved to Saturday teatime (5.40), with a showing of The Two Ronnies Sketchbook on Friday at 8.30.

I think we are in danger of underplaying that rating a touch, sumptuous viewing as it is i dont think many would have expected figures approaching ten million.
Wednesday at 9.00 isnt always the easiest slot, especially with a poor lead in.
The BBC must be the world leader with this type of programming.

Dented by Millionaire? Had been comfortably over a million the past couple of weeks IIRC

Although The Apprentice always delivered big ratings in that slot with poor lead-ins.

Reports now suggesting that she won't be scaling back midseason as originally planned but will continue as things are for the rest of the season. The fact that there's now three lead detectives on the show will undoubtedly scale back her workload a little regardless though.

In truth I don't think the cast change has done quite as much damage as people suggest. The writing has been on the wall for SVU for a few seasons now (and the Law & Order franchise in general for much longer) and I don't think there's anything that would have reversed or stopped the current trend. The real death notes for the show was being moved from that plum Tuesday 10PM slot and then thrown around at 9PM and then 10PM and then 9PM and 10PM again during Lenopocalypse and its aftermath and the Law & Order: LA and its aftermath.

The really sad thing for NBC though is that as things stand even when its failing to break a 2 its likely for a renewal. If hypothetically NBC were to have a 2.0 'cut off zone' and basically cancel anything that can't break a 2 by the end of this week I suspect we'd have:

-The Sing-Off
-Rock Center
-Up All Night
-Harry's Law
-Law & Order: SVU
-Community
-Prime Suspect
-Chuck

All cancelled and potentially Parks & Rec and Whitney as well. Grimm gets some slack because it airs on Friday (although that's not enough to save Chuck). Its quite spectacular how badly things are going for NBC. But as terrible as things are going for them they're still only 0.2 behind ABC season to date. That football alone is able to make that race for third competitive says something about how terrible ABC is as well right now.

Stunned by that FP rating!

I said last weekend, that if ep 2 only got half the timeshift of ep 1 (given it was 1.1m up in the overnights), then it should break 9m. I never expected it to be pushing 10m!

Looks like we can assume FP will rate about 1.5m+ higher than whatever the overnights come out at.


Edited to 30 mins, or the full hour as originally shown? I assume the former, or will HIGNFY have finished by then?

He's done two voiceovers with Hop and Arthur Christmas so he's not being overlooked but I think its unlikely he'll get a leading role in a film, I wouldn't be surprised if we see a new Fry and Laurie special. Before House he did an ITV drama called Fortysomething which didn't do well but clearly Hugh was looking to do a drama.

I wasn't suggesting that he'd been overlooked just that he'd made a string of truly awful films both before and during House. And his schedule on House likely would have deterred him from doing much outside of House. Being the sole lead of an hour long network drama is exhausting.

Fortysomething wasn't really a straight drama though, was it? If memory serves it leaned more toward comedy than it did drama (I refuse to the word dramedy to describe anything). It was pretty awful as well though which is generally true of a lot of what Hugh Laurie has done over the years.

It is worth noting that both Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie have been talking about doing something together again for a couple of years now. If I remember rightly Fry came pretty close to doing a guest spot on House last year but they couldn't quite get the schedules to work. If this is the final season of House then the BBC should jump on getting them back together for something in late 2012 or early 2013.

I keep forgetting about the Thursday dip for CS. What did people think of Life's Too Short tonight?

I think ages back, ITV1 wanted to do Sherlock Holmes but with Fry as Holmes and Laurie as Watson but it was scrapped as the BBC had their own one-off film with Rupert Everett as Holmes and Ian Hart as Watson.

The only film that he's made while he's done House aside from voiceovers is Street Kings and that wasn't great, he was forced to turn down Perry White in Superman Returns during House.

I'm sure FOX or any US network would want him for a drama or comedy but after doing House, he probably wants a break.

The lovely Helen Fospero is presenting Daybreak for the 2nd Friday in a row, which suggests that if Christine Bleakley is down to a 4 day week, it'll be between Helen and Kate Garraway as to who co-presents on Fridays.

Yep edited down to 30 mins.

Gold (or UK Gold as it was probably called at the time) showed edited half hour versions of Sketchbook. It'll probably be the same edits, but without any annoying commercial breaks.


The BBC are rubbish at reviving their old comedies - Red Dwarf on Dave, The Fast Show on the web, Alan Partridge on Sky (although the BBC took up Rab C Nesbitt). Expect to see Fry And Laurie on Sky One, Gold or Dave.

They presented a 'clip show' of their old work on UK Gold, a year or two back.

Life's Too Short 2.53m (10.5%)
Rev 2.37m (9.8%)
both inc. HD

Life's Too Short - 2.5m
Rev - 2.3m

Thank you both.

Good for Rev.

The first episode last year got 2.37m in the consolidated!!

It then got 1.75m, 1.67m, 1.5m, 1.76m and 1.76m.

When was the last time BBC2 had scripted comedy in the 9-10pm slot?

For the full hour?
I'm not sure Psychoville, Lead Balloon, and Episodes were all at 10pm AFAIK. Rab C Nesbit is on earlier around 9ish, I think? I think The Trip was on later too. Why?

Very good for Rev based on last year, less so I suppose for Life's Too Short. I think they will have been expecting something around the 3m mark.

I guess the Gervais/Merchant connection wasn't enough by itself to ensure big numbers if the premise didn't appeal. I think it will fall back a bit from there, as it was a bit hit and miss, and I can't see floating viewers coming back to it.

Rev should hold firm though - I can see why they put them that way round, not leading the hour with Gervais.

Great ratings for Frozen Planet! I know its repeated on Sundays so will have been seen by more than that in the end I am sure

Glad Rev did well. I really enjoyed it