That wasn't part of the Masterchef competition last night. It was Michel Roux Jr doing some cooking.


Noticing the My Family Christmas 2010 repeat on BBC1 tonight reminds me that some people were saying there was going to be a new Christmas special this year but it never showed up.

You've got it completely the wrong way round

Ant & Dec are presenting the main show on Christmas Eve, Phillip Schofield and Christine Bleakley are presenting the launch show as Ant & Dec will only just have returned from Australia.

To those saying there isn't much buzz about Text Santa, maybe that is because it hasn't officially launched yet until tommorow!

BBC1 obviously sent mum to Iceland this Christmas, judging by this year's ident...

Is it just me or are those soap ratings really poor? Surely Coronation Street and EastEnders should be hitting that 40% share considering it's winter now and it's only a few weeks until Christmas. Very disappointing.

EastEnders and Coronation Street should be at least hitting the 9m mark and be aiming for 10m.

The Million Pound Drop has put in an average performance across the week. I think Channel 4 would have expected it to hit 2m instead of being in the 1m ballpark.

Or, it's shit...

I'm not surprised at the low ratings to Live at the Apollo thesedays, the BBC should know that there are only a few stand up comedians that are worthy of such a mainstream slot, the likes of Peter Kay, Michael Mcintyre etc.

Last night's comedians weren't mainstream names and back 10-20 years ago would only have been on at 9:30pm had they have been on Channel 4

Concur. Very underwhelming soap numbers.

Is there not usually a rule when discussing charity programmes? If someone wished low ratings on Children in Need they'd get slated.

Some negativity about tonights Strictly, the couples VT's before the dances have reached the bottom of the barrell and this alongside the fact that not all the judges are getting to comment on each dance. And more than usual peculiar marking.

Compared to the same night a couple of years ago, EastEnders and Emmerdale were both up: http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/soaps/ne...cember-11.html

Not compared it to the same night last year as the soaps were boosted by the Corrie 50th Anniversary effect. Corrie was down from the equivalent night in 2009 too though.

LOL - so true. BBC2 though make up for it, ditching their four year old package for a rather nice new ident. ITV though after a couple of good efforts in recent years have gone back to the lazy option of sticking something on the regular idents - and these random Text Santa characters aren't well known enough - or prominent enough within the ident - to make them work. A shame they didn't make an ident as the Text Santa promos and Christmas on ITV promos are rather nice.


Their own fault for milking it for the extra half hour a night - had it been 10-11pm I'm sure it would have done better (would be interesting to see the breakdown actually). It also suffers now from far too many people winning - and generally just winning £25k. It kind of needed those two going out on the first question this week.

Personally for this "Christmas" run I'd have tried it out in a 5pm slot for the week, with a second nightly edition at 9pm. Not much competition at 9pm there now I'm a Celeb has finished, and considering 5-6.30pm can be when C4 hits the highest audience of the day I think a daytime trial would be a good way of trying to bring in a new audience, even if it is an older audience.

Yes, there is a sense of anti-climax after all the bells and whistles last year. And soaps arent the habit they were for many.

Dont see how saying a show looks shit means they wish it gets low ratings. Children In Need is pretty poor every year and gets a lot of negatives comments about the content. Does that mean everyone wishes CIN to get bad ratings?

If it has Ant n' Dec hosting, quality entertainment is not something to expect really, but hopefully the money raised will be a decent amount. Why does it seem we will have X Factor people on it, Jason Manford/Paddy McGuinness - something so bad that it is 'good'. I will check it out, but not expecting much from it really. It would have been better to tie in The Royal Variety with telephone donations, just have a rolling banner.

Yeh I think that schedule will be right. I agree that The Exit List will probably flop, it just doesn't sound like a smash hit show and will be pretty isolated in the schedule. ITV need to try harder on Q1 Saturdays. Family Fortunes will probably do OK although Let's Dance will dent it so it'll probably be down to c4m, so fairly similar to how Push The Button was doing (although better from ITV's POV as ASFF is much cheaper than PTB). I get the impression thought that ASFF is a bit of a last minute slot filler though, as I suspect Red or Black was originally planned to run weekly in those slots, but its underperformance in series 1 have made them reconsider their plans. The fact that it'll be the first time since 2006 that Ant & Dec won't have had a Q1 show and that ASFF will be 7 episodes make me think this could be the case.

Good to see EE winning the night again - 8.726m combined is decent for a Friday. Most tv viewers don't watch Soaps, the same as most tv viewers don't watch TXF or SCD. As we know many EE viewers go out on Friday nights, maybe CS viewers do also.

Which show will get the highest viewing share this weekend, SCD or TXF? TXF could approach 50% tonight, tomorrow it ought better that figure. SCD would be very happy with a 45% share tonight or tomorrow.

Thanks for that link. Interesting reading. I notice that Corrie was just hitting that 40% share on the equivalent night in 09.


I don't know why they made it 90 minutes for this run. It should have been 60 minutes at the most, as a gameshow like that would drag over 90 minutes. Hopefully they'll reduce it to an hour runtime when it returns.

I think they should only show it 6 weeks of the year. They should show it two weeks running up to Christmas/New Year, then they should show it again during BGT finals week, making sure it starts straight after each BGT live show, then they should do another stripped two weeks at the beginning of September, at the start of the autumn season.

I've just watched this on the iPlayer and I don't recognize this description.

Doesn't look like a vintage year for Christmas idents, maybe we were spoiled last year.

BBC1's is quite tacky featuring 'celebrities', ITV's is quite lowbrow with the regular idents being used with added effects.

BBC Two's is pretty good though. BBC One should have just shown last year's again like they were originally going to, it was better.

Downton Abbey trailer appeared at 8.15 junction of X Factor...

That Happened once ONLY.
Twitter had 8 Strictly Trending topics tonight and 3 of which were worldwide

The soaps appear to be low as well; maybe everyone went out last night so they could stay in for the Strictly semi final/The X Factor final tonight? Considering their relative ratings over the series I'll find it hard to believe but...

Strictly has become a bigger highlight for me than EastEnders just lately and it's been must see TV for me right now

Im just waiting for the who is the Stalker? & the Hostage plot trailers to come from EastEnders

The Stalker storyline is building nicely and it features Phil/Pat and some of the other known characters plus it's bringing back a storyline from 1994 which many might know