ITV are bricking it privately over Call The Midwife. That's all you need to know.

Back in 2004/2005 Emmerdale & EastEnders clashed weekly and with the Hyped up 'Big'episodes Emmerdale was running each week it beat EastEnders 9 times out of 10.
ITV/Emmerdale cast and some of it's fans kept saying how Emmerdale would become 1 of the big 2 based on it being the Walford soap once a week during a 30min headstart clash with a stunt.

EastEnders begain to pull it's self back around and started to beat Emmerdale during the clashes despite the ITV soap having a 30min head-start and then what Happend?

ITV removed the weekly clash.

It's simply never going to happen

Plus the One Show's ratings have been going up and up too...that would be fun if it beat Em now and again..

Million Pound Drop secured their second 2 million rating this series. Funny that the two shows to hit above 2 million had celebrity games,

That's good and yet depressing at the same time. Plus the next series of The Cube with the celebrity specials should do well.

[quote=cylon6;56496421]ITV are bricking it privately over Call The Midwife. That's all you need to know.[/QUOTE
Too right, they can't accept that DOI is being beaten by a well made period drama. Perhaps if ITV1 stopped their addiction to shows with Z list celebrities, maybe they could score a big success like CTM. After all, I imagine when this series of DOI finishes, most of it will get thrown in a skip as it can't be repeated again, while CTM can have a successful afterlife on UK Gold.

[quote=Glenn A;56496963]
It's probably just me but DOI seems to bear an uncanny resemblance to a particular BBC show hosted by a certain Sir B. Forsyth.So every show depicting life in the 50s will now be branded as an imitation of Heartbeat ?

i see the quality of discussion is as wonderful as I remember it here. The point I was making about what I saw of CTM was that it was heavily overlaid with pop songs same as Heartbeat.

As for you comments, well where to begin Cue Glenn and his Z list celeb post again. Will he mention Hughie Green or love island before 4pm today? I've got £10 at 7/2 that he will.

Really the only show out of those that should be moved is Songs of Praise. I think it would be a bit poor if 35 minutes couldn't be found for religion somewhere on a Sunday afternoon, and probably most of the audience would watch it instead of the OIympics anyway. I can't see many committed Christian's forgetting their faith for two weeks

Everything else should be rested (and I say that as an EE viewer). Episodes can be made up before/after the games. With EE in particular I think the viewer overlap with the Olympics will be significant. Surely BBC2 should be targetting groups of viewers unlikely to be interested in the Olympics? Putting EE on BBC2 is just going to annoy more viewers who also want to watch the Olympics than please non-Olympic viewers I fear. Plus IIRC BBC3 is meant to be Olympics until 11pm, so the EE repeat is going to be rather late, with 3 days being a 'worknight'. If it was at 10pm like normal it might not be so bad

Panorama will probably have shockingly low figures if it stays on Monday 8.30pm against Corrie and the Olympics.

BBC2 seems like it will just be a weird mish-mash of BBC1 and BBC2 shows. I guess we could see EE leading into Gardeners World or Holby City leading into Horizon

Hilda Ogden once mentioned Hughie Green

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=818woBC0Yb8

I haven't mentioned either of them this year, but you have to admit ITV still has too much of a liking for shows with Z list celebs in. Family Fortunes and Millionaire could work very well without celebrity versions.

Surely if it culd be accused of being a copy it would be of Where the Heart is which was an ITV show about Midwives/Dictrict Nurses and had Pam Ferris, sure it wasn't based on a nurses memoir and set in the modern day but not that much diiferent other than the facy Midwife is much better,

Strange goings on on BBC2 this evening ,Radio Times and all the papers say their is 2 ep of Pan Am this evening, but the Freeview EPG says that there is only 1 ep and the other is next week and everything else on BBC2 is now on 40 minutes earlier. Don't know what thats all about.

Technically there's not much wrong with Dancing On Ice it's just that this year a new show has come out of nowhere and beat two of ITV's big Sunday night shows that were doing very well last year.


Dancing On Ice bears an uncanny resemblance to Strictly Ice Dancing the Christmas special in 2004. It was won by David Seamen who then appeared in the first series of Dancing On Ice. And another celeb from that special, Jessica Taylor, appeared on Dancing On Ice too. But this is all just coincidence! *cough*

Where the Heart Is was set in Yorkshire in the present day and was more like a story of life in a small town. ITV did get a good run out of it, but it seemed to run out of steam as the stories were quite slow.

It could though be the catalyst which revives ITV's Sunday nights though as surely the race will be on for them to find a new Sunday night pre-watershed drama of their own. They were right to axe Heartbeat and The Royal - but in the Spring and Summer they do need something to hold the audience as entertainment formats have failed spectacularly.


I'd have thought Panorama would be rested - it doesn't air every week so missing two weeks won't be an issue. Indeed they skipped a couple of weeks at the beginning of the year.

Two runs of Celebrity Big Brother is certainly overkill particularly if they're also going to continue with the normal version of the show as well. In fact presumably if they're planning two celebrity runs then they'll end up with a similar set up to the one they had last year - Celeb Big Brother running directly into Big Brother (or the other way around). It seems madness for them to even consider that. The only way I could see two celebrity versions a year working was if they ditched the normal version. But that doesn't appear to be the plan.

And so much for Five not becoming the Big Brother network...


Its not as if the BBC hasn't always made period drama and wouldn't be making it now if it weren't for Downton. It seems to me that ITV (and Downton fans) want to make believe that Downton invented the genre. It didn't.

I know this is really random, as you ratings geeks will know this but for people who don't... here are the UKs biggest ever TV audiences of all time:

World Cup 1966- 32.30m
Princess Diana's Funeral- 32.10m
The Royal Family- 30.69m
Eastenders (Den's divorce)- 30.10m
Apollo 13 Splashdown- 28.60m
Eastenders (New Years Day 1987)- 28.00m
FA Final Cup Replay (Chelsea VS Leeds 1970)- 28.49m
Charles and Diana's Wedding- 28.40m
Wedding of Princess Anne and Phillip- 27.60m

The most current being Princess Diana's funeral.

The last ever thing to get over 20m in the UK as an AVERAGE was Only Fools and Horses in 2001 with 21.35m.

As for the US:
MASH Finale ever episode- 105.94m (77% share)

I always thought Live Aid attracted 35 million viewers and was the most watched broadcast in history as 90 pc of televisions were switched to it, as Bob Geldof is always keen to tell you.

I know it's only a small thing but I'm getting sick of them using the same layout of the BB house. That's another reason it shouldn't be on back to back.

The house has been the same for 3 series now. I hope they have made changes for this year's summer series as if they keep the same layout and only make minor alterations to the decor again it really will feel like they are doing the show on a cheap budget.

I think three series a year of BB/CBB would kill what is a format whose best days are behind it. The summer BB was a flop last year and Channel 5 would be best advised to leave the format as it is. CBB does well for them, but two series a year smacks of desperation as the format is tired.

Could I just point out that Upstairs Downstairs started on LWT in 1971 and was eventually picked up by the BBC. So I think we can see which came first.

The total audience for the World Cup Final was 36 million with 32 million watching on the BBC.
The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show 1977 had an official audience of 28.83 million
The two EE figures are aggregates including the Sunday omnibus, which is not included now, nor is the BBC3 repeat.
The trouble is we are not comparing like with like as the research companies and sampling methods have changed so much over the years - the first audience research (which produced the 1966 figure) was going out into the street and asking people what they had viewed the previous night.

ITV were right to axe Heartbeat and The royal because they had less energy than a tortoise on Heroin. However ITV have failed to replace these shows and they should have been thinking of a replacement 2-3 years in advanced to axing them.

ITV need to get commissioning now. But what they do commission may take years to grow an audience.

And this is the thing when one channel does well it spurs the other on to do well also. The thing is Wild At Heart is a Sunday night pre-watershed drama that does better than many other shows across the week. It's just that CTM has come out of nowhere. It happens sometimes and for the first time in several years, ITV's well performing Winter Sundays have had serious competition. It's just rare for a BBC1 drama to do what ITV's have for years and be huge.


The fact that BBC1 are moving some big shows to BBC2 over The Olympic period shows that they aren't always chasing ratings.

That M*A*S*H finale has been beaten by the last few Superbowls with the most recent one getting 111.3m. That is amazing considering the multi-channel era we're in now.


That Morecambe & Wise figure for Christmas 1977 is getting disputed now. According to the BFI Mike Yarwood's Christmas Show on before it was watched by more people.

Ratings are so confusing.