well according to the DS poll (according to Samuel these are really important) 13% said they wouldnt watch another episode.

I saw a bit of it last night and just though it was a cheap X factor knock off. Sobbing relatives, audience whooping, celeb judges. Only difference seemed to be rotating chairs. Is that what tv is reduced to now? Swivel chairs.

Am not sure. I think it'd have done similar but having 2 big shows on the same night is always a helping hand anyway.
Means bums on seats!

The Voice would do okay. Mid 7 to Low 8 I'd say. It'd have a few stories going out and would build its own marketing campaign. Cowell stuck his nose in and stupidly promoted his rivals show.

He isn't some evil genius many describe him as. His ego got ahead of him and he should have been fine and promoted the entire Saturday night, if someone mentioned The Voice, say 'I'm happy for them - competition is good'

The Alisha lines and everything made The Voice look like serious competition. No idea what he was playing at, or the effect he wanted to have.

At least the voice cut all the freak show part out, most of them were good singers it was just a matter if they got chosen or not.

Fame Academy series 1 was on Fridays and its launch lost against a repeat of Runaway Bride on ITV1. Popstars The Rivals was on Saturdays at the time.

IIRC The launch of Pop Idol 2 was against the 5th or 6th episode of Fame Academy (s2) [FA had live shows on both Wednesday and Fridays for the first few weeks]. I think thats what you are remembering.

Yes, that is so true.

13 percent of the first episode audience might not watch the second episode. But then new viewers who didnt watch episode 1 could make up the loss and watch episode 2. 13 percent drop would mean 7.3m which is still good anyway. I thought you went to bed early yesterday before the Voice was shown ?

On a side note. Am more excited about the final figures, and then what The Voice did on iplayer.

Not because I want to see it higher, but I'm interested in how some shows timeshift higher than others etc. and wonder if TV will push closer to BGT.

What's more, with Channel 4 unable to move the successful Homeland, you have the weird prospect of a live quiz show running at 11.30pm on a Sunday night.
This can only end in tears.

BGTs repeated 8 times this week on telly so bgt will overall get more viewers than The Voice UK. Also theres itv player for those that can get it to work.

He seems to have become very rattled since Red or Black flopped, X factor US underperformed and SCD began to beat The X Factor on Saturday's. First poaching Alesha Dixon of all people and now his reaction to the Voice.

There was a world of tabloid coverage of The Voice before the launch date (and clash with Talent) were announced or even suggested. I suspect regardless of where it launched the show would have grabbed headlines the clash with Talent just happened to be the easiest story here.

And in fairness its not as if the established show has managed to make headlines without the aid of The Voice (or Strictly) this time around either.

As well as saying that he would like to poach Jessie J for XF

http://www.mirror.co.uk/night-copy/w...ell-set-771897

He's had a rough 12 months hasn't he.

I think his reaction to The Voice UK might be misplaced anger toward the US version of the show more than anything else. When NBC managed to rush The Voice to air it took the wind out of the sails of The X Factor US and ultimately pummelled it in the ratings. Cowell's image is now severely dented in the US where he's on the back foot trying to fix The X Factor and make it competitive not only with American Idol but The Voice. And of course at the same time as Fox is on him to fix X Factor US, ITV are on him to fix The X Factor here as well as Red or Black and then to top it all off Britain's Got Talent gets thrown head first into a battle with The Voice UK.

It's easy to be wise with the benefit of hindsight, but those figures for The Voice and BGT seem pretty obvious.

BGT, as the established programme in the later slot, takes the higher average and peak but The Voice with its hour-long head start wins the head-to-head clash which dents BGT's figures slightly compared with last year.

Simon Cowell may regard everything to do with The Voice as a personal affront, but from where I'm sitting it looks like Danny Cohen and Peter Fincham have got a nice little cartel going: "With this scheduling we get the higher ratings but you can claim victory in the head-to-head clash". "Nice. That'll do for me."

The acid test for The Voice is obviously how many viewers come back next week. But considering Cowell wants to kill it off at birth, ITV's not exactly making a huge effort against it - next week's main competition is All Star Family Fortunes starring Ed Byrne and Lesley Nicol. How many people here would know who Lesley is without looking it up? And how many other cast members from Downton did they ask first?

Still, it's the last of ASFF next week. Maybe the following week they'll move BGT to 7 o'clock.

What else have ITV got though? Its not like they have a deep bench of Saturday night hits to call on.

The Marriage Ref?

An excellent start for The Voice and BGT last night. BGT was bang in line with where I expected it to be (a nice 10er coming my way on the DSRPG) whilst TV was about 1.5m higher than my expectations. The big question now is where will TV go from here? I did watch it last night and I enjoyed it however it did feel abit dragged out. BGT was always going to be down on 2011 with the clash but 10m (inc. +1) and with a higher peak than last year suggests everything is fine with ITV's hit show. Such a shame TV Burp ended on a such a low figure after 11 years and possibly its last ever show. It deserved to do much better than this.

Robbie's going to have a fit when he sees these ratings!!

Sure. But am hoping to see if theres a different demographic for either show.
I'm just interested about the stats really and how TV viewership is changing. We have a few shows to draw comment from, but The Voice might add to this


Yup. The Alesha thing was just mind-boggling, did the BBC a MASSIVE favour. He obviously isn't very in-touch with BBC One and Strictly. Otherwise he'd have known leaving her hurts them more!

R/B was always going to flop. I think that was just part of his ego swelling after X Factor 2010, as was X Factors 'underperformance' (it actually did well, unlike R/B but he over promoted his expectations, and also they had too high costs for the first series).

I think last year his ego was inflated, now its dented and hes being seen for what he really is. Lucky.

It'll be interesting to see the ratings for its repeat showing at 6.20 tonight. It might even get more viewers tonight than last night.

I am glad The Voice exceeded my expectations by 0.9m, I didn't watch either show but I went for 9.4m for BGT based on the clash, as it turned out I was correct to do so. Next week The Voice is 7.00-8.20, BGT is 8.00-9.05, BBC2 is showing live football until 7.30 (match ends 7.10pm) - a shame it could not fit in on BBC1 as it would give a better lead-in than Winter Wipeout. Any predictions for next week? Last year BGT dipped to 8.99m for Ep. 2 directly against poor opposition (Who Dares Wins 3.61m) If The Voice can grow by 5% - with a 20 minute clash they could be a lost closer than last night.

Bring it on.

Although it doesn't take a genious to work out when two big shows aimed at a similar audience overlap generally speaking the first show on air will win the clash.


And to think the BBC aren't supposed to care about ratings.

I agree though the clash has ultimately helped both shows, but The Voice especially. It'll be interesting now whether the BBC maintain that clash next year - or whether they do look for an earlier start, especially with Let's Dance losing a couple of million viewers this year.

If Doctor Who is going out in January onwards next year, I could see The Voice in there.

Then again Cohen might take the decision that DW is a Saturday pull in itself, so Who > Lets Dance > The Voice, all running into each other, might be the preference!

That's bang on what I was expecting for The Voice and BGT. Now to see if the audience stick with the Voice next week... I'm not so sure...

The Ten O'Clock Live rating was reported here, it got 936,000. It's not actually doing that bad this year, actually, as I said I think this is the first time it's dipped under a million this seris. The Jack Whitehall rating was really poor, though, compared to what Sarah Millican's picking up, and with BFGW as a lead-in as well. And next week he moves to 10.30 to make way for Facejacker, which hasn't been on for ages and never gets very high ratings.

10pm should be the top priority for C4, though, there's news on BBC1 and ITV and BBC2 have Newnight at 10.30 so there's flexibility and a huge floating audience, yet it's all over the shop and they're wasting time and money on pre-watershed and Saturday nights, where they're never going to do anything. The low point at 10pm was the repeat of 8 Out Of 10 Cats there in the autumn.

The Broadcast survey was mentioned where indies said they were the best channel to work for, but in the magazine they had comments from various indies about the pros and cons of each channel, and for C4 there were numerous comments about how they haven't got a clue what they want and there's no vision, they don't have a head of drama at the moment for a start. They were actually named the second worst channel to work for, the Beeb came top but most the complaints there were about them being too big and too cautious, which you expect.


It's not actually the last Winter Wipeout, there's another one next week. It seems bizarre to be showing it after the clocks go forward, I know it's exactly the same as Total Wipeout and the winter branding makes no difference whatsoever but it looks stupid. They may as well held it over to Christmas and put on a normal Total Wipeout, they've got enough.


Although it does look odd, the Beeb always seem to take the opportunity to launch new stuff the day the clocks go forward, famously Doctor Who started this very week in 2005. It's perhaps odd how they always seem to be crammed with new content in Q2 - in recent years they've had the Lloyd Webber shows, Who, SYTYCD, Total Wipeout - when it's the quarter must messed around with other events.


They did talk over the credits, though? And they stuck the Next banner on screen during the song as well. I wonder if 'stEnders specifically held back killing Heather to this week to coincide with the last TV Burp.


ITV were also helped in 2011 with the FA Cup Semi-Final, mind.


And yet ITV are always quick to run crying to the papers, look at the Strictly vs X Factor stuff the other year where everyone was blaming the Beeb, and all the papers hate the Beeb as well so they always publish it. Des Lynam in his autobiography says that before the major tournaments the Beeb always used to go to ITV and say that they wanted to show all the England games and ITV could as well if they wanted, and ITV always said no and threatened to go blubbing to the papers if that happened.


Well, we've had all this but I would be willing to stand up and say, really, the promotion has not been anything special. I remember when Fame Academy started back in 2002, that seemed far more a big deal, because as well as the BBC1 show you had a BBC3 spin-off, a CBBC spin-off and two extra shows on teatime BBC1 devoted to the house (and later an extra post-watershed edition), none of which you have here. In addition, the first episode of Fame Academy was put in the schedules on a Friday night shifting a load of stuff out of the way, whereas this was just slotted into the schedules in the same place Let's Dance was. It could have had a far better lead-in than Winter Wipeout, that's for sure, they could even have moved Friday's displaced 'stEnders to Saturday to prop it up.

Sure, there's been a lot of trailers, but no more than you'd see for a new series of Strictly or The Apprentice.

Anyway, for what it's worth, Strictly aside I stopped watching shows like this after Pop Idol and I find The X Factor hopelessly contrived and irritating, but I found The Voice quite entertaining, I liked all the judges and it seemed to be edited quite snappily - I quite liked how the presenters were quite anonymous in it, it felt like a new way of doing it.

Indeed, catching the end of Glee Club on CBBC on Friday, and seeing Carrie and David Grant and Sisco on the juding panel just reminds me how bad these shows can be.