I never understood the point of ITV re-making Titanic as I could never understand why they re-made Dr Finlay's Casebook and Quatermass. They had all been hugely successful in their original versions and ITV brought nothing new to our understanding. It might have been more interesting if Titanic didn't sink in their version

One thing that intrigued me on the trailers was "the truth will surface"

Did it?

Or was the truth, simply, that ITV in massaging Lord Downton's ego were sold a pup?!

I know they don't have the lavish production values of Downton or OTT sets of TXF, but I wouldn't say Corrie or Emmers are made cheap.

Just like Martin Clunes, the cast aren't exactly cheap, let alone the various production staff. Though I concede I don't know this for a fact


sorry didn't to imply that Ruth was talking to ITV about Stella, I only used that as an example because she'd previously appeared in Fat Friends (along with James) ages ago. I was mainly thinking that Stella something that fits into that realm of comedy-drama, but wouldn't be picked up by ITV now (like you say the people who commissioned Cold Feet aren't there now).

Also I think ITV solely relying on Doc Martin for comedy drama is a bit stupid, especially as the series are bi-annual and ultimately will only exist as long as Martin Clunes wants to do it.

In a funny way I almost miss the golden handcuff deal ITV had with Robson Green. Sure a lot of the stuff could be labelled as vanity projects for Robson, but at least made stuff besides Wire In The Blood. I miss the Martin Clunes who made William & Mary and those occasional one offs - but I digress

Anyhoo from the industry events I've been to and heard various ITV people speak at, they don't want to take risks because they can't afford to write the money off.

Excellent football rating, BBC1 held up well though. Impressive rating for C4 from 9:00-10:35pm for Liz Taylor show.

The belief is that remakes are low risk.

That buying in already successful "fomats" is low risk.

That keeping a series running for decades is low risk.


Anyhoo, that's the BBC for you. As for ITV....

Well, it was genuinely bad.
Not even so bad that it's good - just bad.

The characters were cardboard cut outs that you felt nothing for, those that did raise a flicker were dealt with badly by the ending and there was no atmosphere or sense of urgency at all - I've seen more panic when a pedlo doesn't come in on time than during the whole programme. It just seemed that the passengers were going for a moonlit stroll on deck that ended in a quick paddle.

It was bad.

I'm not sure about any co-production issues - it was written (and known to be) by a person well known and seemingly well liked by the ITV audience and it had plenty of well known names and faces. I would have thought that to most watchers it was more domestic than anything else

Have I said it was just bad?

Not a huge amount. Sky TV subscribers:

Dec 2008 - 9,238,000
Dec 2011 - 10,253,000

So up 11%.

Not sure when BBC aired series 4 but Sky TV subscriber growth has been slowing. Growth from Dec 2010 to Dec 2011 is only 1.5%.

It's hilarious that people still don't get the economics of Mad Men. When is someone going to post how many subscribers would need to be retained to justify its cost? Or would that ruin the fun?

Hi does anyone have ratings for Great British Menu on bbc2 7.30pm?

rzt, can you provide a breakdown of the football on ITV1 from last night please?

Re the above debate about ITV I'm not sure whether people have noticed the very strong recent improvement in ITV's share price.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business/m...elve_month.stm

Did anyone actually look at the 2011 results presentation? It was at the end of February but for some reason was not available online for a long time afterwards. But it is available now.

It's worth watching. I thought Crozier's comments about "cost deflation" were particularly noteworthy.

(On the graph note the very big rise on the last day of February - the day of the results).

But the soap casts make a lot of television for their money so cost per hour will be low.

Anybody know their annual budget?

Your the one with all the Sky statistics. Perhaps you could post how many new subscribers Mad Men has brought Sky.

The simple facts are Mad Men is hugely overrated, pulls in tiny ratings and adds very little to Sky Atlantic.

Ugh, its one of the best shows in the history of television and deserves every write up it gets

But what was ''the truth'', I didn't realise there was any mystery about what happened ? Similarly Dr Finlay and Quatermass were much inferior to the BBC originals so why bother ?

Nobody can possibly know how many subs it has added because people subscribe / leave for a whole myriad of reasons.

But what can be calculated is how many (average) subs are required to offset its cost.

And what is hilarious is that in all the endless posts on the subject by people saying it's a waste of money nobody has attempted to do this despite it being such an easy calculation to do.

A few points here

1 – Arguing that people don't understand the economics of Mad Men whilst also pointing out that Sky subscriber rates have been slowing is somewhat contradictory. Part of the point of Mad Men (or more accurately Sky Atlantic in general) is to in crease the subscriber base. They want to lure Virgin Media customers over for example and Freeview and FreeSat etc. etc. viewers over to Sky. And by their own numbers that isn't working so now we have to endure this nonsense of 'rewarding' customers to justify the poor viewing figures the channel is bringing in.

2 – The problem with the 'economics of Mad Men' argument is that it relies on the notion that people are subscribing or aren't unsubscribing because of Mad Men. Its all well and good to say that Sky need to retain x number of subscribers for Mad Men to be a good purchase but actually if x number of subscribers would have been retained regardless of Mad Men then its a moot point and wasted expenditure. The only way you can justify the economics of Mad Men is to produce statistics that directly attribute a rise in subscribers (or people renewing their Sky contracts) purely to Mad Men and I suspect you'll struggle to do that.

3 – In general people aren't failing to understand the economics of Mad Men. They're failing to understand why Sky brought a niche series that very few people actually watch in the first place. They also failing to understand why the media continues to harp on about Mad Men and why the Guardian just published a piece of unadulterated spin from Sky that (very poorly) tried to defend Mad Men's terrible ratings.

4 – Regardless of the economics of Mad Men its ratings are terrible. There really is no escape from that and given that this is the ratings thread understandably people have zeroed in on said terrible ratings. The argument you're making is in fact remarkably similar to those ITV/Titanic fans who keep parading out the idea that actually the fact that people didn't watch Titanic is absolutely fine because ITV Studios sold it to 100 markets and thus made money from it. Your argument is that it doesn't matter that nobody is watching Mad Men (which has been promoted as the flagship purchase of Sky Atlantic since before the channel even launched) because Sky is still making money.

5 – I think somebody might want to tell Sky that Mad Men's ratings don't actually matter. Maybe then they wouldn't have partnered up with the Guardian on ridiculous articles spinning Mad Men's ratings.

It'll be interesting how 2 Broke Girls does tonight, especially as it's got the lead in of double Big Bang Theory, if it can do 0.6-0.7m then E4 will see that as successful.

But that isn't the economics of Mad Men that's the economics of Sky. Nobody is suggesting that Mad Men is going to sink Sky and they're going to collapse because nobody is watching this show. People aren't even suggesting that about the fact that nobody's watching the entire Atlantic channel.

As I said above its all well and good to say that Sky can turn a profit on Mad Men as long as they have x numbers of customers but that's absolutely irrelevant because we have no way of knowing how much impact Mad Men has on any given Sky customers decision to get or keep Sky. If those x amount of customers would be regardless of Mad Men's presence on Sky Atlantic then it just renders the money they've spent on Mad Men completely useless.

Sky bought Mad Men because it's a thuggish, bully-boy corporation that steals programmes from other channels because it can and for pleasure and just for the hell of it.

End of debate.

You raised a point about subscriber growth since 2008 being a relevant factor to the change in viewing figures. I demonstrate that it is in fact trivial. So what do you do? Forget that point and move on to make some other points!

And, of course, you don't answer my question. Again!

Everyone knows (as I said above in post 965) that nobody can ever attribute specific joiners / leavers to any one programme. Two reasons:

1) There is no way of knowing

2) People don't subscribe for one programme - the subscription decision is based on whether people want the overall package

But what we can do is look at the cost and see how many subscribers, theoretically, would be needed to justify the cost. Something nobody on here has done. I wonder why?

The figure I have for the cost of Mad Men is £2.5m per year. (NB. If that's wrong, please correct me).

At an ARPU of £544, that equates to the revenue from 4,600 average subscribers.

Not let's put that figure into context. CONTEXT!!! During calendar year 2011:

- 1,120,000 new subscribers joined Sky
- 960,000 subscribers left Sky

(Net growth = 157,000 subscribers)

Now, given all we know about Mad Men is it unreasonable to think that it's likely to have covered its costs? Even if it has only had an absolutely miniscule effect on joiners and leavers it would have done so. Especially bearing in mind all the publicity generated.

Certainly I can't see that anyone has any basis for saying with any confidence that it hasn't covered its costs.

US Ratings Wednesday April 18

With two-hours of American Idol of course Fox won the night but Idol was down 6% and hit an in season series low.

On ABC Suburgatory lost a tenth on last week but it was airing out of a repeat of The Middle at 8PM. At 9PM Modern Family dropped two tenths to a season low and in its second week on the air Apartment 23 lost 10% or three tenths. Its future looks OK for now. And at 10PM after a six week hiatus Revenge returned with a series low dropping a tenth on from its last original in March. It certainly could have been worse.

On NBC the Betty White fronted Off Their Rockers was up a tenth vs. last week. Depressingly I assume NBC will renew at that level. BFF however won't be renewed despite remaining stable week-on-week. Rock Center jumped two tenths vs. last week but was still basically unwatched. And at 10PM Law & Order: SVU fell two tenths to a series low. Its an expensive show and those numbers aren't good. It might be time to call it a day.

CBS' only original of the night, Survivor, was steady vs. last week whilst The CW's only original of the night, Top Model, was up a tenth vs. last week.

ABC
8PM: The Middle [r] – 1.3 [4.66]
8:30PM: Suburgatory – 2.0 [5.76]
9PM: Modern Family – 4.0 [10.07]
9:30PM: Don't Trust The Bitch in Apartment 23 – 2.6 [6.59]
10PM: Revenge – 2.3 [7.58]

CBS
8PM: Survivor – 2.7 [9.38]
9PM: Criminal Minds [r] – 1.7 [7.49]
10PM: CSI [r] – 1.5 [6.74]

Fox
8PM: American Idol – 4.7 [16.47]

NBC
8PM: Betty White's Off Their Rockers – 1.7 [6.21]
8:30PM: BFF – 0.9 [3.15]
9PM: Rock Center with Brian Williams – 0.7 [2.87]
10PM: Law & Order: SVU – 1.5 [5.72]

The CW
8PM: America's Next Top Model [r] – 0.4 [1.14]
9PM: America's Next Top Model – 0.6 [1.35]

I didn't make a point I asked a question. Hence the use of a question mark.


Firstly where has anyone said that Mad Men hasn't covered its cost? Although I will say I think you're using some questionable methods to declare that it has (more on that in a second).

Your it needs x amount of subscribers to cover its costs is a flawed argument though unless we can ascertain whether or not people are subscribing to or renewing Sky because of Mad Men and we can't. Your argument is that x amount of people have signed up to Sky and therefore Mad Men was a fine purchase regardless of whether any of those people who subscribed have any interest in Mad Men at all. On this argument a show can only recoup its costs if we know that people are subscribing (at least in part) because of it.

More over I think the methods you're using to declare that Mad Men is covering its costs is questionable. You're taking the new subscriber base and declaring that its big enough to cover the cost of Mad Men and forgetting that the same subscriber base has to cover all of their new content not just Mad Men. In fact that new subscriber base arguably also has to cover the renewal of existing deals alongside the existing subscriber base. In reality what you're looking at is a tiny percentage of the subscription fee being devoted to Mad Men and then I think it becomes a stretch to use the entire base given that not much more than 100k people are watching the show.

So in reality I suppose technically what you'd have to do is work out what percentage of Sky's overall programming budget is represented by Mad Men and then apply that to the average subscription fee of the 100k or so people who watch Mad Men and then decide whether that is enough to cover its costs.

EDIT - We should probably factor in the promotional costs as well.

Thanks for your reply. Your reply so completely mis-states and misunderstands the points I made that it's obvious we're completely at cross purposes. So there's no point in continuing. Thanks again.

Shows like The Voice and Strictly are hard to schedule against, though. Unless they had some kind of 90 minute/2 hour show they could run, they'd be starting halfway through and as we've seen even for the biggest shows, that doesn't work. And they will always be playing for a limited audience in that slot. Plus, the OFCOM rules just now kind of encourage ITV to focus on a small portion of the night where they use up their ad allowance then run much of the rest of their schedule on the cheap with fewer adverts.

Which is why I think January-March has been a total waste by ITV the past few years - they could be launching a bigger series in there with a large pool of potential viewers and limited competition.

In terms of something before BGT/XF, I think the best option is to try and find something really young skewing for before X Factor. Perhaps not a huge total audience but good 16-34 numbers. I actually think Take Me Out would be good in some ways but as it's all they've got for Q1 I doubt they'll move it.

I think mlt11's point is that in order for Mad Men to return on its investment through sub revenue alone, it would need to be responsible for 4.6k extra subscribers, of a total of around 1.1m new subs per year. This seems likely.


I don't think you can assume that all the people who might have Mad Men as one of the reasons for subscribing to Sky actually watch it every week.

Some people will have been attracted by the idea of Sky Atlantic much more than the actual watching of it. This is undoubtedly the idea behind Sky Atlantic and Sky Arts - premium quality figleafs, the idea of which is much more important than the channel's themselves.