484,000

Is this the most ridiculous soap opera storyline since Bobby Ewing woke up in the shower?


I hate this programme with a passion. (My mum watches it. I'm in the room waiting for The Apprentice) The BBC have commissioned 50 programmes over the next two years. Fingers crossed for a long, painful and humiliating (for the BBC) death.

The episode was so unbelievably rushed and the ending was just mad. Talk about jumping the shark.

It'll probably get around 4.6/4.7m though.

+1 It really is terrible shite. Tonight was the first time i saw any of it in years and it just me LOL.
The last time I saw it a few years ago, an angry parent was trying to knock the school down with a JCB and all the students gathered around outside chanting 'we are Waterloo road''. Seriously
I will celebrate its eventual axe.

And yet again ITV muck up the football. The HD feed cut to Mark Austin in the news room for 20 seconds before switching to the SD feed, which was unaffected. Luckily nothing of note happened in that time.

Did'nt happen in the Meridian area

It's just a ludicrous decision, taking it out of Rochdale to Glasgow under the guise of spreading the BBC more fairly across the country. Exactly what other shows get made in Rochdale!

If it really had to be done they'd have been better off axing it and replacing it with a Glasgow based pre-watershed show - though why the relocation needs to be part of the story I don't know. It wasn't in Casualty when that moved to Cardiff, and they could easily pass off the change in set either by hoping viewers don't really notice or by creating a merger storyline with a local school.

Someone said the picture went to an 'ITV Meridian' holding screen before switching to upscaled SD. It only happened on HD; SD was completely unaffected.

Waterloo Road is my guilty pleasure. Yes, it's far fetched and ridiculous and this Scotland storyline is silly (although no more ridiculous than some of their other stories) but it's enjoyable escapism and its heart is in the right place and its certainly never dull! It has a real charm and I'd much rather watch it than the genuinely dire Holby City or Casualty (or any of the soaps for that matter).

It's also my guilty pleasure but there is a limit.


I think it's very young audience (I guess a lot of young kids watch it just like they would watch Grange Hill back in the day) who don't really care about storyline arcs and continuity are the only reason why the show rates so consistantly solid.

It's never reached what it could do, and has always been capable of getting another 1-2 million if the producers would actually follow the same rules of TV drama as all other producers do. (characters constantly disappearing with no explanation etc)

Seriously ITV again? Who will they blame this time

The director who decided to air a couple of minutes from the blimp?

Waterloo Road is a BBC Scotland commission and yet had nothing to do with Scotland. So the BBC are accused of giving the programme to Scotland just to fiddle the figures - like relocating In It To Win It to Scotland. Did the Weakest Link go up there as well? Points Of View (or is that still BBC Birmingham?) The sitcoms The Old Guys and Life Of Reilly were also BBC Scotland commissions for programmes that had nothing to do with Scotland.

Casualty is set in the ficticious town of Holby which may at one point in his history have been a suburb of Bristol. But Holby City is also set in Holby (surprisingly) and that's filmed in London.

Should be a considerable peak for ITV1 with the shoot out.

Most of the cast in the show has a very strong Lancastrian/Manc accent. The surrounding areas are shown a lot and it's very clearly Rochdale. I'm sure in the new programme a lot of the cast will sound very Glaswegian. Holby is a fictional city, so was much easier - and of course as Cardiff and Bristol are close the cast remained the same.

Cheers as always rzt Not a too bad of a start

That reason is good enough to mean the move should have been ruled out straightaway. If they needed to move drama out of London would they move EastEnders elsewhere, I think not!

Though imagine if two successive CL finals featured foreign teams, esp those which aren't particularly big ratings hitters, then ITV might have got cold feet at the next contract round. However, their premium contract has come good again, but these tournaments are a gamble and Channel 5 threw in the towel with the EL as it is long drawn out competition with no English teams left in the last rounds.

It's the same with international football though. I do think the switch of the final to Saturdays has made it a bit riskier for ITV (they'd much rather it on Wednesdays I'm sure), but generally speaking the benefits far outweigh the risks.

TV ratings Australia: big comeback for #AGT to 1.53m, #theblock solid on 1.21m, Bones 1.05m, Home & Away 1.04m, #celebapprentince 858k.

I know its Tuesday, but that set of ratings is almost unbelievable.

It says a lot when ITV's Tuesday target appears to be to stay above 10% audience share.

ANZAC day football yesterday got an amazing 925k (from Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth only). It topped the day's rating in Melbourne with 677k, which eclipsed 2nd place, Seven News, with 467k. AGT obviously rebounded as there was no sign of The Voice last night. Offspring attracted 759k, which was a slight improvement from last week. It managed 4th place for the night from 18-49 demographic and 3rd from 16-39 demo. While it is still down from last year, at least they are holding steady for now.

Brilliant rating for AGT, I wish Seven would think about moving it to Wednesday/Thursdays this season in order to save face from the Voice. Bones did well to say it wasn't advertised as a last minute replacement, and however bad titanic did in the UK, at least it never sank as low as 320,000 viewers. Perhaps Nine should have advertised last night as the Hoff's last appearance on the apprentice, perhaps they may of got more viewers, and it seems a shame to waste the fact they clearly only contracted him to a few episodes.


Amazing result for the ANZAC game, no doubt helped by the fact that there was only 1 point in it. With the game on 7mate in Sydney and Brisbane it is likely to have topped a million

Good news for Dancc, looks like one of channel 5's programmes is getting a primetime slot in Australia; The Hotel Inspector. Saturday nights at 7.30 from 12th May so not the best slot, but Graham Norton does really well on a saturday night at 8.30 so perhaps it will do ok?