Sorry, I mustn't go away for weekends, this one is going to go on for ages...
Originally Posted by AlexiR:
“They don't need to attach anything to the Lottery. You've said yourself that they can and have run it perfectly fine without a format or show attached to it. Secondly my point isn't that the entire BBC1 schedule is packed with quizzes but that Saturday night is just a rinse and repeat schedule for the majority of the year.”
Sorry to drag this on. The point is, all the quizzes are different, my mum doesn't like In It To Win It but does like Who Dares Wins. And I know they don't need to attach anything to the lottery, but they're going to commission quizzes and LE formats anyway so they may as well include the lottery anyway. I'm guessing the lottery might be one of the lowest rated shows of the night otherwise - what with all the dull good causes chat - so a quiz incorporating the lottery is actually helping the lottery out, not the other way round. You could have the lottery on Strictly.
Originally Posted by RobbieSykes123:
“The premise of the programme is rubbish, the trailer makes it look worse, the timeslot inspires little confidence.
All those things were true of Mrs Browns though.
I do think though that Khan will fail to find an audience and prove to be a big fat comedy flop!”
Well, I'm pretty sure the 10.30 slot was a last-minute chickening out, I'm sure it was intended for 8.30. The more mainstream sitcoms we have on BBC1 the better as far as I'm concerned (PS I did a seminar with one of the writers years ago and he was a very nice man so I'm always well diposed to his stuff).
Originally Posted by Fudd:
“21.00 - Whatever Happened to Harry Hill?: 817,000 (3.9%)
22.00 - Vic & Bob's Lucky Sexy Winners: 574,000 (3.1%)”
Heh, so none of the ITV audience that have tuned into Harry over the past decade were interested in that, but it was pretty unintelligible if you'd never seen his C4 show, my dad watched it with me and he was completely bemused, despite being a big TV Burp fan. But I loved the C4 show and this was a great show. They should repeat all his C4 series actually. As for Vic and Bob, I'm reminded that when Big Night Out started the head of comedy told Michael Grade it wasn't doing very well and Grade said "If nobody's watching this we should carry on doing it".
Originally Posted by grimshaw:
“The 'funny' week was a great example of this, they didn't do anything with it, meanwhile I don't think it really did anything new.”
One of the things about this fortnight is that there's probably been too much for general consumption in too short space of time, and yet this year C4 have hardly shown any comedy, and I don't think there's much coming up either. Most of the stuff here would have been better off shown on its own when it could have benefitted from better lead-ins and more focused publicity, and the repeats, though welcome, could have given More4 more of a purpose.
Originally Posted by grimshaw:
“Don't BBC Four run their dramas on Saturdays though? So its not like no one is doing it.
I think it should be mainstream but that doesn't mean bad - Children of Earth whilst stripped across a week could have done Saturday nights and been very good.
We don't know where the new Spy drama - Hunted - is going tbf.
ITV1 should try Saturday dramas, they're not getting anywhere with the other LE shows their running and the biggest hit at weekends has been Downton. Meanwhile Casualty is going un-competed with, stick a drama on at 9 and they'll win some of that audience on top of their usual audience.”
There has been dramas on ITV on Saturdays in the past but they've never really done very well. I remember The Governer, the Lynda La Plante series, moving its second series to Saturdays from Sunday in the mid-nineties and the ratings plummeted, I remember Garry Bushell banging on about it for ages. And they moved London's Burning to Saturdays for a series but after six weeks they moved it straight back to Sundays. I think, like sitcoms, dramas aren't very good on Saturdays because the schedules are far too fluid - because things like The X Factor and Strictly expand and contract and there are numerous events, you end up with it going out at a different time every week and you can't hold on to an audience, and in addition you might not go out every Saturday but you'd be more likely to go out then than any other night so you wouldn't want to commit to anything. Different with a soapy show like Casualty when you can miss episodes.
Originally Posted by Lucidia2011:
“So The Olympians could swing the ratings war this year?”
I don't know why we're expecting Olympic-related to get massive ratings, Mo Farah didn't do much for Alan Carr, did he? I see The Sun running another article today on the Olympic X Factor with the added twist they now want Tom Daley to present it, because the ladies love him. This story is just bizarre. The Opening Ceremony did alright, let's try and get The Queen in more things. That's basically the level we're working at.
Originally Posted by Chris1964:
“I think ITV rather did drop the baton though, vast swathes of the population just used to leave the button set to three in the pre satellite era and all of that devotion has been lost. If you look at the news, its curious how BBC news maintains large audiences following a big event where ITV's just melt away. In the old days News at Ten was the habit of many millions of ITV viewers.”
Yes, and it's not just a question of money, either, because ITN had much smaller budgets than the Beeb, but consistently beat BBC News because of its originality, its innovation and its friendly, well-known presenters. ITV have alienated a lot of its old audience in recent years with cynical decisions, there was no need to drop the likes of Heartbeat for example.
Originally Posted by wizzywick:
“Because in those days most of the BBC's budget was saved for Autumn/Winter AND they had invested much more in Hollywood movies, American imports, sports rights, etc. The amount they received reflected what they had to offer.”
Back in the days pre-Sky, sports rights certainly didn't come into it, because they went for a pittance. There was a stat that at the start of the nineties I think sport made up something like 20% of BBC2's output for 2% of the budget. Certainly that wouldn't be the case these days.
Originally Posted by SouthCity:
“These days people can watch the news whenever they want and it wouldn't surprise me if BBC1 just has a news summary followed by regional news at 10pm after DSO is complete, with the full bulletin being shown on the BBC News channel.”
This will never happen, because what are they going to replace it with? Everyone seems so quick to shove stuff off BBC1, sport is another one, but then you end up with a channel that loses whole genres and is just pickled in aspic shoving out repeats of sitcoms and docusoaps. A news programme in primetime is excatly what BBC1 is about. You may as well say all BBC radio stations should stop doing news because we've got Five Live.
Originally Posted by guestofseth:
“If it's the same number of weeks as last year it would end on the 22nd December not the 15th. Which is another good reason to move the Christmas special away from Christmas day, it may suffer from Strictly fatigue, move it closer to New Years and have an Olympic special when most of the 'look back at the year' programmes are airing.”
The final of Strictly has been on the 22nd and 23rd before now so there is no diference this year, and it's even more valuable putting it on Christmas Day in that situation because the bandwagon is still rolling and it seems even more relevant. What IS this thread's obsession with taking Strictly off Christmas Day?
