Originally Posted by Brekkie:
“Of course I wouldn't have been surprised if closer to the event the BBC had added more hours, especially after the Olympics, but I do think apart from the ceremonies and weekend afternoons much of it would have been on BBC2 rather than BBC1.”
I'd ageree with that, they were never going to get equivalent coverage to the Olympics on the BBC simply because they're not comparable with the Olympics. Similarly something like the Women's World Cup wouldn't get equivalent coverage to the World Cup, when England held Women's Euro 2005, the Beeb showed the England matches on BBC2 and then very late highlights. Even when C4 did the World Athletics last year it didn't have continuous coverage and was taken off for Come Dine With Me and Deal Or No Deal, and that's a bloody big event. It's easy to forget that the continuous coverage we got for the Olympics isn't the norm, for any sporting event. You don't get able-bodied athletics on peaktime BBC1 outside the Olympics.
I predicted an eight million peak for the opening ceremony so I'm very impressed. I thought the coverage was perfectly fine, I didn't think Snow overdid the grim references, it is a fact that a lot of competitors are there because of wars and conflicts. Ade Adepitan I thought was good, and Geoff Adams seemed very cool and articulate. It was a bit more of a traditional ceremony, though, with dance and mime and that, whereas the Olympic ceremony had lots of silly bits in it. I gave up at half eleven and let the recording carry on because I simply didn't know when it was going to end, apart from Krishnan's reference to the fact it was massively overrunning there was no sense of time of the whole thing.
I don't know how the actual sport will rate though because of all the various classifications and so on I don't know if it will have particularly immediate or universal appeal, some of them need a lot of explanation. This is slightly aside the point, but Daraine Mulvihill really is lovely. She's their best asset.
Originally Posted by RobbieSykes123:
“How stupid. How can you have ITVs 2,3,4 but no 1!
It's like BBC1 rebranding as "BBC".
Daft.”
Well, we did have ITV and ITV2 co-existing for ITV2's first three years and I thought it was bizarre at the time to change it to ITV1 because ITV2 at the time had no budget and no viewers and it seemed stupid to elicit direct comparisons. But then nobody ever calls it ITV1, the only issue will be when sports presenters refer to "football coming up on ITV" when it spans two channels, but it's no different to BBC News having to refer to BBC News on BBC1 and the BBC News channel. Can I say, I was appalled the other day to hear a colleague refer to BBC2 as "Channel 2". I know for a fact she's got Sky as well so it's not even on 2! Tch.
Originally Posted by
cylon6:
“A Woman Of Substance was period melodrama. Adults seemed to love it at the time as it seemed to get the country hooked. I was young then and just wanted to watch stuff like The A Team. 
”
C4 did have quite a lot of mainstream stuff on in its early days, I was looking again at Jeremy Isaacs' book at the weekend and he said they tried very hard in the early days to cater for older viewers. In those days ITV also had a financial interest in C4 being a success and Isaacs points out that ITV specifically gave A Woman of Substance an easy ride by scheduling around it.
Originally Posted by allthingsuk:
“Which looks to be correct because at the time, the day of the England v Argentina match, they had slumped to a 16% all time low. BBC1 had slumped to another massive low on 8th September 1999, when Jack of Hearts recorded 1.9m against Millionaire with 12.6m, but JoH aired after the Nine O'Clock News.”
If anyone's interested, BBC1 showed The Money Pit and One Foot In The Grave opposite England vs Argentina, and I remember BBC2 showed the first of a new series of Ground Force which might well have beaten BBC1.
Originally Posted by D.M.N.:
“Channel 4 News from 19:00 to 20:00 for anyone wondering had ~1.5m (7.6%).”
I wonder if it would have made more sense to have billed that as Countdown to the Paralympics including Channel 4 News because it was mostly the former, and the actual build-up at 8pm wouldn't have seemed so rushed. A decent showcase for C4 News, in any case.
Originally Posted by NeilVW:
“As Dancc said, there was no real reason to tune into ITV1 last night at 9. Anyone interested in British history would tune to BBC1. Plus it's another signal that ITV1 has lost the default audience it used to rely on. BBC1 cannot be complacent - its 8pm figure was very poor by its standards; but it has a bigger core, perhaps helped by the ever-ageing population.”
If they'd billed The Flowerpot Gang as Garden SOS it would probably have done better. That said, I think they've already done a Garden SOS. As for ITV at 9pm, it was a completely pointless commission anyway, it's virtually the same concept as Turn Back Time on BBC1 which was only on two minutes ago and didn't do very well anyway. It's all very well doing factual on ITV but it's got to look like an ITV programme and have something to it. It can't just do stuff a million other channels can do.
