I can just see the awarding body accepting that; having to pay back a contract they signed in goiod faith because the Government moved the goal posts.


It's a difficult balance - money against exposure. The ECB are in a much better state now than they were when terrestrial cash lined their coffers but the sport is being sidelined in the process.

What did The Chase get yesterday, as it doesn't seem to have been reported here.

Does anyone think XF on Saturday will benefit from the lead-in from Take Me Out?

Not if everyone is watching Strictly!

ABC managed to do well with OUAT and Revenge. Like you said, a decline is possible, but for now it looks promising. As for 666 Park Avenue, that is a worrying number. The cast looks good and it has potential, so it's a shame that it didn't start off well. Being an optimist again, I am giving this a 13-episode run before ABC decides what to do with it. Sunday 10pm means heavier competitions from cable channels and ABC might spin that as an excuse for the time being. I am guessing Homeland, an E! or Bravo reality shows have taken a huge slice of that advantage.

Fox Animations are doing just fine, although that is a staggeringly huge decline for Family Guy. As for CBS, oh dear. 2.1 is not good for The Mentalist and 10.83m is a far cry from their peak days of 16-17m a few years ago. Even last season can muster 13m for them. The Good Wife should just get axed after this season. It was doing poor business when it was on Tuesdays and it is faring much worse on Sundays. I heard that CBS is trying to make 25-54 their "main target audience". Well, with those numbers, what are the chances that TGW and Mentalist's 25-54 numbers will be any better? Doubtful, obviously.

The Ryder Cup hasn't been on FTA for 17 years and it's stronger than it's ever been.

But that's not what I'm saying. I'm not saying that the large scale promotion and support from a broadcaster guarantees a hit but rather that when shows are given that widespread support and promotion its not right or true to say that they're out of nowhere hits. Call the Midwife was promoted for what felt like months across the BBC so to suggest that it came from nowhere is just patently untrue. The same is true of Downton Abbey. It had a prolonged advertising campaign, a big name writer, huge budget and a lot of positive press before it debuted. The idea that it came from nowhere is simply untrue.

As I said its perfectly fair to say that the scale of the success is or was somewhat surprising (although to still be saying that 3 years into Downon Abbey seems absurd) but that they were successful isn't. These aren't shows that were shunned by their respective broadcasters and expected to do poorly. These were shows that were given huge promotional campaigns and expected to do at the very least well and in the case of Downton ITV were quite clearly shooting for more than just well.

Out of nowhere hits are shows that come from nowhere to be hits and neither Downton Abbey nor Call The Midwife fit that description.


The spinning chairs will not be back for every episode next year if only because that would make absolutely no sense what so ever.


It (potentially) could if any of the networks were signing up to it but last I heard The CW were the only network who had. My guess is that's because the online viewing of shows is overstated at this point and that the networks don't really want to open that can of worms just yet. At least not until they feel their in a stronger position with their online platforms. I'm also not convinced it would make a huge amount of difference anyway. I don't imagine that any shows online figures are so impressive that they would dramatically alter their fortunes.

I saw the Ryder Cup highlights on BBC One, and I had the bonus of not having heard the result, so it was just like watching live coverage for me.

Interesting that X Factor USA grew from the opening episode on Thursday on ITV2.

Parliament is sovereign!


Fair enough. Would have bee nice to have it play out to 8-10m viewers on BBC1 though. Slightly awkward to schedule - I expect the bulk would have been on BBC2, with BBC1 taking over after MOTD2.

BT take note.

A big 4 head to head (Arsenal v Chelsea) and still well below 1m. Sky Sat 12.45pm games never, ever, rate well.

Man City v Arsenal (an almost identical game in terms of appeal) last Sun at 4pm got 1.7m.

19 years actually.

The problem there is that I'm not sure this is a like for like comparison. The issue of over exposure is much more pressing in the US than the UK where over the past 12 months they've had

The X Factor
American Idol
So You Think You Can Dance
The Voice [two seasons]
America's Got Talent
Dancing with the Stars [two seasons]
Duets
The Next

And that's without looking at some of the stuff the cable channels are churning out like The Glee Project etc. and anything else I might have forgotten.

At the moment we're not anywhere close to reaching that level of saturation. Equally I think its probably untrue to say that The Voice isn't rating brilliantly. When you look at the network its on and the era in which its launched its doing phenomenally well. American broadcast television has changed an incredible amount in recent years and the networks just aren't going to be able to produce shows that get Idol at its peak numbers – as evidenced by Idol's declines. That NBC right now is able to have a show that is amongst the biggest on television is a near miraculous feat. That they were able to basically self start that (and for all the talk of the Super Bowl The Voice was a self starter) is even more miraculous. There's clearly still a huge audience for these shows. I'm also not sure how much I buy this issue of overexposure in general. Whilst I can see the logic to some extent and would agree that with so many of them now on the air its unlikely we're going to be seeing the monster ratings we've seen in the past I don't know why this genre of television would be impacted by over exposure more so than any other genre. There's a hell of a lot of comedy on US television this season does that mean we should expect Big Bang Theory and Modern Family to fizzle out in the ratings?

As much as people might be uncomfortable with this reality television works on the same basic principles as scripted television. I'm not sure it has to worry about overexposure more than drama or comedy does. If television can sustain 50 cop shows why not 50 singing competitions?


They can try that but I'm not sure advertisers will play along with them on it. I would imagine their numbers look quite a bit better for last night 25-54 but I haven't seen anything to confirm that.

In other news the latest attempt by the Academy Awards to go younger is in – Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane will host the 85th Oscars. After his excellent turn hosting SNL this might not be a terrible idea.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJrJ2DZHBAI

Not that BT will care anyway if enough people subscribe, but IMO it's not that bad a rating.

It comfortably beat ESPN's teatime kick-off which involved two top 5 teams battling it out that featured many goals and much drama.

It also comfortably beat yesterday's 4pm kickoff on Sky Sports, albeit an uninspiring sounding Aston Villa v West Brom tie, which had less than 548k.

The fact of the matter is there are simply not very many people watching TV in the early afternoon period on Saturdays. It's actually quite impressive that a subscription only channel held over 10% share of the available audience.

CBS needs to broaden their slate, the crime dramas do work well for them but it probably wouldn't hurt to pilot a couple from different genres like soap or sci-fi/supernatural.

There's an element of Emperor's New Clothes about Andrew Marr's History Of The World. BBC1 see it as an EPIC DOCUMENTARY because:

# It's 8 x 60 minute episodes.

# It's about the HISTORY of the WORLD! How epic can a subject matter get.

# It's presented by celebrity journalist Andrew Marr.

# and we've spent millions of pounds flying him to dozens of exotic locations, giving him a big carbon footprint that the American Oil Industry.

But its content doesn't match its grand ambition.



Nonetheless I won't have the BBC criticised for scheduling it on Sundays at 9pm because thanks to this, and I quote the DS ratings report:


and thanks to Downton's phenomenal timeshift figures, X Factor will fall even further behind in the officials (where it was already trailing.)

So well done, BBC1, for a brilliant piece of scheduling.

But BARB has updated today - so the figures on BARB are correct?


Well this seems very odd indeed now and TXF is down week-on-week. Do you know the +1 figure rzt? Or is that still the same? This is getting quite confusing now. Also do we yet know last Saturday's correct overnight figure for TXF please?


I really thought XF could have touched 10m+ last night. As for making up ground now as we enter the lives to reduce the decline, do people really believe this is even going to happen? Yes - the lives each week were around 10m including +1 (on Saturday night), which could be possible. But its the Sunday shows that will probably keep the decline in line with the recent trend of the series. The results shows were getting 11-12m each week. I can't see this happening at all this year - and thereby this whole point of reversing the decline seems very unlikely IMO. As for DA - 10m is an excellent figure and same goes for last week too. Staggering stuff!!

History of the World is alright but I prefer his previous series, History of Modern Britain and Making of Modern Britain, Think had it been scheduled on a different day or in January, it would be doing around 4-5m, decent but not a huge hit.

Just a reminder that the NEXT SEASON of the DS Ratings Predictions Game is up and running, so if you haven't played for a while why not have a go at it?

The schedule can be found HERE; it includes two Star Ratings which are explained in post 8.

Thanks to everyone who takes part.

But Derek you have missed the point. It could be doing even better with FTA. Yes it's doing well but it could be doing better.

Ken

I swear it was performing much better in the spring than it was now; I thought it was in the mid 5s? Maybe I'm not remembering correctly. I know it had a Super Bowl boost that time around which may have helped it slightly.


Maybe that's it - while an audience is still there the peaks will never be hit which we saw from Idol in America and The X Factor here...though both shows have their own problems that no amount of 'under-exposure' could cover.

I would love to see CBS return to some sci-fi. But at the moment, it would probably just be NCIS in space

The problem is when they've tried to broaden their horizons in the past it hasn't really worked out well for them which is why they keep coming back to their procedurals. As an example compare and contrast the fortunes of Vegas and Elementary last week. One was a slight break from the norm for CBS and the other was basically the pinnacle of the procedural drama.


It was absolutely performing better in the Spring during the auditions but a lot of that can be put down to a Super Bowl bump. Its still a big show for broadcast though and a huge show for NBC.


I would certainly agree with that. I suppose you can say that what we've seen the past couple of years is a 'normalising effect'. They've gone from being huge shows head and shoulders above everything else to big shows that are kind of in line with the top echelon of other shows. Of course I don't know how much of that is down to the saturation of the market and how much is down to age. Would Idol still be down in the US without the likes of The Voice and The X Factor coming into play? Presumably so. And presumably The X Factor would still be down here as well. Perhaps not so much but the declines would still be there.

Will that many subscribe if they realise a lot of the matches are Saturday lunchtime?

ESPN doesn't have nearly as many subscribers as SS.

The second half of yesterday's Super Sunday was opposite the high rating Ryder Cup (and the first half against the build-up).

Is it that surprising that ESPN doesn't have as many subscribers as Sky Sports? Sky Sports has a huge head start in terms of the time they've existed and its public profile. Sky Sports tends to have more content as well. In general I think what will make or break the BT channel is what other content they have. If they're simply expecting people to subscribe because of the football it won't be enough. They need a decent line-up across the board.