8.5 million people plus still watch The X Factor. And the show's going to be axed next year...apparently.

There is no reason why Dancing on Ice couldn't run alongside X Factor, although from a business perspective it probably makes more sense to have 20 weeks of 8m viewers in the run up to Christmas rather than 10 live shows rating at 10m+ when advertising money is pretty dry. Britain's Got Talent is also much less advertiser friendly than X Factor is, plus you run into the same problem because dates would inevitably clash with X Factor USA earlier rounds or early live shows.

The ultimate compromise could be to get him on the show as an impartial judge and split the acts between the other three judges, whoever they will be. He used to frequently fly to and from America when on the British show so there is no reason why he couldn't do it again.

Hmm, Personally, I love Stars in Their Eyes and think it could work again BUT regardless of the brand its the sort of show they should be trialling, a FUN show. The Magic of Stars in Their Eyes (and other shows of its era) were that they involved ordinary people having a bit of a laugh on TV with no sob stories or over produced auditions. Yes the Talent ran out in the end but the show was event TV because The SHOW was key, NOT what happens after or the media surrounding it. This is what ITV need to return to imo if they want another hit show

It's well known the biggest months for ad revenue are October-December and the weakest months are January-March (as all the ad spend for the financial year is usually used up pre-Christmas by retailers).

ITV would never run their biggest show/s January-March.

But their biggest shows are now Britains Got Talent & I'm A Celeb.

ITV need to look at twitter to see what is being said about Ant & Dec. You have a show here that is 10 years old & the format is very dated. Why is it popular? Resounding reason is Ant & Dec / funny. Lots of I wish they were my mates? It is a vehicle for them to 'gently' take the p.ss out of celebs (in the broadest sense) & we laugh along with them. GBP feel comfortable with it. It matters not one jot who wins.

X factor just got too big / too brash / too contrived. GBP can spot (well most) insincerity. Once audience starts to not believe what they are being fed then the rot sets in.

SCD lost its way a few years ago when it started to take itself too seriously. When you had the judges getting wound up because the public weren't voting out the poor dancers. The more they moaned the more the public kept them in. Once they re-set & basically took it back to fun time & just rolled with what the public say it has had a whole new lease of life. A few Come Dancing fanatics will always get wound up as they see it as a professional dance show but the producers seem to have learnt to ignore them!!!

ITV's flattest time tends to be the period between BGT and TXF. This is where shows like Superstar and Let's Get Gold tend to be shown as they can stiff and no one will notice. Oddly enough, it was always the time when the BBC was weakest, repeats and cricket seemed to rule the roost, but now it seems to be ITV that flags in summer.
Maybe they should consider getting a big sports contract to tide them through.

Funny how TXF is still generating so much comment about the content of the show, even though nobody is apparantly watching it.

Meanwhile SCD which is everyone's favourite show, nobody ever comments on the content here, perhaps because nobody here is actually watching it, they just support it by default as an anti-Cowell vote.

None of the last few pages should be in this thread really. If the ratings did go down every time there was a shock result, we'd be on about minus 50 million by now. I did think this thread had managed to get through a Sunday without the same 10 pages of the same posts as last week, but the last 2 pages has just ruined it.

Glenn do you actually own a TV at home? because your endless tales of what your local pub has on the TV, and how this translates to ratings definally did jump the shark many months ago.

Neither of which they would consider airing January-March.

Although, worth pointing out X Factor makes a ton more than either of those shows as it runs for almost 50 hours a year.

Well I presumed your post was as a result of Brekkie's idea of shifting XF to Dec - Mar & BGT to Sep / Oct.

Viewers realising it's trashy rubbish?

No-one needs to watch XF to know whats going on, the press and media sites are either its glove puppet or an encircling vulture depending on its fortunes.

As long as the show keeps chopping and changing the judges, ratings certainly won't improve for the long haul. Stability is the only way forward but it is a tired old format, Cowell needs to the decent thing and axe it before it gets the axe.

The ITV thinktanks need to come up with a new Saturday night show and fast.


I usually have my supper when SCD is on, hence my lack of commenting over there. The content doesn't need much criticism because you know what you are going to get.

The only thing that has grinded my gears has been Brucie, but he did provide a few laughs on Saturday.

This thread has gone downhill only 1 round up in the last few days. without DMN here there would probably be none.

Not many ratings have been reported. We can't roundup nothing !

I was reading one of my text books (I study Media) and there is a section that gives various ratings for random weeks in the 1950’s to 1970’s. I thought they may be of interest for some people. It’s important to add that back then, these was measured in homes and not viewers.

I’ll post the rest tomorrow, but here’s the ten most popular programmes in March 1958.

It’s interesting to add that ALL of the top ten programmes were on ITV!

1. Take Your Pick – 4.1 Million Homes
2. The Army Game – 4.1 Million Homes
3. Armchair Theatre - 3.8 Million Homes
4. Emergency Ward 10 – 3.8 Million Homes
5. Saturday Night at the London Palladium – 3.7 Million Homes
6. Double Your Money – 3.6 Million Homes
7. TV Playhouse – 3.6 Million Homes
8. Emergency Ward 10 – 3.5 Million Homes
9. Shadow Squad – 3.1 Million Homes
10. Play of the Week – 3.1 Million Homes

Chatter, much like trending on Twitter does not equate to popularity. Strictly viewers tend to be happier with what they're watching compared to X Factor viewers and don't feel the need to say something every single minute.


It's a ratings thread and people will talk ratings it'd be dull in here otherwise with a list of ratings and then people saying thank you for posting them then going off for a walk.

You are right though Andy. Saying the same things over and over again can get old.

The thread is only as good as the results coming out regularly. They're usually nicked from another thread anyway.

Not always. Often roundups from here are copied and pasted into there from what I've seen, not that I go on there much.

The X Factor isn't a show where you have a host with acres of personality you have somebody competent and ordinary who can get from A to B. Also the judges aren't particularly witty, any talking points usually come from them bickering. For some viewers it's a case of seen it all before. The X Factor more than any other talent show really does rely on the right mix of contestants primarily to be a good series. Are there enough personalities? Does the show need to take itself more seriously or less seriously? That's the difficult question to answer.

The show always had joke acts, but the really good contestants made it to the end. This series the good contestants seem to be falling by the wayside. The judges take much of the blame as they said yes to some at the auditions and did tactical voting to keep their acts in with the live shows. Is it coming back to bite them on the proverbial? Possibly. But I still think it can be tweaked enough next year to bring ratings back up.

True. But this whole thread started many moons ago because of ratings posted on GB. I've been at the birth of both.

We don't have to keep posting to keep the thread busy, if there's nothing to talk about then don't post anything.

I think every angle of discussion about X Factor's ratings performance has been covered now. Most of the X Factor talk is about the actual show and not about ratings and there is an X Factor ratings thread aswell.

One of the issues with any X Factor related discussion on this thread is that it tends to be dominated by people who never really understood why the show was successful in the first place. Saying "I told you so" doesn't count for much if you've been telling us for 3 to 6 years now.

The joke acts, shock eliminations and fix theories are as old as X Factor. It makes no sense that the mere presence of those things would be the problem. What's more likely is that "we've seen it all before". I watched Saturdays show and it was good. The acts generally gave strong performances or provided some kind of TV purpose and it was fun (unless you're the DS minority that sits tearing their hair out over "real talent" and hates fun). But if there has been an issue with the show this year (and last) it's that knawing sense of doing it by the numbers. Here's the joke act... here's the "shock" elimination and so on, to the point that it would have been more surprising to send Rylan home earlier this series.

It reminds me of Big Brother in its later years. After all, when they've had Jade/Shilpa and 5,000 other big rows, how do you hype the next one? Once Michelle's toes curled in pleasure under the table in 2004, where do you go with the romance angle? After BB7, how can you have bigger characters without them being too much? You could relate similar questions to different areas of X Factor. And Big Brother is the only other show of the 21st Century so far to be as commercially valuable as X Factor. As "brands" and TV shows they're similar studies.

The numbers right now are, in a broader context, fine. Do 8.4m this time next year and all is well with the world. The problem as far as I can see is that the current trend suggests it won't do 8.4m this time next year. More likely to drop 20% and be under 7m. Same situation as Big Brother 9 - a 3.6m average so it seemed like there was room to fall next year. Except it collapsed early on and was cancelled mid series.

My favoured plan is a relatively clean break. Cowell returns but with a new show - no major changes, just an Idol-X Factor style transition. That's a really easy propostion for ITV to try and hype up. Start in November with pre-recorded stuff. Go live after Christmas. No "old faces" apart from Cowell. With the current situation, I don't even see this as a particularly big risk for anyone involved.

Christopher Maloney winning might actually complete the comparison. An embarrassment championed by the "head judge", he'd be X Factor's Michelle McManus although she was championed by Cowell with the specific intention of damaging Pop Idol. Then again, maybe Barlow wants to take the whole thing down with him and is doing it deliberately!

Right now, I think The X Factor brand might be a weight around the shows shoulders. Constant comparisons to years gone by from judges to contestants to ratings probably don't help.


Basically what you're saying here is that ITV would rather make less money but have an upper hand in debates on The Ratings Thread.


Not as well as he may have wanted, but it is paying off. RTL reported X Factor USA as a key reason for why their financial performance improved. If the show is worth of being singled out for a company the size of RTL, can you imagine what it's doing for Syco's bottom line? Then again, One Direction are probably making him more money at the moment than both versions of X Factor combined.

Reading through this thread and the comments regarding Simon Cowell and a possible return to X Factor UK, I had a random idea come into my head. Thinking it through it's not the greatest of suggestions but what the hell...

How about Simon returns to X Factor UK (as he's clearly needed, maybe moreso than in the US) and he's replaced over there by a One Direction member (Harry, let's be honest...although having said that Niall's the most popular out there so...)? Now their age is obviously a problem, but looking at it from a 'who is going to pull in the most viewers' point of view, surely someone from a band that is huge in America is the best option? I don't know, just a silly idea that popped into my head randomly.

I'd predict 9.5m and 11.4m peak roughly for last night.