Not by much though. HIMYM is rating very well this season for its standards.

It does look brilliant and I'll certainly be tuning in, mainly because of the actors starring in it. I'm a massive fan of Olivia Coleman. I think this will be a hit for ITV - I can see a lot of casual viewers giving it a chance due to the cast.

Just looks well made, has a sense of scale about it. The cast helps, and the acting from the clips looks very convincing.

I might be wrong obviously. It just seems to scream hit to me.

Its seems that if david tennant is appearing in a drama you may add an extra million to its audience. He has a strong following people watch just because he is in it. Plus it will attract the doctor who audience because he appears in broadchurch too.

Nice to see EastEnders coming out on top. Generally, when a soap runs into another soap's slot, the one starting first gets the higher ratings, but Emmerdale quite often fails to get the higher audience under those circumstances.

No....

There's much more to it than the Tennant effect. Read up on it, rather than writing off the drama and saying it'll only do well because "he's in it".

The pathetic depths that posters sink to in their efforts to dismiss ITV's successes (in this case, before they're even successes) are becoming laughable.

If ITV does something good, certain people rationalise it as a fluke, a clone, etc... Why are people so hard on this damn network? Why can't people be impartial?

Nothing ITV ever does is good enough, there is always an excuse for their success, there are always more digs that can be made, it is never given credit for its efforts.

For what it's worth, I hope Broadchurch is as good as it looks, and if it is I hope it gets huge ratings because I don't care about anyone else - I support the underdog, and ITV comes in for so much slack because of outdated perceptions and frankly the network has changed a heck of a lot from the days when such criticisms and perceptions were justified.

Improvements and gains with things like the strong rebrand, improved drama slate (Biggs, Selfridge etc), progress pre-watershed (Cornwall, Dogs), Daytime gains (Chase, Tipping Point etc), massive improvements to News (Etchingham, no standing up, more serious) and new factual commissions (Aylesbury, Death Row etc) are consistently ignored and overlooked.

Why are so many people so hateful towards this commercial network? I really genuinely want to know now why members of this thread cannot just stand back and view TV as a WHOLE.

ITV is trying to be a good network. It's trying very hard to balance the wishes of viewers and its business obligations in a tough market and frankly I think the team in place is doing a sterling job.



Apologies to all for the rant but I'm so fed up of people kicking ITV in the balls all the time, like it's still under the reign of Charles Allen and has nothing going for it.

Broadchurch might not get the huge ratings you're hoping for James J. BBC one are not giving it an easy ride with their big event drama Mayday against it for the first episode and detective drama Shetland against the 2nd episode. Shetland especially sounds like a George Gently/midsomer/death in paradise kind of show and might surprise some people in the ratings and get the better off the more advertised broadchurch...

Yeah, let's see what I enjoy on ITV, The Chase, Aylesbury, Death Row, minority sports, TMO, Jonathan Ross, ITV3 when I can receive it, DA, a good film, Whitechapel, travelogues like Cornwall, quite a bit and I will always commend them on high ratings.
Yes I'll hold my hand up, in the last decade I became a hater and when I was on here I was still harking back to their awful reality shows as if they were current as ITV had annoyed me so much. Now I think, some things they're doing well at and rather like no one mentions Pets Wins Prizes when discussing BBC One anymore, I think it's time people stopped automatically assuming ITV has a reality shows on every night following Corrie.

Let's hope Broadchurch, Shetland and Mayday all do well, not to mention Lightfields. The more British drama which performs well the better.

As for last night; I'm surprised Waterloo Road isn't doing better against the Europa League, which did well for ITV. EastEnders held up ok considering the clash with the second half presumably climbing opposite the football build up. Emmerdale is being dented by the early start. Jack Taylor didn't have a bad start for Channel 5 while BBC Two and Channel 4 had quiet nights.

I'd have thought Shetland would be a Sunday show - are they putting it on Mondays? Fair points about Broadchurch not getting an easy ride though as launching against Mayday won't be particularly easy. Hopefully Broadchurch gets big numbers though as it looks really good and is 'original ITV drama.'

Mayday isn't getting a particularly easy ride though. Whilst episode 1 will have a terrific lead-in from Call The Midwife it's launching against Mr Selfridge which has a consistent c6m audience. It then faces Broadchurch on night 2 which I do think will start well. On night 3 it will be starting midway through live coverage of Manchester United vs Real Madrid which should be a big rater and then on night 4 it faces part 2 of ITV drama Lightfields. Could be tough for Mayday although like you I do hope it does well as it's always a shame when a good drama struggles, and apparently Mayday is a good drama (as is Broadchurch according to early reviews).

I hope all three do well. But I predicted 8million for Broadchurch a couple weeks ago however I will have to revise that prediction down to 6million in light of hearing BBC one is showing drama against it. Yes shetland second part will be shown on Monday: http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/pro...yearweek=&day=

We saw on Channel Five too last season what a good value contract it is, although I wouldn't put it in the top tier of TV rights by a long way, because although the knockout games rate well I'm not sure the same can be said for the group stages which are terribly turgid.

I guess you would put it on a par with something like the League Cup which rated very well for the Beeb in the last few seasons, but i doubt many people are taking up Sky subscriptions because they now have it exclusively. I suppose the Europea League contract is like the Beeb's League Cup contract in that you get a handful of decent games with big names in primetime, while the dull fare is either shown as highlights or on ITV4, helping that channel out in the process.

I don't think it's do much for a subscription channel, though. Of course at the turn of the century when Sky were looking for any possible advantage over ONDigital they bought the rights to the home matches of most of the British teams in the Uefa Cup so they could show them exclusively on Sky Digital, to little effect. I think the Europa League, if a pay channel got exclusive live rights, would follow the League Cup in being of minimal interest to the casual fan. It wouldn't bring any new subscribers in.

I used to like the Uefa Cup before this centralised contract, though, when matches would turn up on any channel at any time, and Channel Five would have triple headers and so on. I liked that rather haphazard coverage.


Maybe, but at the end of the day, channels are not political parties and so there is no requirement for people to give it credit. I don't think it stifles debate at all, we're not forced by law to give each channel equal coverage on this thread.

In addition, I happen to think that if the BBC gets an easy ride on here, which it doesn't, good, because it gets so much rubbish flung at it from the rest of the media. The Sun and Mail slag off the Beeb over and over again. There's an editorial in The Sun today slagging them off today for some apparent anti-Tory bias nobody else noticed or cares about, yet if you removed all the stories that were about, or based on quotes nicked from interviews on (with no credit), BBC programmes, you would lose half the paper. Also, see every thread in the Broadcasting forum. If this thread has any kind of pro-BBC bias, which it doesn't, that makes up about 0.00000001% of the UK media. And we're not pretending to be a proper news source.

If I want to slag off a programme on ITV, I will. I don't have to like them.


Sunday and Monday.

Slightly off topic but I really hope ITV recommission Great Night Out. It's exactly the kind of show they should be aiming for and it was very enjoyable to watch. Maybe they'll give it a summer re-run before making a final decision on it; ratings wise it didn't pull up any trees unfortunately.

I agree - those who have watched it seem to generally praise it and it could be a grower given the chance. ITV have a drama budget they have to use and in the case of Great Night Out I think it's better to use it on something they can build on than throw it at another new show and hope that does better.

Had EastEnders ran to time it might have rated higher but I guess the silly 7:28-7:57 is going to hurt it with people turning over at 7:30

I did Tweet the BBC about EastEnders hardly ever running to time and the reply I got was....

BBC One ‏@BBCOne

@dan20082 We do try to keep to time as much as possible but it can be tricky with three live programmes before EastEnders

Is there a 5min breakdown for both Emmerdale and EastEnders? I Assume EastEnders would climb from 7:45

Tricky my arse!! It couldn't be easier for a non-commercial channel to hit those kind of junctions cleanly. They simply don't have any great desire to do so.

Yeah, I mean a lot of Shows start early throughout the day and that's without having LIVE shows before hand.

At least on BBC channels most PVRs will smart record programmes automatically so nothing is missed. They send accurate time checks to flag programme start/end.

It'll be interesting to see the breakdown for Jack Taylor, it did well against the football and next week the competition is a lot weaker so it could benefit from that. I thought it was decent and I hope this will encourage Channel 5 to dip their toe into homegrown drama even it is just ordering more Jack Taylor,

Not always,Not on sky anyway I have missed the start/or end to some programmes in the past. Doctors is one of the worst. The BBC feel the need to change the start time far too often.They have it down as 1:40-2:10 but start it at 1:45

The breakdown was encouraging. It began with 1.40m (6.0%) at 9pm and ended with 1.26m (7.6%) at 10.40pm. So the last 5 minutes outrated the programme average of 1.24m (5.8%).

However, I'm very wary of taking these breakdowns too literally, especially for a first episode, as I remember being taken with the breakdown for Dallas and ultimately it proved to be misleading.

Hopefully it can settle the 'right' side of the million mark at least.

Full 5 Minute Breakdown for Jack Taylor: The Guards:

Disappointing that The Last Leg is reverting back to being half hour long next week, it flows a lot better at 50 minutes long.

The new series of Alan Carr: Chatty Man being advertised to start at 10.

It's billed as 1.45 in the Radio Times.


I'm surprised they didn't mention the real reason they run EE (and The One Show) early, which is to fit in the 90-second news summary just before 8pm.


I'll try and get one tomorrow.

I think you have misunderstood my comments on broadchurch. I mean that no matter where david tennant is he adds viewers. Im thinking even on bbc four. He is an asset to any television play. Im sure he adds millions to any production regardless of its quality. I am a huge who fan and like many others am attracted to dramas where the ex doctors appear and I think tennant developed a cult following. Whether itv or bbc one has him on their channel he is going to attract more viewers. I think the bbc is about to use him soon too and again he will add to the ratings on that channel too just as john thaw did or david jason he is a popular television face I would say. I've not attacked itv broadchurch how can I when I've not seen any of it so couldn't say if its any good or not. Itv produce
equally good drama to the bbc. Ie mrs biggs downton lewis so its unfair to say im critical of their production and I have never said as such. Its just a tv channel not a personal attack after all.

At the same time, I'm sure Emmerdale went up from 7pm, as it would equally have been dented in the first 15 mins.