I am pretty sure those 0k means less than 1k, less than 500 maybe and not 0 completely because I always fall asleep with the TV on and the amount of times I have woken up dazed and confused with The Hoobs on, which is quite creepy when you open your eyes

I have no idea, does it? Even so, S4C isn't a new sports channel needing to prove that it's worth £15 a month, S4C isnt a new sports channel trying desperately hard to shout about it's credibility - and, perhaps most importantly, S4C isn't a new sports channel that wants so desperately to be seen as a serious challenger to Sky where Setanta and ESPN tried and utterly failed to take off. Like I said, for the amount of money they'll have paid to show the rights, paying for a blank screen would be better value for money than programming which attracts sub-1000 viewers.

I know what you mean though, I pulled an all-nighter the night before A-Level Results Day last summer, and goodness me 5:30am TV is odd

I'm glad you asked! Here is my latest stab at BBC One's 21:00 schedules (Sun-Fri) from now until 20 December:

http://i42.tinypic.com/2n9ksgi.jpg

Inspector George Gently apparently starts in September so I've swapped that with The Escape Artist. Happy Valley might be for 2014 as I can't see it fitting in this autumn.

Turning to comedy, it appears that the BBC may have lost confidence in Jason Byrne's Father Figure, which was supposed to launch a week on Friday but is now slated for mid-September according to Byrne himself. If this is post-watershed fare I cannot see where it will fit into the 21:00 hour (unless it's for Saturdays), so it is absent from my chart. It may end up in a 22:35 slot in the week.

If it was getting 500 viewers, would that not be 0.500k? I dunno. I've only just started looking at ratings, it's all quite interesting.

I have seen ratings of 500 before. One BARB viewer equates to about 5,000 people. There is some statistical jiggery-pokery which goes on to align the sample with the country as a whole, leading to a downward adjustment in some cases. Plus of course these are programme averages, so you could get 5k in the first five minutes, followed by 0k for the rest of a 30-minute programme, meaning an average of less than 1k.

It really is, I came back at 3am this morning from being out woke up at almost 6am and the things they air on TV at those times mess with your heads!

That hasn't even been cast yet, let alone filmed, it's been pushed back to next year. Also I think you've mentioned all the BBC drama there is, except for The 7.39, Death Comes to Pemberley and Sherlock, all of which I can see airing around Christmas. None of the new drama really stands out as a potential ratings hit, a lot of it looks very good but nothing that could pull a big audience. Both channels have solid returning hits though, so both should do well on the drama front this autumn.

Especially with a hangover.

I think the nearest a major channel has come to 0 is on Christmas Night in 1993 when BBC 2 achieved an audience in thousands for a serious drama shown opposite Ghost.

Surely ITV must have recorded zero figures in the days when they always seemed to be on strike

I read somewhere that some ridiculously trashy dating show in the 90s on Channel 5 got exactly 0 viewers. I don't know how true it is though.

I think those BT ratings are about what would be expected.

They had 550,000 orders as of 10 days ago. Let's say they have approx 700,000 now. That's 10% of the number of Sky Sports homes.

So multiply those BT ratings by 10 and then compare that figure to what you would expect on Sky Sports.

Liverpool v Olympiakos - multiply by 10 would give average 460,000 (with very long intro), peak 900,000.

Arsenal v Napoli - multiply by 10 would give average 870,000, peak 1,290,000.

The above look pretty much in the area you would expect Sky Sports to get - maybe even a bit higher actually possibly reflecting the very strong football skew for BT viewers compared to Sky Sports.

Of course the other key thing to note is how much better the Arsenal game rates than the Liverpool one - despite the Liverpool one being a bit more attractive. Timeslot key as always.

You can take Last Tango out of that grid, it'll be Xmas / 2014 for that...

You sound a bit bitter there H just admit that's a pretty good figure it beat YFSF.

Samuel W sounds like he works for the BBC's PR department, he wouldn't sound out of place as a politician, does he ever say anything negative about The Voice?

Digital spy are wrong according to tvratingsuk. Tvratingsuk says National Lottery actually got 3.75million

So apart from ILMC BBC had a great night. Itv did ok to accept for the Americans.

Not at all. When it slumped to sub-4m for that show that moved to Friday, you could expect someone would spin the figure, saying the figure was double ITV's figure at the same time.

How so? TV Times and What's on TV say a November start.

Zero ratings were often recorded for 5 News Early. I remember reading in 1998 that Exclusive!, a prime-time celeb show was the least watched show in ten years.

There was also a time when certain programmes on the BBC Digital channels got zero viewers.

Photographer Rankin on Twitter says that the new Doctor Who is a "he" (could be a bluff of course)...

https://twitter.com/rankinphoto/stat...04638640447489

Why - it rates well enough, cheap and if very much in early peak rather than in the middle of the Saturday schedules.

TV Burp was generally topical and even the "best of" editions quickly date, so not much value in repeating that.

The summer of 1979, when ITV was off air for 10 weeks. This was when BBC1 recorded some of its highest ratings outside of Christmas. Doctor Who reached a record for City of Death and even the funeral of Lord Mountbatten had 17 million viewers. Also there was a lot of anger about the strike as these were the days when ITV had 50 pc of the audience and some viewers watched nothing else.

Sssh, you're not supposed to mention who Exeter were playing!


There was a piece in The Guardian the other week about pop on TV to coincide with this show. I'd love there to be a music show on primetime TV, I still think it's totally bizarre how there are two hugely hyped shows on primetime TV which attempt to try and find new pop stars, and the likes of Lady Gaga are all over the papers, yet apparently pop music has no chance of succeeding on TV.

The piece mentioned the best places to launch bands now are Soccer AM and Saturday Kitchen and certainly there's an obvious gap to be filled in between the snoozesome Later and the showcases for established stars. The piece mentioned CDUK as a great show and certainly in its pomp it was very influential and got plenty of support from the industry because its scheduling meant it was a very important way to attract the audience they wanted. But the revamp in 2005 ruined it, then of course Channel Five bought it but it never happened, and ITV planned a replacement but couldn't find a sponsor so abandoned it.


Indeed, the idea was that it would pull in big audience when Emmerdale had gone off for the summer as it usually did, but ITV countered that by, funnily enough, not taking it off for the summer. Not sure why the Beeb didn't expect that. And Emmerdale has been on all year round since.


Much of the ire on Twitter of course comes from people who slag off all Saturday night light entertainment, assuming that if we didn't have it we would get Breaking Bad on a Saturday night or something. I think only Ally Ross of all the TV critics actually spot the difference between good light entertainment and bad light entertainment. As has been said, light entertainment has always been that, light. There's a couple of complete House Partys on YouTube and last night I ended up watching the episode from Boxing Day 1992, famously its most successful episode ever which absolutely thrashed ITV (and at the end Noel twice points out that Last of the Summer Wine is next) and one of the main items is Joe Longthorne singing with a dog.


Yes, I think this was always going to be an acquired taste. Robbie's reference to Night Fever isn't a bad one, I actually thought it felt a bit like this, and I do think the relentless silliness and cheerfulness is going to put a lot of people off. You can give it credit for at least trying to make a panel show format suitable for Saturday primetime but it is going to turn some people off immediately because it's so brash. Can't imagine what it would have been like with David Walliams.

The bits I liked about it are a) Frank Skinner, who is always great, and I like how he recycled his old Anne and Nick routine, as seen on Fantasy Football in 1996, for Susannah Reid, b) Jamelia, who I've always liked, c) the fact it's got a band perfoming the theme tune to The Challenge Programme, as Anneka called it and d) the parcel exploding with obviously more force than they expected it to. By the way, it's not me who was the Script Associate. in case anyone who read the credits was reading.


Indeed, that made my cry with laughter first time round. It was actually the first sketch ever sold by Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews, as can be seen by the fact it's clearly a Big Train sketch six years early.


I loved this post, the bits in bold really tickled me. I think that's exactly right and that's why I didn't care for Splash, the second you start putting voting in it you're taking it too seriously. Too many shows these days think they matter. It's a bit like on Celebrity Fame Academy, when everyone cried and booed the judges, who cared? Far better when they replaced it with Let's Dance where nobody gives a toss, the judges mess around and everyone knows it means absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things.


Apart from the actual draws themselves, of course, which is why they don't do them on Wednesdays and Fridays anymore, and why when they're on their own they rate very poorly. And of course there have been a lot of lottery quizzes that haven't rated, like This Time Tomorrow and Millionaore Manor.

Break The Safe is certainly becoming highly entertaining in terms of stupid answers, though. Can't decide if my favourite last night was the suggestion George Osborne was preceded as Chancellor by George Osborne or that Craig Charles' character in Red Dwarf was called Hitler.


But there's loads on Sky that gets no viewers, like all those minority sports they put on. Things like showjumping, netball and that on Sky Sports get low ratings as well. They inherited the UFC from ESPN so they probably paid next to nothing for it and then it's two in the morning as well.

Obviously in their early days BT are going to promote their stuff more extensively, they gave the Liverpool friendly yesterday 75 minutes of build-up and had all their big names on it. In a few years time they'll be doing what Sky do and just get Tony Jones to present and commentate from a cupboard.


William Phillips in Broadcast once did a list of all the occasions a terrestrial channel got a rating under 250,000 in primetime, it was in around 1999. On Christmas Day 1993 both BBC2 and Channel Four got a zero rating in primetime, BBC2 got it for Selected Exits, a one-act play starring John Geilgud and directed by Kenneth Branagh. Can't remember what C4's zero rating was for but I do know that, as the Radio Times Guide to TV Comedy points out, three days later they got 235,000 at 10pm for an imported Tim Allen stand-up special, before Toy Story and Home Improvement when nobody knew who he was.

It used to be that under 200k was zero because at that point the margin of error made it impossible to judge. I know RI:SE used to get zero quite a bit at 7am.

We will see how Doctor Who rates tonight, But it will be more of hit on the BBC IPlayer (