Either way, we could do without any dirty bits on a thread which provides relevant ratings data.

Football highlights at 7pm didn't work because half of its target audience were returning from games. I'm sure The Premiership got beaten by Dog Eat Dog, which was a brilliant show.

Still, I admired ITV at the time for thinking outside of the box and the one good thing that came out of it was a fixed 10.30pm slot (the Beeb have a habit of alternating MOTD's time, annoying as hell).

Basically BBC/ITV don't have enough programmes (worth watching) for all of the year.

ITV seem to be dealing with this by having Harry Potter on loop, the BBC have been at the sherry...

The BBC have been at the sherry for 15 years!

Ken

The Premiership was also dogged by endless commercial breaks and too much studio talk. It was a rough period for Saturday night television with formats like House Party either being finished or shows like Blind Date at the end of their shelf life. However, Pop Idol/Popstars was showing what would become the big ratings hit later in the decade, singing and dancing contests.

I think they'd be best advised to throw everything at getting that premiere weekend off to a good start. A Harry Potter lead-in alone won't make a massive difference but it's certainly a lot more helpful than Animals Do The Funniest things would be.

If it starts off down 20% again then the live shows will be too late to sort it out. It's highly unlikely that they'll be able to close that gap. They need to get off on a good foot, as close to last year as possible and then it's up to the show itself to try and hold onto that.


Most new entertainment series fail, whether they're from in-house BBC or independent producers. It's a really tough genre which has only got tougher in recent years for various reasons discussed on here.

Also, you can't pin all BBC1's Saturday night woes on its in-house production team. The commissioning team make the decisions on what makes it to air.

Personally, I think BBC1 Saturday nights are stale but generally rating well. They've taken a couple of risks this summer and it hasn't paid off. Notably however, the very pedestrian, safe lottery gameshow commission is doing just fine. And Strictly will be back soon to cure everything!

This will be the case I'm sure. Worth noting also:

Football eufa super cup is on Friday night, so there's two episodes of Corrie going begging. I could see something like this:

Saturday:
18:00 Harry Potter
20:00 X Factor

Sunday:
19:00 Coronation Street
20:00 Stepping Out

As the weeks go on, it could end up like this on a Sunday night:

18:00 - You've Been Framed
18:30 - Stepping Out
20:00 - X Factor Results
21:00 - Downton Abbey

If Stepping Out is 5 weeks long(?) then it'll probably start in the second week of X Factor which would then take it through to judges houses (assuming 4 weeks of auditions, 1 bootcamp, 1 judges houses).

And in theory ITV could run Harry Potter from teatime on the 31st and use it as an X Factor lead-in. Then on the Sunday they'd have the spare Corrie episode at 7.30pm leading into the second X Factor.

It's Celebrity Chase on the Sunday for a few weeks (before X Factor) from September, then it seems Catchphrase is going to take the slot nearer to Christmas. I wonder where Big Star, Little Star will slot in?

I don't think they should use Stepping Out as the lead-in for X Factor as I don't think it'll be strong enough. Surprise, Surprise may have fared fine but the concept of this show is already getting a bad reception - it may translate differently on TV.

A standard start time for X Factor would be 19:45 or 20:00 for Saturdays, no later.

Do ITV have to show the Super Cup on their main channel as ratings have often been dreadful? Also this will affect CS as it tends to lose viewers when it's moved.

Still think Coro St should move back to Sunday at 7.30pm with the 8.30pm Friday slot being freed up in the post-EastEnders junction for comedies, 90 minute dramas, thinks like Stepping Out etc.

Then Autumn schedule of

7.30 Coronation Street
8.00 The X Factor Results
9.00 Downton Abbey

Would be pretty dynamite. And when XF isn't on, Corrie anchors Sunday nights. Get on with it ITV it's long overdue!

Probably not, I'm sure it has been on ITV4 in the past.

Chelsea are involved this year so that automatically makes it a main channel match, particularly with Mourinho back as manager.

Plus there was bias towards the bigger teams. The primetime edition was awful; I thought the one that came on at 11pm-ish was however surprisingly good. Studio talk was much more forthright and there were extended highlights. The Premiership on Monday was a breath of fresh air at the time (would give MOTD2 a run for its money today), so there were some positives for ITV.

The Beeb did experiment with singing contests around that time -- 'Star for a Night', but it never took off like Pop Idol did for ITV.

Do you think Stepping Out would be better suited to primetime on a weeknight?

Under the last deal, ITV were contractually obliged to show it on the main channel. Not sure about it now.

Like you say, Chelsea, the European champions Bayern Munich, Pep v Mourinho -- enough reasons for them to show it.


It says on the press pack that the target audience is female-orientated.

Sunday evenings seems the best fit.

I certainly think ITV should give Friday night entertainment a go.

8.30pm is a perfect junction on Friday as EastEnders finishes then. It was good a few years ago, before Corrie moved there.

Corrie has always suited a Sunday slot and inhabited one for many years before it was moved by Simon Shaps, a horror of an exec at ITV who made horrible decisions and relaunched the schedule making it worse. He removed Corrie to make Sundays the 'night of entertainment' but failed to deliver beyond Dancing on Ice in January and a 1 hour X Factor results show for about 8 weeks.

Put Corrie back on Sundays. There's always room for it, there always has been, even when XF/DOI are on. When they're not, it anchors the night.

Fridays are set up anyway, so put new stuff out there - like Stepping Out. Or even the Dancing on Ice performance show!

I wonder if, next summer, ITV should just throw out the Harry Potter films across the summer post World Cup - they should have eight films by then so it would bridge the gap between the end of the World Cup and the beginning of The X Factor (if it's still around):

19 July - The Philosopher's Stone
26 July - The Chamber of Secrets
2 August - The Prisoner of Azkaban
9 August - The Goblet of Fire
16 August - The Order of the Phoenix
23 August - The Half Blood Prince
30 August - The Deathly Hallows Part One (X Factor lead in)
6 September - The Deathly Hallows Part Two (X Factor lead in)

That way they can spread their light entertainment formats through the rest of the year... though I'd be the first to say it's incredibly unimaginative and lazy.

As for last night - BBC One's light entertainment formats have failed to take off though the shares are not disastrous. Big Brother seems slightly on the low side but should bounce back tonight. Harry Potter did well but The Americans is really not working out for ITV. Channel 4 had a low night and BBC Two didn't do much better.
Last edited by Fudd : 11-08-2013 at 18:11

I think it was arrogance on ITV's part, trying to make their mark, and fix something (poached from a rival) that wasn't broken. Same with Parkinson: he kvetched (after jumping ship) that his show was being pushed too late on BBC One, and when his ratings disappointed in core peak on ITV1, they put him in late night again! Incidentally, he had been due to be pushed later on BBC One after they won back the Premiership highlights.

As for MOTD's start time, it was probably easier for ITV1 to give the highlights a fixed slot at 22:30 (after three months of poor ratings at 19:00), as there was nothing of consequence that couldn't be booted out of the way for it. It might be different these days with X Factor finishing quite late sometimes (in recent times anyway). Timings will vary at the weekend, and I think viewers accept this. People know MOTD will start at some point in the 22:00 hour, after the news, and generally this is fine.

If it was to go out at 7pm, it would clash with Strictly though, wouldn't it?

Maybe a 6pm slot would work?

It would be nice to see entertainment on Fridays, or more entertainment on the whole on weekdays.

All Star Mr & Mrs is capable of 4 million on a Wednesday at 8pm. It'll probably not clash with Strictly either. I think it'll have a similar appeal to M&M as it focuses on the real-life couples.

Is that the spoof version?

The axing of the Sunday episode of Corrie was brought about by Simon Shaps, who said at the time: "We have always been the home of Saturday night entertainment and we want to broaden that out to make the whole weekend on ITV something to look forward to."

Well I'm sorry, they failed at that objective and Saturday has even been weakened by it. Gone were the days of a solid 7.30 Corrie 8.00 Heartbeat 9.00 Drama schedule, and instead Dancing on Ice abandoned a perfectly good Saturday slot and aired there for just a few weeks at the start of the year, then X Factor perked things up for one a hour a week at the end of the year.

I fail to see how Downton Abbey is so "perfect" for Sunday nights if Corrie is not?

They'll chicken out of showing the true version.

However, tradition always wins out and viewers wanted MOTD back. Maybe, though, MOTD 2 was inspired by POM and a later development, The Championship, will have inspired Late Kick Off and TFLS, as lower league fans were complaining they were being ignored.

That's just offall.