The 40 minute build up for the FA Cup game really dented the overall figure...

Next week's Demons looks a lot better and the RT review sounds promising. Sometimes the first episodes can be a bit hit and miss so it probably needs time to bed in.

I thought it was enjoyable for what it was, as long as you leave your brain at the door.

I wonder which will win tonight "Lark Rise to Candleford" or "The Royal"? I think the latter will lose.

I agree. Although TV Burp is on tonight before it (a best of compilation) - wonder how that will do against Antiques Roadshow.

Definately. Theres a couple of pretty tasty games. They'll have to choose between Liverpool v Everton and Man United v Tottenham. The Merseyside derby might seem like the obvious choice but aparently they'll have trouble convincing the police to let them play it Saturday evening - so we might see the other match instead. Either way, a pretty good draw - a big all Premiership tie for Saturday, and plenty of potential giant-killing games to choose between for Sunday.

(Setanta have the second choice pick so will presumably take the other of the aforementioned ties)


Theres no reason why both shouldn't do very good business. No new Top Gear to compete with now (just a 'best of'). I can see the Royal getting back to 6 million +, with Lark Rise to Candleford perhaps a tiny bit more.

I agree... I can see Lark Rise doing well on the back of the well-received Christmas special.

The PTB at ITV1 have effectively halved Heartbeat and The Royal's audience in recent months through their insinstence on pulling both series out of the schedules at random. think tonight's episode of The Royal is 9 out of 12, yet rather than let it finish its run, ITV are replacing it with the new series of Wild at Heart next week.

Good idea.

The part with the boxing gloves astonished me.

Wild at Heart gets kid glove treatment from ITV1, but The Royal and Heartbeat are treated very badly these days.

Even one of the big red balls would do, with W&G bouncing on them!

K

I know - both shows seem to be treated as fillers now rather than series in their own right. It would fair enough if they split each series into two blocks of 6 to 12 weeks, but running them for 3 or 4 weeks at a time and then dropping them is no way to maintain audience loyalty.

TV Burp is on tonight??? What on Earth are ITV1 trying to do to their programmes? TV Burp, traditional Saturday night fare, is swapped to Sunday, You've Been Framed is given every available half hour slot going and Heartbeat and The Royal get chopped and changed so much viewers aren't sure whether they're coming or going.

As for last night - reasonable for both BBC and ITV. It still rankles me in thinking that Total Wipeout would be lucky to get 4m if it was aired on ITV1. It seems that BBC shows are just given a chance whatever. An ok start for Demons, though, like Total Wipeout, next week's figures will be very interesting. The FA Cup match also did well, with the ratings being affected by the drawn out introduction. All Star Family Fortunes and Who Wants to Be A Millionnaire? seem a little low though, considering the opposition.

Saying that, I'm amazed Casualty didn't top 6m on a winter's night now The X Factor has finished. The share for that, FF and WWTBAM? all seem low as well, so why did people switch off from the programmes?

Eurovision didn't have a great start with under 5m. The fact is that it's pointless - people of Europe like different things to us, and that's part reason why giving the public the choice of who to send doesn't work. Doctor Who Confidential did brilliantly, however, obviously assisted by the announcement on who the next Doctor was.

Celebrity Big Brother gained a pretty standard audience for a Saturday night. They'd really like to see the first showing rating top 3m though.

Very good ratings for Total Wipeout: never underestimate a programme with attractive females writhing around in mud.

Back to the FA Cup: one of the big points the FA made about the previous BBC/BSkyB deal was the fact all games (except replays and 2006 QFs) would be played on Saturdays and Sundays, and apparently that was "key" to restoring the magic of the FA Cup.

So why do we now have Friday and Monday night games?

Ouch!!

That must be hurting ITV - nearly 3m down on the corresponding BBC1 coverage last year, which didn't even feature the club that was top of the league at the time or any giant-killing potential. The United v Villa game peaked with about 8.5m-9m too IIRC, so they're a good 2 million down there too.

I find it enormously satisfying to see ITV paying stupid money to wrest the rights away from the BBC, having seen how much stronger the Beeb's coverage and ratings had been since winning the rights back off ITV, and then finding that audiences would simply rather not watch FA Cup/England international matches at all than have to watch ITV Sport's amateur hour efforts and Tyldesley and Pleat/Beglin wittering on inanely.

That's 3 big games under the new contract that have pulled in disappointing audiences (England v Kazakhstan, Germany v England, and PNE v Liverpool) on ITV1, around 2-3m down on what BBC1 would have got for the same matches. Indeed, I think only the Germany game actually won its slot - and that got only 7m or so, for a game England actually won lest we forget.

ITV must be losing money hand over fist on this contract, particularly with ad revenues being squeezed. If they can't deliver an audience, and viewers would rather watch on BBC1 a programme normally used to pad out BBC3's schedules or contestants wriggling around in mud and bouncing off giant bouncy balls, then they are going to have problems.

Will ITV have to pull out of this contract too before it runs its course, like they did with the F1 and the ITV Digital/Football League contract that nearly resulted in many non-Premier League clubs going bust when they pulled the plug?

As for the other stuff, I think the Beeb will be disappointed that Your Country Needs You.. couldn't clear 5m with a lead-in of 7m. I thought it would just nose past Demons, and it prevented a BBC1 clean-sweep last night which many on here scoffed at when I suggested it was a distinct possibility when the schedules were announced.

I think it will build as the live shows start, but it's only a short 6 week run - will people bother to engage with this? Mind you, it will only have re-hashed YBF and TV Burp repeats to go against from next week, so that will help.

Good start for Demons, but it will struggle to maintain much more than 4.5-5m on last night's evidence, particularly as it looks like it will now be up against In it To Win It.

Total Wipeout did very good business, building to nearly 7m, but will struggle to hold that with an earlier slot next week. I think the Beeb are on to a winner with this though.

The BBC will be disappointed with Casualty. Although it averaged a very consistent 6.0m over the 50 minutes, and looks to have found a regular audience at that level, it has inevitably been damaged by the X-Factor competition and people getting out of the habit of watching. I think the BBC should shorten it a 30 week run (max) launching on the Saturday of the SCD Final and running until July, then resting it until December. And make it less soapy, and more like it used to be when 16m tuned in to 'guess the accident', not to see who is shagging whom.

Does anyone know when the final 2008 all day and primetime figures for the terrestrials will be published? Last %'s I saw were from Broadcast until 15th December and posted pre Christmas. Am interested in the changes from 2007. Do we have to wait until mid-January before this is published?

It just another "best of" show, and it looks that way for the next few weeks I think.

Shame we've missed out on a festive TV review by Harry this year - won't be much point in having one in late Jan/early Feb when he returns.

I imagine TV Burp will be getting about 4-4.5m for the "best of" shows.

As for the change of night, they could have put it on at 7.20 last night before Demons, as Demons is moving to 7.45 next week anyway, but presumably they wanted Demons to get a leg-up from the 9m they thought would be watching the climax of the football....

Didn't Michael Grade say that he wanted ITV to be home of FTA premium football? He's pretty much a football man and understandly football does bring viewers, ad revenues and demos who wouldn't normally watch ITV.

Speaking of football, when is bids due for Premier League football? I expect Sky, Setanta and possibly ESPN to bid for the live matches but I expect that Five will try and wrest the highlights off the BBC like they have before.

It will be interesting how Above Suspicion does tonight, I expect that ITV will want to become an series if it is successful but it's up against Swarm on BBC One which is the type of programmes that seems to do well.

That really makes me annoyed!

Yes, and they are plugging it with the "Kicks for free on ITV" tag line.

Unfortunately, "few will see on ITV" would have been more accurate...


It will do well, a good 7-8m probably with weak competition from BBC1, getting no more than 3m I expect. Shame though that ITV1's prime 9pm output this week consists of La Plante detective drama, La Plante detective drama, daytime filler about slimming, detective drama repeat, hidden camera/emergency services doc, another La Plante detective drama.

(Mind you, I've just seen what BBC1 has in the 9pm slots this week... )

Saturday 3rd January 2009 - Primetime Shares (17:00 to 23:00)*
BBC One - 23.4%
ITV1 - 21.05%
BBC Two - 7.17%
Channel 4 - 6.02%
five - 5.31%
Multichannel - 37.05%

*may not be 100% accurate - based on 15-minute breakdowns

I don't think there is any prospect whatsoever of ITV breaking their football contract. It was a PR disaster last time and if they did - they'd be kissing goodbye to any chance of football rights in the future.

You do have to consider the quality of the matches when looking at the ratings. However you spin it, theres no doubting the BBC's equivilant tie last year was far more attractive than ITV's this year. We'll see how ITV does with the more attractive looking ties in the next round.

That said, the ratings for all of the matches so far have been a little down on what I was expecting - particularly the England matches. Not the disaster you make out, by any means - but yes, a little lower than they would probably have gotten on the BBC. You have to consider that the BBC do have a natural advantage with big events like the FA Cup in their ability to use lots of cross-promotion and companion programming on all sorts of media outlets, particularly raido and their very popular website. You see this utilised to good effect for the Six Nations rugby. It used to be quite a minority event, but its grown massively, partly due to this approach, over the past few years.

People watch for the quality of the match, not the quality of the broadcast channel right?

I necessarily didn't like one of the F1 commentators when it was on ITV, but I still watched it as it's my favourite sport.

The ratings evidence does seem to suggest people just won't watch if it's on ITV1. Perhaps the die-hard fans will transfer, but the floating viewer finds himself more inclined to endure Motty et al than Clive "he just never shuts up" Tyldesley.

Had yesterday's match been on BBC1, I would almost certainly have watched it all. Instead, I kept flicking over to Doctor Who Confidential and Total Wipeout, and then stuck with TW for its last half hour, returning only when that went off. If others are doing the same, it will reduce the average ratings.

Oh yeah, absolutely - in the vast majority of cases.

The point I was making really has little to do with the quality of the coverage itself. I think thats a very minor point. Its more to do with the promotional aspects.

The BBC are very good at hyping and promoting their big events like Wimbledon, the Six Nations or, in the past, the FA Cup. They use TV, Radio and Online to instigate a huge build up to events by the sheer number of hours and resources they devote to covering it.

Take Wimbledon as a great example. The majority of the British public couldn't give a stuff about Tennis for 50 weeks of the year - but for two weeks - it becomes the nations national sport. It takes on far more importance than it logically should. This is, of course, down in a large part to the unique and historical nature of the event. But the sheer saturation coverage the BBC provides gets people who wouldn't normally dream of watching Tennis, hooked on the Federer-Nadal final. On another network, the coverage would simply not be as high profile or saturated, and I dare say the ratings for the final itself would be corespondingly lower.

Of course, Wimbledon is the extreme example - the coverage of football is a very different beast. And this isn't in any way an attack on ITV's coverage - I'm just pointing out the natural advantage of the BBC's size and multi-platforms when it comes to covering big sports events.

This seems to confirm that about a million people watch BBC1 by default, and hence other channels need to try harder for their ratings

Regarding Demons v Total Wipeout, I wonder what the ratings would have been if the two channels swapped places.

Erm, ITV would almost certainly be slated for Total Wipeout and it probably would have been an early candidate for the "ITV FlopZone".