Originally Posted by cylon6:
“Your Face Sounds Familiar was tacky though. Be honest.”
Originally Posted by cylon6:
“And that is Tumble's biggest problem. People think it's tacky before they have actually watched to see if it is tacky. Most people think it's Splash without the pool. The description has it more like Strictly with gymnastics.”
All Saturday night light entertainment is slagged off for being "tacky" the second it's announced, long before it's on air, when it's on air and after it's finished. You can take probably every succesful format on TV and find examples of people slagging it off when it began, Stars In Their Eyes and Noel's House Party among them. Most of it's slagged off because people generally do slag off Saturday night light entertainment for being Saturday night light entertainment and have got it in their heads that all television has to be like Breaking Bad.
If you were to look back at some of the genuinely bad shows of the eighties and nineties, like Caught In The Act and Anything Goes, I would suggest you can't put Your Face Sounds Familiar in the same ballpark. Your Face Sounds Familiar was brash and noisy, yes, but it was Saturday night ITV where people like brash and noisy. Look at The X Factor hyping up its ratings, it's terribly vulgar. But brash and vulgar is fine, in its place.
A lot of Saturday night shows have succeeded because they're brash and vulgar. Look at Total Wipeout, it was a big success and as daft as they come. Don't Scare The Hare didn't flop because it was tacky, it flopped because it was boring and not silly enough. Your Face Sounds Familiar wasn't a particularly good show but there are many reasons for that, the presenters weren't very good and some of the ideas in the execution were a bit off (the incomprehensible scoring system for one). People weren't turning off because it was brash and vulgar because it's a slot where brash and vulgar is what's required.
As for Tumble, I dunno, clearly they're spending a lot of money on it and the Radio Times putting "The new Strictly?" on its cover won't hurt. I like Alex Jones and it looks like it'll be executed well, but I dunno if it's too late for this kind of thing, it seems a bit uninspired, the result of people sucking pens and going "what haven't we done?". I doubt it'll ingratiate itself in the public's affections like Strictly has, but it should be a reliable enough banker.
Originally Posted by
NeilVW:
“Interesting piece in the FT relevant to this [registration may be required]. ITV plc were offered a network simulcast and turned it down, opting (as the FT puts it) to "maintain its usual evening schedule of Love Your Garden, a horticultural show with Alan Titchmarsh, and Kids Behind Bars, a US documentary". 
STV apparently refused offers from Sky News and the BBC News Channel to show it.”
The chance of ITV showing two hours of that on the network were so remote, they're not even that bothered about UK politics. What they could have done is shown it after News at Ten if that was on the table though it would probably have rated poorly even there. Given people outside Scotland don't have a vote much of it would be totally irrelevant and while I'm interested in the outcome I'm not interested enough to watch that for two hours. Your average ITV viewer even less so.
But it was STV's programme and STV could decide who they wanted to show it. Nobody else's fault.
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