And highlights just how weak SITE is - The Voice isn't making a massive impact on it, it's so unwatchable that it doesn't even matter what is on the other side, people don't want to watch it.


The finales and launches in the past few years have been pretty steady above that level but you never know with ITV's performance this year.


It will drop as usual after the auditions but they're basically paying for the blind auditions.

The only problem is that it does limit the volume. They're getting all they can out of the auditions at the moment and judging by the final rating last year there's not much scope to do more live shows especially as they'd run into BGT. In other territories The Voice has managed volume more similar to X Factor/Idol.


I think what ITV might be best off doing is channeling the money for SITE and GYAT into one big new format next year (maybe for 6.30pm-8pm on Sundays). The problem is that there are a million ideas out there for the next Win Your Wish List - nice, affordable quiz shows with second/third tier talent attached. But those things won't do the business anywhere other than BBC1. There are far fewer options for commissioners when it comes to those tentpole shows.

Another fantastic rating for The Voice. We've seen time and time again that a lot of shows which face weak competition still can't rate well, and we know The Voice auditions can get 6m+ against strong competition like BGT, so clearly it does have a large audience who actively tune in to enjoy it. Having said that, it's obvious that this series more than the others is benefitting from more casual viewers tuning in due to the absolutely dire c2m competition. Even if it was facing 'average' 4m-rating competition, it'd probably be doing about a million lower, and more so if the competition was upwards of 5m. It's now had six weeks to establish a 8.5m audience, so I think Saturday Night Takeaway really will have its work cut out. In a couple of weeks, I can quite easily see The Voice being about 1.5m ahead of SNT, partly due to how much leeway TVUK will have to drop.

It's been a dire start to the year for ITV. Even ignoring how poorly the new shows have done, you know there's problems when even the traditionally reliable long-running shows such as Foyle's War (couldn't even get 5m exc+1), Midsomer Murders (failed to get 4.5m for its most recent episode against average competition - will probably take a further hit this week against GBBO) and Benidorm (c4.5m instead of 5.0m+ it was getting in that slot previously) are underperforming. Even the Monday 8pm mid-Corrie filler show can't get 3m anymore, a slot which used to be good for almost 4m. There's been no announcement of any ambitious sounding new light entertainment shows for the rest of this year yet (You're Back In The Room is hardly going to be the next big thing), only 2 new potentially returning dramas have been announced and they're soon losing 40+ hours of reliable-rating male-skewing Champions League football.

We've seen how difficult it has been for them to replace 20 hours of Dancing on ice (which wasn't even rating that well last year). Get Your Act Together launched with about 2m viewers less than DOI's lowest ever rating performance show. Who knows how on earth they will end up replacing 45 hours of The X Factor if that continues to decline big time the next couple of years, or if BGT/IAC suddenly take big dips the next few years (unlikely but you never know). There doesn't seem to be an obvious active effort to turn things around or find successors, and although they'll just defend their strategy by saying they're making big profits at the moment so what's the point, it will catch up with them around 2017/2018 when they'll have declining tentpole shows, declining soaps, no football, hardly any successors in place and falling ad revenue.

Fantastic peak time schedule on Channel 5 last night - three and a half hours of NCIS. It averaged 600,000, which may explain the slight rise in volumes elsewhere.

Even so, Planet's Got Talent could only scrape 2m (2.1m with +1), and Jonathan Ross 2.2m (2.5m).

ITV is a shambles.

I do wonder how the issues ITV are having at the moment will affect Takeaway, BGT and later X Factor. They all dropped about 6% last year which isn't bad but is slightly more than ideal (especially as X Factor should really have been level or up a bit). Another 6% decline could see one or two of the Saturday X Factor live shows slip below 7m. Also they've got to work around the Rugby World Cup somehow. It will be an interesting year for X Factor. I presume Cowell will be back again but will they have a new judge to hype up or will they try and keep it the same? The latter is probably my pick to be honest but then that would mean they'll have to find something else to hype up the launch with (I think it's important they have something new to talk about at least). I thought the last series was good but there's definitely room for improvement still and they'll need to improve if they want the ratings to stay steady.


I half wonder if they'd be better off just doing it like Dragons Den and just have the blinds without anything afterwards (maybe 1 or 2 follow up shows like DD does). They could probably do even more blinds then.

The problem is that there are only so many ways of whittling the contestants down after the blind auditions and I can't think of anything that would really improve the show. Unless they could somehow nick X Factor's 6 chair challenge then there aren't many options outside of the battles they could use! Having said that, I guess what they could do is have the battles and then strip the live shows BGT style. Say each coach has 8 acts after the battles (which I think they do now). They could go Monday-Thursday and have 8 acts per night (each coach fields 2 acts per night to make it competitive between them each night). The top 2 each night go through to the final on Saturday night. Might help them keep hold of viewers a bit better (it'd avoid running into the slightly warmer late March/April weather if nothing else). They could do something like what ITV do and have The Voice 7.30-9pm and 9.30-10pm with BGT inbetween. Maybe worth a shot?


That's the problem in a nutshell. They had a big format lined up in Rising Star but they ended up bottling it. Get Your Act Together was the last minute replacement and you kind of wonder if they'd have been better off just going with Rising Star anyway given how badly GYAT is doing.

Next year they'll have Beowulf presumably on Saturday nights. It would be very useful for them to have something to support it with though and Sundays also need a new format. Not an easy task ahead of them at all although surely it can't be worse than this year?

I doubt their big hitters will be affected that much. They'll most likely be down a couple of percent due to a smaller reach though. The issues seems to be with the programmes rather than the channel itself.

Let's not forget that their soaps are still getting 30%+ shares for them Monday-Friday. The viewers are there for the channel if they want them.

I'd agree with all of that. Last year when SNT returned it launched with 6.5m and The Voice had 7.3m. This year though I can see The Voice holding up at about 7.7m and Takeaway launching about 6m if not slightly less due to the fact ITV have allowed The Voice to build up and also due to ITV's issues with returning shows right now.


It doesn't make good reading. With the returning shows I'd say some are more of a cause for concern than others. Foyle's War definitely had a poor run. Some of that might have been hangover from the last series which was slammed by fans of the show but even so it was disappointing. Ignoring the episode that faced Call The Midwife, the 2 other episodes got 5m and 4.7m. Last Tango will have dented it a bit but even so I'd have expected both episodes in the 5.0-5.5m bracket (in the previous series it got 5.5-6.0m against The Village so that would seem reasonable) but it fell short and I'm not sure why.

Midsomer Murders is easier to explain though I think. We've seen a couple of times now how FA Cup matches have dented ITV this year and I think this week's Midsomer lost half a million because of it. It got 4.6m so that would have put it at 5.1m (there's no point looking at ITV's ratings without +1). The first episode got 5m and Midsomer doesn't normally spike for episode 1 for a new run so that would seem reasonable. As for why it isn't getting the usual 5.5-6m, I think it's a combination of Wolf Hall denting it slightly (by maybe 0.2-0.3m) and I think them running repeats leading up to the new series maybe is knocking 0.5m off the audience as some viewers might think they're still airing repeats. I agree that GBBO is going to cause problems for it this week and then EE/GBBO even more so the following week, so all in all this won't be a great run for Midsomer.

Benidorm launched quite well at 5.8m but has lost viewers since, partly because of young skewing competition from CBB. Episodes not against sport have consistently got 4.8-4.9m so it'd probably be in the low 5's without CBB. Aside from that I think Benidorm is an aging show that isn't as funny as it used to be. The last series averaged 5.6m, the series before in 2012 averaged 6.1m and the series before that averaged 6.6m. So continuing that pattern this series would average 5.1m. So far it is averaging 4.8m (might go up to 4.9m once the rating for the finale is in). So it has fallen a couple of hundred thousand short of the recent pattern, possibly in part due to the 2 sport fixtures it has faced this series that it hasn't come up against before. Stripping those out the series has averaged 5.1m so that might be it.

I do think some returning shows have been badly treated by ITV this year. Take Me Out and All Star Family Fortunes are particular standouts, with the latter having a knock on effect on Mr Selfridge (which again, starting against the penultimate episode of Last Tango, which of all the dramas it has ever faced was probably most likely to have an audience crossover was a really stupid move). Meanwhile the audience showed up for the return of Broadchurch, but some didn't like what they saw, which I think was bound to happen. It has been a truly rotten start to the year for them all in all though and they'll desperately hope that things start to perk up soon.

Some officials:

Midsomer Murders (28/01) - 6.48m (6.12m excl. +1)
Wolf Hall (28/01) - 4.46m
Celebrity Big Brother (28/01) - 3.42m (2.92m excl. +1)
...
Birds of a Feather (29/01) - 5.16m (4.97m excl. +1)
Death in Paradise (29/01) - 8.69m
Celebrity Big Brother (29/01) - 3.47m (3.13m excl. +1)
Cucumber (29/01) - 1.22m (1.03m excl. +1)

Nice little rise for Stars in their Eyes.

Could yet turn into a sleeper hit....


..... *Kidding!!!* It's a creative and commercial disaster, of course.

I miss Samuel's constant reminders about ITV's reach crisis, but it's something I thought was very valid. Narrowing of programming range and schedule (nothing new on telly post-news or at weekends off peak) is really starting to hit home.

Also, yes, I do think the rise of the PVR is starting to kill off commercial TV. I actually think it makes the case for the licence fee that much stronger. Yes, it's a compulsory subscription, but because it's compulsory it makes it far cheaper for everyone. Compare that to the ludicrous sums we chuck Sky's way each month - and yet they only invest £600M in UK programming (outside sport and movies). A terrible return on investment, really.

Having said that, there's no reason the Voice couldn't be on ITV from 2017 onwards. It does great business for the Corp, but it's not a PSB show.

Its still crap, if it was on ITV we know you wouldn't like it! Okay ratings I suppose. ITV ratings are krud also. I've not watched nothing on TV past two Saturdays. Can I ask do you all watch the same things every sat/ other nights on TV or do you not put a DVD on? Its the same comments about same shows every morning!

On the subject of product placement it should be noted that (in US shows in particular) what people often think is product placement isn't. There's a general belief that if you see a brand on television then someone somewhere has paid for that brand to be on screen and that's actually not always the case. In fact often its very rarely the case.

House of Cards and Damages were two shows mentioned earlier and they're easy enough examples to use here. Apple is heavily featured in House of Cards but in reality they do not pay for that (its worth mentioning that Blackberry and Sony are also prominently featured as well). Those products feature heavily because those are the products that are provided to them at a discounted rate or free of charge by third parties. Damages meanwhile features Sony products because it was a production of Sony and they could get all of those products free of charge because they already owned them. There's an element of slight of hand product placement to all of this but it isn't in the strictest sense product placement.

Something else worth mentioning here is that a few years ago Modern Family did an entire episode based around the newly launched iPad and absolutely everyone on the planet watched that episode thinking it was just an extended advert for Apple. Apple however had absolutely nothing to do with it. They didn't pay anyone at ABC for that episode nor did they discuss it with anyone at Modern Family. All they did was provide an iPad for the episode when asked to by the Modern Family production.

For better or worse now brands are a huge partly of daily existence and its pretty difficult to make a television series without featuring them. How odd would House of Cards be if people didn't have phones and computers for example?


What I find particularly odd about The Voice is that the numbers suggest that actually interest in the competition is sustained throughout the run. Every series to date has dropped after the auditions and particularly for the live shows but equally every single series has also seen a rather noticeable jump for the final as well. So clearly audiences are retaining some sense of interest in who actually wins the series even if they aren't tuning into the live shows every week.

All fair points. But I can't see how things are going to perk up soon. Monday nights should be fine and Tuesdays will have the return of the Champions League soon so both those nights shouldn't be a problem. But on Wednesdays, they're going to have Celebrity Animal Sanctuary/Big Star's Little Star at 8pm which aren't exactly going to rate very well. And the 9pm shows will do badly - as we've seen time and time again, the 8pm LE/9pm drama combo hasn't worked well for them. Thursdays will be a mix of average-rating Europa League and one-off documentaries for the next couple of months.

I'm not sure about Bear Grylls: Mission Survive. It's different to their usual stuff, at least, and I think it's right for them to give it a go. But I can see a situation arising here whereby traditional female ITV viewers don't watch it and they struggle to get younger male viewers to watch it, resulting in a show rating below 3m. As for Saturdays, it'll be an improvement with SNT back but You're Back In The Room sounds like the sort of run-of-the-mill gameshow which won't make waves. Nothing seems to have been announced with what will be going in the Saturday 9pm slot when BGT is back. So it sounds like it might be cheap repeats like what they did last year with reruns of L&O:UK and Prey, which is just madness. Sundays are a disaster with another 2 months of ASFF and Selfridge in such a high profile slot.

Only 3 new potentially returning dramas (6+ episodes) have been commissioned for this year: Home Fires, Jekyll and Hyde and The Forgotten. If you take the traditional new drama hit rate of 1/3 into account, the law of averages suggests only one of those will probably end up becoming a reasonable success and getting a second series. They really need to be launching more new dramas to find shows which stick and can come back for more series.

Samuel was obsessed with ITV, he must of had an interview for a job and got declined :D
Also license fee talk, as you brought it up... I'd not rather pay it and spend the money on something else :)

Yes they have but I reckon there is no time like the present . If ITV were to be interested they would have to outbid the BBC by some margin I would think-they do seem to have a good working relationship with Jon De Mol and it was reported the BBC's offer was initially 5 million less than ITV.

Looking at next Jan/Feb, there is little to suggest anything other than more of the same across the schedule and more woes for ITV.

It is a great figure for the Voice and as always it preforms well in the audition rounds and will fall as usual in the battle rounds. The judges always come across ok in the edited versions but not good on the live shows.

Those are two brilliant CBB figures, which kind of makes the overnight of 2.71m for the final look disappointing, as that will probably timeshift to around 3.2m only. Fantastic as always for Death in Paradise and great for Wolf Hall.

I'd agree with a lot of that. Mondays/Tuesdays will be fine and Thursdays OK-ish (I can see them squeezing the 2 part Trevor McDonald Meets The Mafia in at some point between Europa League games which might do reasonably).

I agree about Wednesdays. It is frustrating how they persist with this 8pm LE (and not particularly strong LE at that) into 9pm drama schedule that just doesn't work. I think their best bet would be to put DCI Banks on Wednesdays as whilst it would decline from the last series it has aired on Wednesdays before (Autumn 2012) and did well enough there so that is probably their best option. Even then though that lineup doesn't work. I've suggested before how instead they might be better doing 8pm drama into 9pm LE. That way the drama could at least do well at 8pm (with a Corrie lead-in and minimal competition as long as GBBO is avoided) and the LE probably wouldn't do much worse than it does now at 9pm. Obviously they couldn't air stuff like Big Star's Little Star at 9pm but it would give them an opportunity to try new post-watershed LE instead. For instance if they had a cop drama at 8pm then Bear Grylls: Mission Survive could actually have a shot at 9pm. They could also shift Long Lost Family there is they had a decent 8pm drama as the lead-in would be solid still and it'd free up Mondays.

The 8pm drama could also be a chance to try out pre-watershed drama. It wouldn't even have to be anything radical. They could even move some of their 9pm shows there. Is there really anything in Grantchester or Scott & Bailey or Lewis that would stop them airing at 8pm? I doubt it. Maybe a bit of swearing but they could always just cut that out. If they were running 9pm LE then it wouldn't even require them spending more money. The likes of Big Star's Little Star, Animal Sanctuary, Surprise Surprise etc could move to either Sundays or even Tuesdays.

I'm not sure how Mission Survive will turn out either. I think you've got a point, although I guess ITV are hoping that it having celebs in it will mean enough female viewers tune in. It's definitely a risk worth taking though. On Saturdays I think YBITR will do similar numbers to The Cube last year (c4m) so nothing special. As for April/May, I notice that this year Catchphrase is doing 60 minute episodes. So I guess that could run from7-8pm on Sundays rather than the usual 6.45-7.30pm. So I think Off Their Rockers could potentially move to Saturdays. Then they could have OTR at 7pm, BGT at 7.30pm and Ninja Warrior at 8.45pm. That would be a decent schedule although 9.45pm is a bit early to wrap up, but I guess it'd be repeats there. If they were to show repeats though, rather than just run a drama or movies repeat, I'd give ITV2 sitcom Plebs a repeat airing there instead to try and expose it to a wider audience.

Alternatively they've got new sitcom The Delivery Man airing in Q2 apparently, so they could perhaps have Ninja at 7pm, BGT at 8pm and Delivery Man at 9.15pm. Not sure where that'd leave OTR though. Also if they were to do that then Vicious series 2 might pop up at 9.45pm as I've no idea where else that could land (they've just finished filming it so it'll be on fairly soon, personally I'd like it to go at 10.35pm on a weekday or 10pm on Sundays but they'd never put it there). A further option would be OTR at 7.15pm, BGT at 7.45pm, Delivery Man at 9pm and Vicious at 9.30pm with Ninja in the Summer.

No idea what they can do about Sundays just now. GYAT should be off the air but it looks like it's staying put. ASFF should start at 8pm at the very least.


Indeed, although Safe House is also returnable (only 4 episodes this time but they could do more in the future). Personally I think The Forgotten has the best shot out of those 3 but it depends where they get scheduled. Home Fires sounds like a Sunday show but I bet it gets Mondays.

I notice the ITV Media sponsorship page for Thunderbirds now says this:


So that appears to be the plan. Presumably the episodes will premiere in the mornings and be repeated in the early evening. Wonder where the 2 premiere episodes on the main network will go?

One word to describe ITV's ratings last night: dire. Their highest rated show last night only got 100,000 more viewers than CBB, a show on a minor channel. It's clear a schedule made up of clapped out shows like YBF and rubbish entertainment isn't working. Indeed ITV's addiction to second rate celebs, low brow entertainment, soaps and cheap filler is backfiring.

Emergency Sunday schedule should be:

5:45pm GYAT
7pm Celeb Chase (repeats if necessary)
8pm Family Fortunes
8:45pm Mr Selfridge
9:45pm Keith Lemon sketch show repeats
10:15pm News

They'd have dropped GYAT had it not been leading into a live final.

Given how ITV seem to have mis planned both SITE and GYAT the sorry thing is that if they did this it would end up much like the following:-

ITVs new Sunday night format, on which they have pinned so many hopes, flopped badly. The Mime, which was accused by some commentators of being an attempt to copy the smash hit BBC success 'The Voice', had a fatal flaw that nobody seems to have foreseen during the planning.

Ida Brainwave, speaking from ITV towers, said 'We all thought it would capture the public's imagination to have celebrities attempt to mime to the hits of global superstars. And putting the judging panel on a children's roundabout that turned slowly towards them as they frantically pressed their buttons trying to secure the act for their team was a brilliantly original gimmick. However, we did not fully comprehend the problems involved when miming makes no sound.'

Not that such a thing could ever happen.

A 45 minute should struggles on a Sunday night as it is against 60 mins shows on the other channels

Why doesn't ITV stop constantly chasing the lowest common denominator? It's still a profitable broadcaster, but the recent series of flops and falling ratings for established shows will create problems for them. Their programmes seem largely aimed at a low brow middle aged female market and creating channels like ITV Be and ITV Encore has been an expensive failure. It's a shame when you think Granada used to be called the BBC of the North and produced everything from Coronation St to World in Action.

Any rating for cbb 24

It was Craig Charles, of course, which was part of the problem with Robot Wars on Channel 5, it was a straight continuation of the Beeb series which was running out of steam and they didn't make any changes whatsoever and it looked a bit old hat.

I liked Robot Wars at the start, the first series in early 1998 with Clarkson of course and then the second series at the end of 1998 with Craig Charles, and when it began it really was a talking point, I was at university at the time and everyone was talking about it. That and The Simpsons on Friday teatimes was a fantastic combination for BBC2 which more or less killed off TFI Friday.

However I went off it massively with the third series in 1999 when it was extended to 45 minutes and they changed the format so all the rounds were the same, I found it very boring, but seemingly nobody else agreed with me because at the turn of the millenium it was a smash hit, usually up there as one of BBC2's highest rated shows of the week and repeated both later that night and on Sunday lunchtimes, plus there were loads of spin-offs, including Celebrity Robot Wars which was on primetime BBC1 at Christmas 2000 (although that was a really weak Christmas). But eventually it all began run out of steam a bit and they were right to axe it when they did.

Then when it arrived on C5, as I say it was exactly the same, which was probably wrong because it became a total fans-only affair. The scheduling was brilliant, though, it started on Sundays at seven in November 2003 but the ratings were disappointing so within weeks it was moved to Saturdays. It didn't do any better there so after Christmas it was shunted to Sunday afternoons, and then to Saturday afternoons. Four slots in about six months.


Yeah, which is why I think it would have been too much to show it in a Sunday or midweek slot, because it would have driven away too much of the traditional ITV audience. At least on a Friday that slot hasn't been rating brilliantly so even if it flops it won't do too much damage.

A lot of ITV's problems do seem to have come from alienating the existing ITV audience. I think Take Me Out skews too young for primetime ITV and a decade or so ago there's no way it would have continued with the audience it has. But this comes about thanks to ITV abandoning any slots where traditionally more young-skewing stuff could air. If they still had the 10pm slot, they could skew younger, but they don't so this stuff gets put at 9pm and baffles and bores older viewers.

I've said this before but in 2001, one of David Liddiment's daftest ideas (the same time as The Premiership, actually, he must have had some kind of brain freeze in the summer of 2001) was to designate Monday as a day for younger viewers so they put Bob and Rose, Soapstars (the long-forgotten Popstars follow-up) and The Sketch Show on that night and did a load of trailers saying "Monday's My Day!". But the ratings for Bob and Rose were poor and within five weeks they shunted that to after News at Ten, stuck Denis Norden's Laughter File in its place and immediately abandoned the young-skewing idea. Whatever the merits of that idea, doing it on Monday seemed a bit of a daft idea given how strong ITV traditionally were on that night. Be different if they'd done it on a traditionally weak night.

I remember a lot of complaints that they abandoned Bob and Rose sharpish saying they were more interested in the quick fix of ratings that encouraging quality and new ideas. But you'd have to say that they were at least quick to respond to the audience, as opposed to now where stuff people clearly don't want stays in slots people clearly don't want to watch it in.

I don't think it's reached 24 series yet