Decent enough start for Hotel Babylon considering its not suited to Friday nights in the Summer.

Decent night for BBC1 and ITV1. Hotel Babylon makes a reasonable start, pretty much in line with the other Tuesday dramas that have aired this year and if it can maintain 4m+ every week then it should be okay.

Doc Martin increases from last week and ITV are going back to what they do best on Fridays, rather than stuff like Moving Wallpaper. Also NaT always seems to get a boost from dramas whatever the rating.

Extremely bad for BB!! 2.2m for an eviction show?? That's absymal! I think if the result wasn't announced in the second show then it would have been around 1.5m. But this does prove that 8OTC doesn't particuarly need the BB sandwich on a Friday night, because it still pulls in a solid 2m nearly beating BB! I do think Friday seems to work best for the show and it shouldn't revert back to Thursdays where it tends to struggle.

Good numbers for Divided, 5pm is very much a 4 way battle these days. Hopefully it will return for another run in the autumn.

Pretty impressive for both Doc Martin (as a repeat) and Hotel Babylon to top 4 million, on a Friday night too and when C4 have Big Brother (which is clearly a weaker performer than in earlier years, but still).

A combined 8.5 million drama audience for a Friday night for the two main channels has to be good. Maybe Torchwood week could get away with running Monday to Friday, rather than Sunday to Thursday?

Yeah I agree. It seems to be turning into a surprise hit. It started with around 1.3m before dipping slightly I think, and now it seems to be solid on around 1.7m which is good enough for the 5pm slot in Summer.

Considering how well Come Dine with Me does on More4, it's perfectly feasible that once the C4+1 figures are added in that could actually top the second BB eviction show.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtJt8Q8HDwY

I don't know why I'm spamming this clip here... But it just sums up BB and why its getting the ratings its been getting.

Lower Ratings Last Night.

EastEnders and Coronation Street did ok though.

HB should have done better but I expect it will be up next week.

BB did better than last week but still abysmal ratings.

That was the funniest thing I've seen in years. I'm going to have to add that to my list of favourites.

I swear that a Sunday repeat of The X Factor last year beat a new episode of Britannia High which aired in the evening

As for last night, very poor for BB but nothing surprises me anymore. I was expecting around 2 million - quite clever how they tried to hold onto its audience though with Davina announcing the eviction result in the second show - that tactic clearly paid off.

I'm not really surprised by Hotel Babylon's figure either - it will be interesting to see if it holds onto its 4 million viewers throughout the rest of its run.

Surprised though over how well a repeat of Doc Martin performed on ITV - it's certainly a reliable programme for them.

According to Broadcast BBC1 has won 17 out of the 24 primetime weeks this year (primetime 6 to 10.30)

If there is no harmonious hymn sheet the sport will be in the most ridiculous mess and likely the only winners will be the Lawyers.

There were a few nights last year where between X Factor, Football, Family Fortunes, TV Burp, You've Been Framed and the occasional event show, ITV were squeezing things into their Saturday schedule. The XF results were often on a bit later than most people would have liked and out of the auditions, boot camp, judges houses and live shows, were probably the worst performing part of the series.

I think we'll see Family Fortunes moving to run before X Factor which it did a few times last year, IIRC. Harry Hill will probably start when SCD finishes. I can see him adding an SCD feature to the show (usually at the start) and finishing with something about X Factor. Then they'll have the X Factor for up to 2 hours and Piers Morgan's Life Stories.

I think we can safely assume that the first episode of his new series will either feature Cheryl Cole or Simon Cowell.


Is 6pm really primetime?

I'd have thought it varied between channels. ITV would be 7pm to 10pm. Channel 4 would be 8pm to 11pm. BBC1 would be 7pm to 10pm or maybe 10.30pm.

Not bad for Hotel babylon... it was getting about 4.5m on tuesdays in the spring last year, so 4.3 on a Friday in the summer is god

ignore

[quote=C14E;33173694]There were a few nights last year where between X Factor, Football, Family Fortunes, TV Burp, You've Been Framed and the occasional event show, ITV were squeezing things into their Saturday schedule. The XF results were often on a bit later than most people would have liked and out of the auditions, boot camp, judges houses and live shows, were probably the worst performing part of the series.

I think we'll see Family Fortunes moving to run before X Factor which it did a few times last year, IIRC. Harry Hill will probably start when SCD finishes. I can see him adding an SCD feature to the show (usually at the start) and finishing with something about X Factor. Then they'll have the X Factor for up to 2 hours and Piers Morgan's Life Stories.

I think we can safely assume that the first episode of his new series will either feature Cheryl Cole or Simon Cowell.



Is 6pm really primetime?

I'd have thought it varied between channels. ITV would be 7pm to 10pm. Channel 4 would be 8pm to 11pm. BBC1 would be 7pm to 10pm or maybe 10.30pm.[/QUOTE]

Presumably Broadcast use 6 to 10.30 for statistical purposes. I do know ITV arent happy with that as the 6 to 7pm hour and 10.00 to 10.30 will no doubt be in BBC1's favour.

Excruciatingly bad for Big Brother.

If they hadn't kept the eviction announcement back until the second show like they did, I dread to think how low it might have gone.

No doubt Davina didn't exactly help matters by agreeing to appear on a rival programme simultaneously.

Meanwhile Five lagged behind by the tune of just 700k with NCIS pulling in strong numbers for a repeat. A huge achievement for Five to be so close to C4 on a BB eviction night, something which would never have happened a couple of years ago. NCIS is such a strong performer, not just in the UK but internationally and Five need to seriously look into acquiring first-run rights.

Totally Saturday deserves to fall further this week. It's a blatant rip off on Saturday Night Takeaway if you ask me.

I can see F1 Qualifying today beating Totally Saturday - with the F1 making the back pages in today's papers and being in the news headlines - qualifying should get about 3 million - as for the race, with Button sixth many would tune it to see if he can come through to win so the race could get close to 5 million, I won't say over 5 million as the weather's set to be good tomorrow. BBC will be realistically hoping the title is somehow dragged to the wire.

Big Brother gets more viewers than Hollyoaks, so i dont know why people make a huge deal over it! 2.5million for a show isnt bad guys!

Usually the response is "it still rates much better than everything else on C4" but now we've come right down to "it's still marginally ahead of Hollyoaks."

Sorry but the ratings for BB this year are utterly dismal. Not sure where you got 2.5m from. Above it says 2.2 and 2.0 respectively, which surely makes it the lowest rated ever for the normal Friday eviction shows.

Also when I say "bad" I mean bad in terms of Big Brother, not necessarily bad overall. In reality 2m is OK for C4. Nothing more than that, but still not bad. However many shows have outrated it this week on the channel and I expect this pattern to continue.

Which was a blatant rip off of Noel's House Party. I agree that it deserves to fall further though, mainly because it's utter crap.

I know it all seems "doom" for Channel 4 with Big Brother, but guess what? They are odds on favourites to pick up the Premier League 46 games for 2009/10. You wouldn't have predicted it would you?

It'd be very good for the channel - would easily become their highest rated programme.

The FA Cup contract set to go to auction tomorrow (Monday [I know tomorrow is Sunday, but that article is set to be in the Mail on Sunday!]) --> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/foo...a-TV-cash.html

Apparently its an Irish newspaper who have reported this - but its for one of the PL packages which is 23 games and the other package is expected to go to Sky.

But how could afford this? and if they can then why are they asking for extra funding from the license fee?

Politically it would not seem like a good move.

How indeed!

Once upon a time TV bosses weren't afraid to cancel programmes that weren't working.

In 1987 ITV dropped the controversial school-based sitcom Hardwicke House, starring Roy Kinnear, after 2 episodes leaving 5 episodes unscreened.

In 1971 BBC2 dropped Where Do I Sit, a live comedy chat show starring Peter Cook after 3 episodes leaving 10 episodes unmade - again because it was too controversial.

Do we not think that BBC1 should bite the bullet, admit defeat and scrap Totally Saturday now, leaving 3 episodes unmade. I saw snippets on this tonight and poor old Graham Norton looked like he'd rather be anywhere but there. Three hour long slots to fill? They could fit in the 1996 Only Fools mini series.