Under 4m is disappointing in my view. Having said that The Hobbit has limited appeal to casual viewers I reckon.

Most people want BBC1 +1 it's only employees of commercial channels that think it's a bad idea. Also no surprise BBC2 is down as I think the Winter Olympics helped them out. Personally I think BBC2 has been average at best this year while Channel 4 has improved considerably.

Not good reading for ITV, they only have 4 shows in the Top 20. Things obviously will change in the autumn with the RUWC, DA, IAC and TXF, but it seems they're dependent now on a handful of ageing shows. Also Emmerdale missing the Top 20 isn't a good sign, as they devote six episodes a week to this soap and it's not delivering any more.

She is being tipped for a Hollywood career after her recent film. Perhaps she has her eyes on bigger things.

Prized Apart was like I'm A Celebrity on mogadon. Or what IAC might be if it was presented by Philip Schofield.

A not that bad of an idea that just needed better planning so that it did not drag terribly in the last 20 minutes or so when they got to the endless questions in the hangar.

Had they interspersed these throughout the show instead of all at the end and created some jeopardy by the success or otherwise of the partners in the studio determining the difficulty of the stunt that their partner had to do in Morocco then it might have worked.

As it was it just ground to a halt and become like any old lottery style show for the second half which lost all the momentum.

As for Flockstars - Ewe know it will not bleat 2 million and will be so baaahd that it will not see series 2.

They could help though by getting some dogs like Pudsy and Mattise to train the cast of Towie to round up sheep. I'd watch that but not the other way round.

True, BBC Two managed 8.4% across February 2014 as a whole and close to 10% in two BARB weeks filled with Olympics. The previous month Sport Relief Bake Off stripped over four nights scored up to five million and helped BBC Two to a 7.1% share that week.

However the impact of specials and one-offs should not be overstated as it is diluted when we're looking at a period of 23 weeks, and so it looks like the audience agrees with your assessment of BBC Two as somewhat lacklustre so far this year.

The thing I'd say about BBC One +1 is fine, launch it, but not at the expense of BBC Three.

In my view, BBC 1 +1 is a colossal waste of money. In an age where on demand is so readily available, this idea is ridiculous. BBC iPlayer serves demand perfectly well. Additionally, most of BBC3's output is repeats and a good proportion of BBC2's output is also repeats. Because these programs have already been shown, new content is going to be needed. I'm confidant that bar news programs, all of BBC1's programmes are repeated within 7 days, and are available immediately on iPlayer.

Thanks for these Neil.

I tried to PM you but your message box is full.

No problem, shame about the ones that are missing but hopefully someone will have those eventually.

I've now downloaded all messages as a text file (just found you can do that!) so I now have a squeaky clean, empty inbox.

A weak start for Prized Apart. I've not seen it and have no intention to, after the comments on here and elsewhere. It also has, *ahem* rather interesting origins which I won't go into, but Broadcast had the full story a few months back. At the time I thought they were all fighting over something not worth fighting over, and it looks like I was right.

So more repeat movies on ITV Saturday nights from next week then? Do ITV have *no* original entertainment shows lined up for the summer? If so, that's madness. The ratings might be lower, but summer is the perfect time to launch new shows. Didn't Strictly launch in the depths of a hot summer? Again, super short termism from our favourite commercial network.

Not everyone has a fast internet connection. And £4.6m a year isn't that huge an outlay.

It seems only BBC One is the place for any sort of Saturday Night TV over the summer, and even that isn't great.

I suppose it will be Potter /Jurassic Park / YBF! mania on ITV until X Factor launches.

Yeah there's only a few missing - but hopefully someone will be able to fill in those blanks.

I really wish BARB would have an ITV inc HD Top 30 chart as well, as their ITV Top 30 chart is kinda pointless IMO.

Following on from lewiep93's list yesterday, here's a list of the Top25 dramas for the year so far. This list includes anything in the dramatic genre (so soaps included too). Each programme is limited to 1 entry.

Irrespective if +1 is included or not, BBC1 has 12 entries, ITV has 12 entries and BBC2 has 1.

25 Most Watched Dramas of 2015
25 Most Watched Dramas of 2015 (inc. +1)

Most people will want BBC1 +1. It's convenient.

With the expected licence fee freeze from the nasty party, i think spending money on a +1 channel is a luxury we could manage without, I would rather the money be ploughed back into BBC One and Two.

Think it might depend on what John Whittindale thinks about it.

I thought it was because of the Nasty Tory Boys that BBC3 was closing and +1 was being offered as a much cheaper alternative.

Anyway, maybe the addition of BBC1+1 will finally mean "total" ratiings are reported as standard *cough digitalspy*

I think entertainment on the two main channels is in a mess now. Apart from the old stagers like BGT and SCD, there's little new, TV excepted, in recent years that has done well. Prized Apart will probably join Harry Hill's Stars In Their Eyes, Play to the Whistle and Get Your Act Together in this year's list of flops.

And those ITV flops were a hell of a lot cheaper than Prized Apart so they won't be as disappointed as the BBC.

I think ITV will be relieved that Back in the Room and Ninja Warrior did well for them.

And Win Your Wishlist did Ok for BBC, so it's not been a total washout, but yes, Entertainment as a genre is looking pretty knackered.

As another poster said, would love to know the carbon footprint of Prized Apart. Isn't Graham Norton show carbon neutral (surpisingly, given all the hot air). How many baby trees were slaughtered to make this show? (At risk of sounding like a typical anti-BBC Daily Mail article).

Indeed, and as has been pointed out it was actually Rapido being axed that meant Rapido TV had to diversify and find new shows, and they turned out to be hugely succesful. They were a really prolific and successful company in the late nineties, especially for C4, with their frog logo becoming really well-known. When I was at university I had a flatmate who came from Hong Kong and had never seen British telly* and after a few weeks the things she recognised the most were Countdown and the Rapido TV frog, because she saw them so often.

And Eurotrash was a huge show at the time, and my parents thought it was brilliant, they watched it every week and thought it was hilarious. It had a bit of wit and style about it that made its relentless smut come across as pretty charming. I think it was particularly popular among older viewers who found it agreeably saucy viewing. They liked it a bit less after John Paul Gaultier left, though.

* Of course, she ended up finding out everything there was to know about British telly by living with me for a year.


Hmm, which would have meant they'd have had eight episodes of 'stEnders to repeat on that Sunday. We've talked before about the endless programme changes when Diana died (William Phillips said in Broadcast it caused the most disruption to schedules since the war) and my favourite was Fully Booked, the kids show, which in those days was on Sunday morning and pre-recorded, so it obviously wasn't shown on the Sunday morning but to avoid wasting it they just flung it out at 7.30am on the Tuesday. Obviously there was no reference to it being Tuesday in the programme so most kids must have been totally baffled as to why it was on.


He suits breakfast radio perfectly, his radio show now is excellent and way better than anything else he's done since about 1997. I like him on The One Show too.

I quite enjoyed the new TFI but I really do think they should never, ever, ever bring it back full time. Certainly the last half hour was the nearest thing to a "new" TFI as it might be now, as opposed to referring back to the old show, and it was by some distance the dullest bit, presumably not helped by the presence of Lewis Hamilton who is very boring.

I wonder how many people went out and recorded it and missed the end, I had to watch the last twenty minutes on demand (I hadn't gone out, I was watching the Wales match and Graham Norton).

One thing i was thinking about last night was the Last Resort revival they did in 1997 which in many ways was like TFI in that it was a big influential show in its day and made Jonathan Ross a big star. They did a compilation in April 1997, ostensibly to mark its tenth anniversary, which was the first I'd seen of it as I was too young to see it first time round, and then on Christmas Eve 1997 they did a brand new episode. I watched it, and liked it, but nobody else did, it got totally obliterated on Christmas Eve by the big shows on other channels and Ross' career was down the toilet at the time, and that was the end of that.


We mentioned this the other day, in 1998 it averaged 1.9 million viewers and in 1999 it averaged 1.8 million viewers. I was reminded yesterday too that in its first few months TFI did a special sketch to celebrate the fact they were now beating The Munsters on BBC2 in the ratings, with Danny Baker as Herman Munster.


Well, it depends what the point of it is, doesn't it? If they want TFI back to be the Chris Evans show then fair enough, but as he pointed out he's fifty years old and the audience was mostly made up of people who watched it at the time. However, if they want a show to have the impact that TFI had at the time among the younger audience, they need to skew younger and make it relevant and it can't be a nostalgia show.

It's like I was saying about Buzzcocks the other week, when it started it seemed relevant and exciting because I was buying loads of records, and the people involved were all about the same age as the artists and the audience, whereas now it seemed irrelevant because the regulars were all in their forties.

A new TFI with Chris Evans would be welcomed by thirty and fortysomethings, but what would teenagers and twentysomethings make of it? They need their own programmes with people they know and like, and are relevant.


How prominent is Nick Grimshaw? Yes, he does the Radio 1 breakfast show but what else does he do on the telly? A BBC3 panel show which I think might have been axed and an once-a-year gig on Children in Need which is late at night anyway. I honestly can't think of anything else he does. And you can compare him to former Radio 1 breakfast DJs like Noel Edmonds, Mike Read, Mike Smith and Zoe Ball, and indeed Chris Evans, who were enormously prominent on TV while they were doing it. Mike Smith for example was on TV virtually non-stop while he was on the breakfast show, doing Top of the Pops most weeks and The Late Late Breakfast Show on Saturdays plus loads of other things as well.

I honestly barely see Nick Grimshaw on the telly, I don't listen to his radio show so I almost never see or hear him anywhere. But I'm out of the Radio 1 target audience. When I see him on telly he seems likeable enough. If he was getting regular Saturday night gigs it might be different. They didn't even get him to present The Voice!


I found this really boring, the two halves don't seem to gel together at all well, for all they shouted about the fact they were in FARNBOROUGH AIFRIELD (woooo!) and contestants were jetting in for all we knew the overseas bits could have been filmed months in advance and, dreadful acoustics aside, they may as well have been in any studio.

We see a lot of game shows set in exotic locations but I'm struggling to think of one that's actually been successful in this country. Survivor certainly wasn't, Drop Zone was dumped on Sunday afternoons. The overseas Treasure Hunts were always the least interesting. You could argue Total Wipeout but that could have been filmed anywhere. I really don't think people are that interested in seeing people in exotic locations. That should be the prize, not the point.

The good news for Prized Apart is that ITV are offering pathetic competition for at least the next few weeks. But the weather should be getting better and we've got Wimbledon Saturday coming up which usually lays waste to the schedule.


UTV have nothing to do with Ireland, of course. If Northern Ireland qualify (which looks more likely than Ireland at the moment) they'd be interested. It's not so much a question of them needing to ask ITV to prioritise them though because for people in England, many will have Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (and indeed Ireland) as a second team and there'd be huge interest in them, as there was when Scotland regularly qualified for tournaments in the eighties and nineties, so they'd choose them regardless. And the ratings will include viewers in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, of course.

Someone at the BBC obviously begrudges the return to 10pm, so they're shifting it at every opportunity (including for Family Guy repeats), and now dropping it altogether some nights.

They used to give Doc one repeat run just before the new series and it worked well, but the new system is silly. Doesn't help that they were repeating a different series in daytime at the weekends when this Friday night run began.