Can a separate thread be created for a certain few members to argue amongst themselves about Bake Off and X Factor/ITV and the BBC? Because being honest, it's ruining this thread. Constant defences of one, complete criticisms of the other and a total unwillingness to accept alternative viewpoints. Agendas are seriously not what a forum is about. Having to scroll through pages and pages of bickering before seeing any ratings is extremely tedious.

I'm not trying to say discussion should be shut down, but what's the point when we know exactly which members will say what? We are literally seeing the same arguments over and over and over and over again.

You can't record off itv HD? Why? That's crazy. That's as crazy as watching adverts. That's as crazy as paying full price to sky or Virgin!!

I don't watch BBC live. Shows likes SCD can be watched in near half the time. Ditto XF. And the news. And sport.

Really only programmes with acting and plots can't be fast forwarded. There was a lot of fast forwarding through the cricket last night!

Regarding Wild At Heart, I emailed ITV to ask about 3 shows. These were The Great Fire, Peak Practice and Wild At Heart. The reply was they have no current plans to repeat The Great Fire or Peak Practice. She cant confirm Wild At Heart until 10 days before. I'm not sure if she meant new episodes or repeats. I can't remember wether I asked about new episodes or repeats either so we will see.

I hope you don't include me in that because that was kind of my point.

I can record every other channel but ITV HD just says error. I record the Emmerdale and Coronation Street omnibuses instead. If I really like something though I will watch live such as Victoria and Cold Feet.

Don't worry, I'm not including anybody in particular, just those who push their agendas frequently.

Having an agenda about tv is curious. It's tv. You have a football side or even a political side but having a TV bias is, well, curious.

Though people's feelings towards the BBC can mirror their politics. And to sky.

There's nothing wrong with having a TV agenda, it's just dull and boring seeing the same pointless arguments over and over again. It's ruining the thread. Even though you have an "agenda", you should stay open minded and listen to alternative viewpoints. Certain members post the same old thing, then refuse to accept any other point other than what they think.

Anyone know the peak for last nights bake off? Would be interesting to see, we've had the peaks for previous two episodes

I think this year will be all about timeshift.

Remember this year BGT launched with 9.03m with +1? A million lower than in 2015. Then it added over 2.5m and ended up with 11.58m. That was higher than the 11.25m for episode 1 in 2015.

Now we come to Bake Off. This year episode 1 of Bake Off went from 10.44m to 13.58m. Episode 2 went from 10.14m to 13.45m. Well up on last year so far.

We really like to timeshift programmes now.

But you could have said the same thing about The Bill, that had a loyal fanbase but by the time it ended that had dwindled away to very little, because although there was still a hardcore audience, the casual audience had got bored of it. It's easy to compete against Holby if the will was there. There was certainly no problem with Holby and The Bill being shown at the same time for many years.


I think The Coopers vs The Rest is the most likely to get a series and to be honest I think it could easily play on pre-watershed BBC1, it seemed likeable enough and you can lose the swearing. Motherland would probably be guaranteed a BBC2 series if the cast and crew were up for it because it's got a lot of talent behind it who appeal to a particular audience. Not sure about the other three, We The Jury especially seems to have been created as a one-off in any case.


I know, but I didn't fancy scrolling through several pages to find the post to make general points, bearing in mind they were relevant to a couple of posts.


But drama is too wide a genre to do that kind of thing, I think. It's all very well saying Monday night is drama night and expecting people to stay glued all year because the dramas will be too different. I'm watching Cold Feet but I watch very little other ITV drama, and Broadchurch is just not to my taste. They're dramas, but they have nothing else in common.

The aim of ITV is to promote the channel as a destination for drama, not one specific slot, otherwise you're going "This is where all the good stuff is, you needn't bother tuning in the rest of the time". Plus as well the reality is that you can't make Monday night a drama night all the time because ITV don't have enough drama to run three or four a year all year round. So for the summer you're either going to have to put repeats in that slot (which don't rate) or cheap factual.


I don't understand this, I'm afraid. I can appreciate the idea of a Saturday or Sunday drama, and I wouldn't advocate showing a period drama away from a Sunday, but why would a drama work on a Monday but not a Thursday? I honestly don't understand it. New Tricks, in its life, played virtually every night of the week. Over the five series of Life On Mars and Ashes To Ashes it played on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Monday again and Friday. I enjoyed all series equally, and nobody complained it was on the "wrong" day. I just can't get my head around this idea, I'm sorry.

And I still don't think anyone knows what day anything is on. If you asked people what day Broadchurch was on, they would not be able to tell you. Viewer loyalty to drama on Monday will always last until there's a drama they don't like on Monday and then they'll stop.


Well, no, it's not just chucking shows everywhere, and it is a fact that ITV especially can be a bit cleverer with their scheduling. I don't know why, for example, they don't make better use of lead-ins and schedule more high profile stuff after The X Factor or BGT instead of frittering it away on rubbish like Newzoids. Also, there's certainly no point in putting stuff in the wrong place, Jekyll and Hyde was probably doomed to failure anyway but clearly the Sunday teatime slot was the final nail in the coffin. However much they wanted to break the norm in that slot, it was never going to work.

But my point is, you can't just distil it to strategy because so much television is subjective and good scheduling is as much serendipity as strategy. You can say "we're only having dramas on Monday at nine", but if you have two underperforming dramas there back to back, how long do you keep it there? And it is a fact that the most successful show on Tuesdays at 9pm in ITV in probably the last decade was Lewis, a drama. Put that there for six weeks and Tuesdays do absolutely fine. The audience come to it, they're not confused by it being Tuesday. There's no need to write the whole night off.

Also as well you can come up with this strategy but so much commercial television wants big hits now. You can argue that you can build up Tuesday factual and the audience will come to it in time but they can't wait for however long that takes. They need a quick fix. Plus sometimes the slots are a matter of convenience - they have to show X drama now because it's the end of the financial year or the rights are about to expire or it's been delayed for legal reasons or numerous other factors.

And in addition, television is often riddled with cock-ups. Some dramas go very badly and they end up being burned off in less exposed slots. You can look at it and go, why are ITV putting it there where people won't watch it, and often it's the case that they don't want people to watch it because it's embarrassing.

By regimenting slots like that you're advocating rather conservative programming, so if someone comes to ITV with a brand new concept that doesn't fit in any of those proscribed slots, it doesn't get made.

Where do you get the second official rating from?

From somebody with access. I ask nicely and they tell me.

I agree, it's been spoken about for ages but I think 2016 is finally the time where it's impossible to ignore the official figures.
One odd exception though - The Voice. Only usually added under 1m this series, sometimes 600-700k.

And of course Countryfile will go on timeshifting its 100k forever, regardless of the other shows.

Can't believe the second episode had a bigger timeshift

You can tell when done programmes are out of favour or don't interest viewers by how much they timeshift. BGT was doing record numbers, dramas like Happy Valley and The Night Manager were adding loads, Marcella, The Durrells and Victoria were big movers, The X Factor adding 1.7/1.8m.

Just rewatched The West Wing on box sets at 3 episodes a night. It was so good that was easy to do into the wee hours.

I have heard whispers of a possible follow up show to that showing 'what happened next'.

But I was thinking if a show like that would ever get audiences in the UK. Perhaps both nations and channels just create an expectation amongst viewers and you would struggle with anything too different or cerebral.

Of course, the writing helps and - as seen with House of Cards - you can get viewers - but it is hard to see a West Wing getting big audiences outside of a big audience for BBC 2 kind.

Or am I underestimating the audience here given something challenging?

There was talk about a British version of the excellent political Scandi drama - Borgen.

But nothing seems to have materialised.

Things like that are the sort of drama British TV used to consider it our role to produce. But we seem to have meandered into rather safe territory.

I've still episodes 5&6 of Hustle on my planner. Friday 10/02/12.

Just wrapped up Agents of Shield and have 4 left of Flash, Supergirl and Arrow. Throw in Prime and Netflix and I will probably get around to downloading Night Manager and Peaky sometime in 2017.

I organise the schedules and that'll be the norm with the Millennials.

Making up for most of the drop in the overnights. Wonder if we'll see an even bigger timeshift for last night's third episode.

I was hoping the entire series of GBBO would overnight at 10m+, but sadly it wasn't to be. Still, a superb number none the less.

Our Girl kinda bombed then. Thought it would do better than that!



Indeed. That is oddly low for Hell's Kitchen. It normally does 300-400k in the overnights and normally adds another 100k in the consolidated numbers. Very odd that rating. It could just be a blip as this series is now 9 episodes in of it's 16-episode run. So you'd imagine it would have built up some sort of audience over that amount of time that watch it every week.



Wow! Another 13m+ number. It looks like this series is going to average that number officially over it's entire run. And that time shift of 3.31m is insane!!

Well Victoria also posted 2m+ timeshifts. 2.3m for Ep1 and 2.1m for Ep2. We'll see how Poldark does.

I imagine a renewal of Victoria will come by next week or the week after although I wouldn't be surprised if ITV ordered scripts before series had aired.

Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley to appear in a programme about friendship being made by BBC Northern Ireland but unlikely to be networked - The Sun

I recorded Paul O'Grady's Dogs from ITV HD and it was all fine! Can't get any text services on BBC HD channels though. Maybe from time to time there are blips that affect different people at different times. Such is the intricacy of modern technology.

It's weird but I have catch up which I watch most things on anyway.