Surprising numbers for Cold Feet. I think we all expected the retention to be very high after how well received it was; maybe even a slight rise. So that has to go down as disappointing. Especially when the main opposition was New Crimewatch, which is really suffering following the BBC's disastrous and needless revamp. Against more credible BBC One opposition, there's a danger its overnights could look very ordinary indeed, and not befitting of a show with the status of much-loved favourite.

Not much of note happened elsewhere. The Paralympics are still going well and C5 had a solid evening.

Slightly hidden due to all the GBBO talk and the lower than expected Cold Feet rating, but it's great to see The Last Leg perfoming so well. Fully deserved.

Aren't the presenters paid by the BBC ? If that's what you mean by talent.

Pretty sure the 70% owners Sky want to maximise their investment. Not better for the viewing public but I doubt they care. It's all about making money, which of course is why they invested in Love.

Crimewatch was very slightly up on last week.
And C5 showed Can't Pay? again last night (at 10pm, replacing Tattoo Disasters).

Mirror reporting that Cowell is quitting BGT...

http://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/s...-judge-3661162

So Cold Feet is doing as well as Victoria. Might slip to closer to Poldark. I'm assuming Cold Feet has a younger audience than those two so will consolidate well.

It's the production company that pays the presenters.

I very much doubt it. Probably not liking the GBBO publicity

this is from 2014

Silly, isn't it?

When it's off air, this would be okay. But there's a new series on, that happens to be doing fantastically well. All these rpts are unhelpful as far as maximising figures for the main showings goes.

So with the crazy amount of publicity, do we think GBBO will benefit much tomorrow night?

What does that work out as? I forgot the overnight.

Interesting read: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-r...bbc-got-burned

BBC in-house are awful but Bake Off is still under the percentage of programming they legally have to make through independent companies. If all become big hits all of those Indies could go elsewhere. It's that most choose not to. If they did it so that BBC employees could see some of the profit there'd be more incentive to stay and come up with hits. ITV are in the same position, they then bought some of those indies and some hits are effectively in-house.

And people still say the BBC has a monopoly!

The overnight was 6.09m.

Overnight: 6.1m
Consolidated: 7.9m

So 1.8m+.

Couldn't the BBC in future stipulate that for forthcoming potential hits, whilst Indy's retain governance of the format, the BBC actually buy the brand so that it makes it more difficult for successful shows to be bought by other networks unless the BBC actually benefitted in some way. It seems unfair that the BBC should be in a lose lose situation all the time.

Also you mentioned Ch5 were repeating the Bemuda Triangle doc. Well it was on Sunday at 8pm, and its also on tonight at 7pm. Talk getting your money's worth

In other news. ITV Tuesday will continue to flounder. Next week they have Parking Wars at 8pm and Car Wars at 9pm. Both I suspect will be under 2m. I don't think Tuesday's on ITV will ever recover. It will stay as a dead night for the channel.

Paralympics peaked with 1.6m (14.2%) at 10.45pm.

Yes SCD works fine without Bruce. Plus we were weaned off him slowly with him giving up the results shows and missing odd weeks of the performance show before he left completely.

I fail to understand how an hour-long episode of a programme with a few people baking in a tent can cost £200,000.

It doesn't I suspect. The BBC know how much things cost and are clearly able to value a production in monetary terms,. which they have to do every single day because of limitations of funds, quite efficiently. Love Productions know the value of the brand is more valuable to them because of sub licensing the brand name for use in Supermarkets and so on. The BBC's idea of value for money is far more restrictive than Love Productions, but Love Productions say it isn't about the money. Bullshit. If it wasn't about the money then there's no reason to take it off the BBC. No one else would ever have nurtured Bake Off into what it is now other than the BBC, so in my view, the Bake Off is already in its best home.

Why? It's an old show.

Hence my wink. Just making a point about trusting the reports

Well, people say this but it worked bloody well for Morecambe and Wise, they got loads more money out of it and ITV promoted them incessantly. The ratings were still really good as well, look in Television's Greatest Hits and there are loads of ITV Morecambe and Wise shows in it, right up until the end. No, they didn't go on Christmas Day in the end but that's because it was on Thames - hence why Thames showed the tribute to Eric Morecambe on primetime Christmas Day in 1984. They were still a huge part of ITV's Christmas line-up.

In hindsight, we can see they were a bit crap on ITV compared to the BBC stuff, but commercially and personally it worked out fine for them, and they were still pulling in huge audiences.

Des Lynam is another one, he was lazy and rubbish on ITV but he coined it in and was massively indulged. He might have regretted not going to the 2000 Olympics and so on but he had a lovely time at ITV.




I find some of this a bit hard to believe. Match of the Day is still the most watched regular football programme on television by miles, often gets into the BBC1 top three on a Saturday and the ratings have gone up since they got the rights back in 2004. Final Score used to be just the 45 minutes so what happens on the red button is neither here nor there, and Football Focus is usually the most watched daytime show of the weekend.

And the general point is that even if it gets three million viewers, a huge percentage of that are people who don't watch anything else on the BBC so it is vitally important. And it does generate loads of content, and keeps the BBC Sport department in business. Without the Premier League, the BBC's football output would be the FA Cup and the tournaments every two years. That's a pathetic amount of football and when it is the number one sport in Britain by absolutely miles it is absolutely vital that BBC Sport has a lot of football. Otherwise it becomes a total irrelevance to many licence payers.

And in addition to that, they didn't blow ITV out of the water to buy it. ITV decided not to bid because they couldn't make the figures work for them. They have different requirements to the BBC.


Indeed, when it ended on ITV in the summer of 2000 there was a year's gap before it returned on Channel 5 - though in the meantime C5 did a magazine show about the programme to keep it in the public eye. Towards the end ITV tried to drive the audience down and reduce their reliance on it, so they dropped the lunchtime slot in most regions and reduced it to four days a week. Much like how BBC1 moved Neighbours from 1.45 to 2.10 in its last few months.

I liked the suggestion on Twitter yesterday that the Beeb should keep An Extra Slice going, and just slag it off.


And that's in addition to the recent deals to buy Formula One - surely the world's whitest, most middle class sport - and darts. I liked this tweet yesterday - https://twitter.com/mark_simpson/sta...17206477819904


Sewing Bee is not part of the Bake Off contract and despite being produced by the same company has nothing else to do with it. Yes, it's a similar show and we wouldn't have had it without the other, but the two are unrelated.


Ha ha, I'm sorry to sound like a dick, but I'd like to file that one alongside Halloween, Bonfire Night, Valentine's Day and Payday as a top Ratings Thread excuse. People were so distracted by the news they forgot to watch telly. God help them if there's a war!