Our chums at TV Cream are reporting that Bob’s Full House hasn’t done all that well in the ratings (I did wonder) and that Challenge currently have no plans to buy more series. They are moving it to Fridays from the 22nd March.
In other news, Challenge have bought the rights to series one and two of Bullseye going out on Thursdays, 10pm from February 14th. Quite interested to see these, clips of the first series suggest there’s a few odd things going on.
Edit: We’ve had loads of people come here by searching for “do losing contestants get their money on Tipping Point?” The answer is: no they don’t. So now you know.
Thick end of 100,000 viewers, opposite X Fac, is not enough? Interesting.
In other old show news, “Classic Mastermind” has popped up on the BBC2 schedules for the week of 28 January, in a slot between very old editions of “The Weakest Link” and directly opposite “Countdown”.
I can confirm they are going to repeat the John Humphreys era from the 2003 revival series onwards.
This may be news to you:
http://ukgameshows.com/ukgs/Contestant_Calls#Ant_and_Dec.27s_Saturday_Night_Takeaway
That it’s returning isn’t news. It will be interesting to see what they come up with.
Since when have Challenge been a slave to the Barb figures?
By it’s very existance it is a ‘niche’ channel, and therefore should expect low figures – even for first run shows. As long as Sky Sales can sell the gaps between the shows and Parts 1 and 2 etc, then it’s doing it’s job. I doubt if Nissan and KFC would ask for a refund on their spots if they noticed that only 600 were watching another run of Unbeatable Banzooki at 8.30am on a wet Sunday morning in Novemeber.
Bob’s Full House is exactly the type of archive shows they should be plundering and spooling after all these years without any real fear of the 0 rating.
Still, suppose they are moving it out of the glare of Saturday nights and shunting it to Fridays rather than dropping it totally – but I wonder if that is to do with how much they have paid BBC Worldwide up front, rather than some gift in kind or nod and a wink to us quizshow fans.
In other news. Furious that yet another hideous and incorrectly named ‘raffle’ is being added to the lotto draw from the autumn – and the price is going up to £2 a line. Plus, if as Camelot say “research shows people want to win more often” then just give us our quid back for matching 2 numbers, and introduce extra prize levels for 3+bonus and 4+bonus.
Ballsing up a lottery is really difficult to do, not so if you are Camelot.
I apologise, this is long and geeky, what can I say It’s my job.
While not unheard of, it’s actually somewhat unusual to sell commercial airtime based on, for example, 30 seconds in Bobs Full House. Certainly where I work commercials are sold on the basis on how many of a specific kind of viewer are needed, for instance 3 million ABC1 18-35 males over 4 weeks. Although obviously I don’t sell commercials and have no idea what the actual deals are.
Oddly of course this means that the smaller channels are even more slaves to the ratings than the massive networks. ITV for example can, for example, show two hours of gameshows every weekday afternoon because they return not just viewers, but a specific demographic of viewer that is different to the demographic from our big hitters. A niche channel has to either hit a specific and valuable demographic, or return significant numbers.
Take Old Skool Weekend, our biggest viewing demo for that weekend was 24-35’s, outnumbering the under 18’s by a considerable degree and most advertisers just love young adults; preferably male and single.
ITV3 has a big demographic is the over 50’s but ITV3 delivers them constantly, in OK numbers, with brand engagement and with few other viewers. Next time you watch ITV3 see who’s advertising.
X Factor on the other hand covers loads of different demographics, but delivers such numbers that it doesn’t matter. The holy grail is of course football. Massive numbers in a fairly tight demographic.
One other thing I learned from Old Skool is that retro programmes are not cheep, and a nightmare to resolve the contracts for. Bob’s Full House may literally not be worth the effort. New shows on the other hand can be repeated to death fot very little if the contracts were right. That means they can make their money over a longer period.
Sorry if thats randomly long, hope it’s of some informative value anyway.
Also of Bullseye, Series one of anything – pre-tweaking – is usually worth a watch.
The holy grail is of course football. Massive numbers in a fairly tight demographic.
I remember reading that the Champions League final is more expensive to advertise in than the X-Factor final when an English club is involved (and I suspect that for 2012 that was especially true). It’s interesting how some marketing men are talking of the CL final as having Super Bowl-esque potential for advertising, which of course it doesn’t because there’s not the tradition and it’s not 100m viewers on the same channel watching the same ads.
You mention how adverts are sold based on demographics; I am genuinely amazed that we don’t get demographic-based ratings on a regular basis, akin to the 18-49 that is so often mentioned on most US ratings websites. I wonder if that’s in part because of the BBC, for whom targeting young adult viewers isn’t a necessity for *quite* the same reason (their job is more broadly ‘get as many people as possible across all demographics to watch and like some BBC programming’ rather than ‘make money by selling advertising space to targeted and/or large audiences’).
If it really is that awkward to negotiate older episodes to air then that certainly explains a lot, including why Challenge repeat the same shows so often, and have skewed towards newer shows where the rights are presumably more easily had. (S1 Pointless and DoND are definitely worth it though, for different reasons.)
The channels do, the advertisers do, and anyone who’s interested can pay to get them.
I don’t get what’s up with Challenge lately. I thought their primary function was to show classic quiz/game shows but they seem to be straying away from that, seeing as they mostly want to show Impact Wrestling and stuff of that nature now along with game shows that haven’t long been on TV such as older episodes of Pointless, Golden Balls and so on. When I heard that they picked up Bob’s Full House, I was excited as it’s a show I watched growing up and wanted to see it again. I’ve watched every episode that’s been shown so far and to hear that not many people watched it is disheartening. Stuff that’s on the main 5 channels on a Saturday evening just isn’t entertaining to me any more, save for a good game show on BBC1 like Britain’s Brightest or any Lottery-based one that’s in the pipeline. This isn’t the first time Challenge have dropped something due to ratings, though. Remember when they showed Series 1 of GamesMaster and said they weren’t buying any more of that due to bad ratings. I think I can guess that it’s the wrestling that’s bringing in the most viewers for Challenge right now, so I can’t see them moving away from it in the near future which is a big shame. I was into WWF/E between 2000 and 2005, but I went off it as I didn’t recognise a lot of the wrestlers they use, seeing as a lot of them transitioned over to TNA/Impact Wrestling.
Play the Final Chase at home!
Amazing find:
Congrats on finding a clip that isn’t just the round with people in wedding gear in a swimming pool (I will never understand the human psyche).
Here’s part two, by the way:
http://youtu.be/PgAKWxCOLPc
For those who are playing along with The Suspect List in Wie is De Mole 2013, I’ll be closing the form for this week within the next 24 hours.
the word game Ruzzle has become a craze in Italy, and many celebrities are addicted.
Gerry Scotti even contacted the makers of the game to see if he can do a TV show version of it.
it could do good against Chain Reaction this Summer.
That’s quite interesting, I had been playing a game called Wordament recently which seems very similar.
Of course Boggle existed years and years ago.
And Scramble with Friends as well- I guess the free/pay balance is what makes this more popular perhaps….
Here’s something completely unrelated that I’ve come across on YouTube that you might also be interested in – it’s a Series 1 episode of Jungle Run – that’s the Dominic Wood era…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIokrG0Ts7w
Looks like there’s a second episode on the same user’s account too.