As the Edinburgh Television Festival approaches, and Autumn line-ups begin are announced and begin, this week’s Broadcast magazine is chock full of exciting, and mostly slightly less exciting news.
The big story is ITV reworking Blind Date into a new speed-dating format. Since even C4 who have previously piloted show called it “the cattle market of dating shows” I’m not at all sure that this is for me.
Five’s big news is that they’ve signed up Justin Lee Collins in a golden handcuffs deal. That’s great news – because it means we’re far less likely to run into Collins on any other channel in one of those dreadful “Bring Back…” format shows. I always liked the fact that the Friday/Sunday Night Project starred both Collins and Alan Carr, meaning that by never seeing it, I could avoid both these people in one fell swoop.
Everyone by now knows that C4 has scrapped Big Brother. It has finally realised that it can do a hell of a lot better with the silly money it had to pay Endemol for it following a bidding war with ITV back in 2006. Indies around the country are dusting off proposals to grab their share of the cash. Incidentally, if you missed Paul Jackson’s history of the UK independent TV sector on Radio 4 recently – Soho Stories – then you missed an excellent documentary series (Yes. That’s the same Jackson who’s going to be responsible for Justin Lee Collins’ first Five series – Heads or Tails – based on coin tossing…).
Sky One is going through one of its periodic upheavals as it goes out and tries to take on the likes of ITV, C4 and Five by commissioning big homegrown shows. So it’s moving The Simpsons and busily commissioning daytime programming, factual (bird watching from Bill Bailey) and drama like the forthcoming Chris Ryan Strikeback.
People even occassionally mention “HBO” in the same sentence as Sky One, despite the US behemoth not ever producing light entertainment programming, and what it does make tends to be more challenging and less like the mainstream. And let’s not forget that Sky has bought the big new HBO series The Pacific (a kind of Band of Brothers sequel) but which is being shown on Sky Movies, also home to the Star Wars TV series, Clone Wars. And Sky Arts is where you’ll shortly find another HBO series, In Treatment. Sky One certainly isn’t aspiring to be HBO.
I predict that ratings bankers like The Simpsons will be back in place before you can say Gladiators…
Meanwhile Julian (Gosford Park) Fellowes is writing Downton Abbey for ITV1 next year. It’ll be set in an Edwardian countryhouse, sounds quite interesting and probably won’t be shown in Scotland.
The BBC is tracking the “buzz” of shows via a website called shownar.combuilt by Shulze & Webb for the BBC. It’s not altogether clear to me why some of those terribly clever BBC types couldn’t do this themselves via APIs from Twitter et al.
That said, it’s an interesting idea and well worth a visit, since the information seems to all be out in the open. Being Human is the show with the most buzz at the moment, as it continues its BBC1 run.
According to the Broadcast piece it could include non-BBC programming at some point although there are currently no plans.
Given the long times between RAJAR reports, tracking this kind of buzz can give you a good feeling about how programmes are going down with the digitally enabled. Although clearly buzz does not equal ratings. Being Human is by no means the BBC’s biggest TV programme of the week.
Elsewhere, More 4 has bough HBO comedy drama Hung, and it seems that they’ll be showing the next series of Curb Your Enthusiasm in October which would seem to be simultaneously with its US screenings, a smart move recently adopted by ITV2 with Entourage. Hulu’s now not expected in Europe until 2010, although ITV is in talks. Meanwhile Arqiva’s purchase of Project Kangaroo assets means that it wants to get into the game too.
I couldn’t find any radio specific news in Broadcast magazine.