Today’s Media Guardian has an opinion piece by Emily Bell about the recent habit of stations canning series mid-run, and highlighting the recent case of the last episode of a Johnny Vegas sitcom failing to be aired having been “pre-empted” by an Ellen MacArthur special.
Somehow it seems ironic that on the day this piece appears, Mediaguardian.co.uk “lead” on a Channel 4 ratings story. In particular they highlight the fact that Nathan Barley only got 700,000 viewers on Friday night.
But isn’t Media Guardian actually leading by example when it talks about this stuff? We never used to have a free outlet telling us how last night’s programming fared. Now, as well as Media Guardian, we have daily reports availble from such avenues as Broadcast (which has always featured in depth ratings analysis), Media Week and Media Bulletin. It’s all out there in the open. When once detailed overnights were only pored over by TV channel controllers, and TV buying/selling agencies/houses, now everyone and their mum gets a look. A show is very quickly deemed a hit or a failure after a couple of episodes. Big projects are examined in detail, and there is almost an undisguised glee if something big doesn’t score immediately with the audience.
What we don’t get are audience appreciation indexes, which are carried out privately by TV companies. So there may well have been only 700,000 viewers of Nathan Barley on Friday, but if they all loved it to bits, that’s got to be important. It may also be that these people are generally hard to reach individuals – always worth remembering when, say, Champions League football doesn’t return quite the same audiences as a regular episode of the soap it’s bumped would have. If I never watch Channel 4 apart from Nathan Barley (and Time Team), then this programming is actually very valuable indeed.
I think that irrespective of the gains made by multi-channel television in the last few years, TV companies run scared more easily because of the heavy reliance everyone now makes on ratings. Even if channel controllers know all of this, there’s still the public or “media” perception that the show’s a relative failure. And no-one wants to wear that badge.