There’s a wonderful story in this week’s Broadcast magazine. In a piece that explains how UKTV chanel “Watch” is having a bit of a rethink, it explains that challenging fare like Cranford, Mistresses and Love Soup is too “demanding” for its viewers. Instead they’re going to show more Dancing with the Stars and Wipeout (aka Total Wipeout).
To paraphrase something someone else once said, nobody ever got poor underestimating your viewers.
They’re saying that their viewers are too thick to understand continuing storylines are they?
Yes – I’m being a little disingenuous. What they really mean is that programmes with continuing storylines don’t play as well on a channel that is largely sampled on an occassional basis. But that just means you have to try a little harder.
I think that UKTV just expected Watch to succeed on the basis that Dave had been a success. But then Dave’s proposition is clearer, and crucially, it’s on Freeview. Allied to top quality BBC2 programming (largely), you know what you’re going to get. And fairly shortly we’ll be getting Dave+1 on Freeview too. One wag asked why it was necessary when Dave repeats its shows in the course of the evening anyway.
But back to Watch. It’s not on Freeview, and perhaps they’d have been smarter using that Freeview slot to launch it on that platform. Evidently the amount of Sky/Virgin Media subscription cash they’re getting means that the economics don’t work.
Then there’s Richard and Judy. They defected from Channel 4 to the station in what can only have been a big money signing. But they went out at 8pm – opposite soaps, sitcoms and popular drama on BBC1 and ITV1. You can only think that R&J’s audience was more likely to be on those channels rather than Watch. 8pm is a curious time for a nightly chat show.
The press loves to report how few people are watching the channel on occassion, but that’s unfair for a channel that repeats those shows several times over a 24 hour period.
Nonetheless, 6pm is probably a smarter time for the show to go out. It’s against news on the main channels, or the likes of Hollyoaks or Eggheads on C4 or BBC2.
In the long run, I can’t see that R&J will ever return to their heyday. They’re probably banking decent cheques, but they’re out of sight and out of mind now. And I still find it amusing recalling an interview that Richard Madeley gave to the Media Guardian podcast when the show launched explaining that jumping to Watch was a smart move because in a few years we’d all be watching digital, irrespective of the fact that Watch is pay channel and Freeview and Freesat are clearly going to be the overall winners.