Launch TalkTV

[London Lite]

If you believe Private Eye's Street of Shame, nobody at News UK is taking credit for Talk TV and are laying the blame at Murdoch.

[scottishtv]

Interestingly the screengrabs have the clock on them, so they've been taken straight off the telly rather than a clean feed. In the first week one of them was clearly taken from the repeat as the clock said 23.45.

 
That's quite funny, as the radio ads I heard a few weeks ago were clearly using audio from the TV studio (you could hear the echo etc.) even though it was an advert script.  I thought at the time that getting Piers to do a proper VO in a booth wouldn't be that hard given the high rotation of the radio adverts.

Incidentally, I was in the car at the time and when I stopped at some traffic lights there was a massive electronic billboard at the side of the road flicking between adverts for GB News ('Britain's News Channel') featuring Michelle Dewberry, and TalkTV with their 'Love him or Loathe him' Piers Morgan advert. It all seemed like a very expensive exercise.

[Worzel]

They seem to have had a bit of a GB News sound moment with the Michael Gove interview yesterday. Either his microphone wasn't on or the fact it was clipped to the wrong side of his jacket for the way he was facing made it sound like he was talking in a bathroom.

[Inspector Sands]

Latest gossip from Talk TV according to this week's Popbitch newsletter 

[radiorebel]

So TalkTv tonight have let the same caller on 3 times in the past hour who is clearly a prank call, mentioning something about someone in jail. The caller called in on the same name twice. This happened first after James Whales video link from home failed multiple times, standards are definitely slipping..

[Sagittarius01]

More technical issues tonight at the start of Daisy McAndrew's show. The screen froze at the end of the talkSPORT update and then when McAndrew came on, there was no sound and eventually a 'we're sorry for disruption' notice was put on the screen. Could still hear her when I tried to switch to radio though. Seems to be working now.

[radiolistener]

Some of the shows are definitely not working. I heard a bit of the repeat of Piers show last night and he kept on saying "look at this". Not good for a 'radio show'. I also think it's pretty damn pointless on radio to have a repeat of the show a few hours after it's gone out - either ditch it on radio or stick it at 4am.

[soupie]

What’s perhaps most remarkable is that none of the 3 talkTV programmes have even been subtly tweaked in any way since their launches (excluding the line-up for The Talk due to Sharon Osborne’s alleged unavailability).

Pick whichever TV megaflop you like: Daybreak, early GB News, early TV-am, and changes were made. It demonstrates panic to the viewers, but also a desire to survive. In the cases of the latter two examples, those measures sort of worked.

[Omnipresent]

A new senior management appointment at TalkTV.   Richard Wallace, formerly of the Daily Mirror and Syco, is joining as Head of TV at News UK.

Given Richard's work at Syco, he is someone who understands the power of TV formats and how to create event television.

https://www.news.co.uk/2022/06/richard-w...adcasting/

[cityprod]

What’s perhaps most remarkable is that none of the 3 talkTV programmes have even been subtly tweaked in any way since their launches (excluding the line-up for The Talk due to Sharon Osborne’s alleged unavailability).

Pick whichever TV megaflop you like: Daybreak, early GB News, early TV-am, and changes were made. It demonstrates panic to the viewers, but also a desire to survive. In the cases of the latter two examples, those measures sort of worked.

I think the reason why we haven't seen tweaks to the shows, is because the formats of the shows themselves have already been proven to work in other markets, so they know that they're not the problem.  It maybe that some shows are in the wrong slot, especially The Talk, but that is not the major problem in and of itself.  The major problem for Talk TV is the reliance on the simulcast for everything bar 15 hours a week.  More original programming is required, not tweaks to the ones they already have.

[DJGM1974]

What’s perhaps most remarkable is that none of the 3 talkTV programmes have even been subtly tweaked in any way since their launches . . .

Piers Morgan Uncensored has had some minor changes recently. There is now a short "cold open" intro before the opening titles, and "The Brain Dump" segment seems to have been ... dumped.

[Sagittarius01]

I do wonder why The Talk hasn't had much success. Osbourne was obviously a poor choice for anchor but if you take her out of the equation (and she has had a lot of time off it already), it's a perfectly reasonable current affairs discussion show. It's certainly not painful to watch like the rival show at GB News in that time slot with fairly low-rent panelists and a high chance of Wootton just shouting over the one token left winger.

They've obviously tried to attract some talkRADIO audience into watching The Talk by upping the number of talkRADIO presenters appearing on it - yesterday having Mike Graham, Jeremy & Ian.

[thomalex]

What’s perhaps most remarkable is that none of the 3 talkTV programmes have even been subtly tweaked in any way since their launches . . .

and "The Brain Dump" segment seems to have been ... dumped.

This segment was awful so this sounds an improvement at least. The whole concept of basing the programme around I presume Pier's big brain was just plain weird, it still features in the titles.

I do think they went wrong with launching with that pointless Trump interview dragged out over multiple days. You had a large chunk of an audience of 300+ thousand who immediately made up their mind on the programme and have never come back. Had they launched with the more daily news content they moved to I do think more of the audience would have stayed.

[all new Phil]

I do wonder why The Talk hasn't had much success. Osbourne was obviously a poor choice for anchor but if you take her out of the equation (and she has had a lot of time off it already), it's a perfectly reasonable current affairs discussion show. It's certainly not painful to watch like the rival show at GB News in that time slot with fairly low-rent panelists and a high chance of Wootton just shouting over the one token left winger.

They've obviously tried to attract some talkRADIO audience into watching The Talk by upping the number of talkRADIO presenters appearing on it - yesterday having Mike Graham, Jeremy & Ian.

Opinionated talking head fatigue. It’s perfectly watchable but it’s hardly must-see. I think that underlies a lot of their issues at Talk TV - nobody is really that bothered about it. I’ll stick it on if there’s nothing else on (particularly TND), but I’ll not give it a second thought otherwise and I certainly wouldn’t be inclined to catch up later on. I don’t know what the answer is for them, you can’t deny Piers Morgan has had some good guests and it’s a well produced show, part of me thinks it might be better to have Piers do a straight news show (including interviews like now) as that was where I felt he excelled at GMB rather than his rants, which have become a parody of themselves.

[AaronTV]

I think what is perhaps most telling is just how little impact Morgan’s show is having on… well anything, really.

I don’t see any clips of his show, any headlines, any interviews, any debates, any impact on the news agenda at all.

I actively avoid GB News wherever possible, but follow news and current affairs pretty closely, and so still see dozens of clips of their coverage each week.

By contrast, I’ve seen a handful of clips of Morgan’s show in the whole period since it launched, there certainly don’t seem to have been many, if any, viral moments.

Morgan is quite literally shouting into the void.

Morgan’s show, and the whole channel really, is just not working. At a time when BBC One and ITV are regularly under 2 million viewers in key slots, TalkTV had no chance really.

I would not be surprised to see Murdoch pull the plug in 12 months time.