01-02-2022, 05:57 PM
Newsroom post_id=66183 time= user_id=1342 Wrote:No, I have don't have a source, it's my own opinion. Having grown up in the that era and ( a bit before), I remember it very very well and the research they did carry out was clearly flawed as it was an utter flop. I do know for a fact that it was extremely unpopular within ITN.
Well, I don't doubt it was unpopular within ITN, because there was the potential for news to be downgraded and for it to lose audiences and influences. But it reminds me of what they mention in Michael Leapman's book about the Beeb in the eighties about Sixty Minutes, and how when it was axed the current affairs department lobbied hard to keep it going, not because they thought it was any good as they'd had no end of trouble with it within the department and it was a very unhappy programme, but because it was their biggest show in terms of hours and they didn't want to lose that commitment.
As I say, ITV said at the time that they'd done audience research which said viewers preferred to watch the news earlier in the evening, and that was a fair assessment, although of course that was probably coloured by the fact viewers were fed up of News at Ten interrupting films and dramas. It could have worked, for some people it was a convenient time, but what did for it in the end was that they could never find anything to play in the 10pm hour so it ended up passing on a paltry inheritance to the 11pm news most nights. But they weren't to know when they did it that pretty much all the shows they were putting there were going to flop massively.
I mean, I remember really fearing for BBC1 when the new schedules kicked in - it was one of BBC1's lowest ebbs with some high-profile flops and some very modest fare in primetime, and ITV turned up with this swaggering schedule that looked like it was going to blow BBC1 off the screen, they were swimming in cash in those days. The potential was there for ITV to do extremely well, which would have benefitted the news as much as anything.