3.8m and 4.1m for Red or Black? last night.
It is only fair we do a graph later.
Quite enjoyed the Celeb Big Brother final last night, if you hadn’t gathered the new civilian housemates will be joining Baywatch star Pamela Anderson this evening.
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Is that the lowest ever rating for a £1m win on UK television? I’d imagine it’s between this, The Vault’s £1m win, the second series of PokerFace, and Someone’s Going To Be A Millionaire.
TFI Friday had an offical rating of 4.42 million on Christmas Eve 1999. The Vault had an official rating of 3.87 million in August 2004 when Karen Shand won the million.
KP, you’ve asked this before. It’s not plagarism to quote myself.
The method of compiling television ratings was completely altered at the start of 2002, to the extent that viewing figures are not comparable across that point. The viewing figures, in millions, for television game show million pound wins since 2002 (and not including this week):
*Gibb (Survivor Panama, 29.05.02) 6.89
*Gibson (Millionaire, 24.04.04) 6.62
*Jackson (The Con Test, 03.03.07) 6.57
*Wilcox (Millionaire, 23.09.06) 6.36
*Lang (The Con Test, 16.07.06) 6.11
*Shand (The Vault, 03.08.04) 3.87
For what it’s worth, the 1999 TFI Friday broadcast registered 4.42m in aggregate: 2.59m for the initial broadcast at 18.26, 1.84m for the same-night repeat at 23.57. Remember, these figures are not comparable with more recent ones, and (mostly) did not include viewers in Wales.
Of course, if we’re being really picky, the lowest rating ever achieved for the first airing of a show where someone walks out of the studio with a million quid was the showing of Charles Ingram on Millionaire. That went out on ITV2 in April 2003 to 1.35m viewers. And, fact fans, he was in the chair ten years ago today.
Turns out my ol’man had the running order right for CBB. The nag I got was the final had SEVEN people. I know they don’t want to keep too few people at the end but to conduct seven evictions and interviews was too much. Would’ve been better at four or five in the final.
It proves Brig Bother is the real comedian on here, not Joe. Dead or Black is miles funnier than Red or Shite. It would be the biggest bombshell EVER if ITV want to recomission it. Since Simon is expecting a second series. At least he had a crack at recreating event telly for people who aren’t business workers, celebs, dancers or singers.
I won’t be around that much this weekend but I’ll predict Holding Out for a Hero will get in the sub 3 million.
It does however seem that ITV are rooting through the formats that Claudia Rosencrantz (former controller of entertainment at ITV) rejected as the article below suggests that Red Or Black? was a pilot 8 years ago.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/sep/09/itv-shelved-red-or-black-pilot
Brian Conley! Get him back on TV.
I would like them to give Let Me Entertain You another run out in 5:15 on BBC 1, personally.
Unfortunately it looks like Don’t Stop Me Now will get there first. It sounds like basically the same format, but with bungee jumping.
Whatever happened to the C4 rip-off to be fronted by Claudia Winkleman?
That Guardian article about the Red or Black? Pilot is odd.
What we’ve been told thus far is that the format is owned by Syco and that it’s made with ITV studios as a co-production, in exactly the same what that X Factor and Got Talent are Syco owned formats with Freemantle/Talkback as production partners.
Are we to accept that as far back at 2003 Simon Cowell was pitching this proposal with Talkback as the production partner? I don’t think Cowell even had a TV company – let along in a position to get his ‘genius’ ideas for non-talent show programme ideas on the telly.
Or have format rights somehow passed from Talkback, to Syco, to then co-pro with ITV studios? Why would Talkback be OK with that?
Or is it the case that the Guardian have the wrong end of the stick and the Brian Conley’s ‘Red or Black’ wasn’t the same show (in terms of intellectual property) but simply had the same name?
Sloppy if so…
But much play was made of how Cowell got the idea from watching a British man double his life savings in Vegas in 2004, so either the article is inaccurate as you describe or Cowell is a liar.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1383153/Simon-Cowell-unveils-15m-TV-gameshow-Red-Or-Black–expensive-ever.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Revell
I don’t doubt that Ashley Blue Square Revell is the source for the end game, maybe when they worked the format back from there Cowell had a chat with Holloway and used some of the ideas from the original RoB?
Also Cowell was making Cupid for the US in 2003, so it’s very possible there was some TV house chat.
It’s not unusual for production companies to pick up ideas killed off by other production companies.
Again, it’s not plagarism when I quote myself. From Weaver’s Week, 17 May 2003:
According to a report in the Sunday Tabloid, Brian Connolly (sic) will host a new quiz show with the working title ROULETTE. His show will be “a fresh version of Millionaire, which has had terrible ratings recently, apart from the cheating major scandal. Contestants will still have a chance of winning a million, but it will be easier — they’ll just place a bet on red or black.”
News of the World, 11.05.03, p21: Rav Singh credited, and the spelling mistaike is his.
Mmm! Good research.
Hahahahahaa, what a flop!!!! Hahahahaha, Red or Black flopped so much as I predicted as soon as the pile of rubbish was announced. Literally, everyone in the industry apart from people working on the show/ITV/Syco are delighted this has flopped because hopefully it will encourage ITV to actually commission the best formats rather than shows for political reasons (Cowell’s involvement etc).
A pilot which was done for ITV recently called Control was 10 times better than Red or Black at 1/10 of the budget. 😀
But even a show like control would get no more than 4-5 million. As I’ve said last weekend. We will never see a normal game show for civilians getting 8-10 million ever again. If it was comissioned, Bleakley would get slagged off on DS and some people would say it’s a chase clone.
Is that because the public are getting slightly gameshow-fatigued? We had the run of big shows in the late 90s, then the drop-off in 2003/04 where barely anything was getting commissioned, and now a resurgence – albeit in mediocre formats with audience sizes to match.
Where’s the next killer format going to come from? Or does the multi-platform age mean we have to adjust what we term as a ‘mega’ success?
On BBC4, I believe the 600k or so Only Connect is capable of is a mega success…
well all of us here were entertained by the bigger flop that was the marriage ref
At least The Marriage Ref’s audience GREW towards the end. And if it had a £2m per night budget and massive marketing campaign, it would’ve done better 😉
Well it certainly didn’t have much room to drop did it? 🙂
Frantically Searching for Positives Chapter 1, there.
Another seven player episode tonight.
And another bloke getting to spin for the £1m.
Looking at past comments about the show, I share the mentality of “they should have just brought back Fluke”.
It’s another win. Handily all done during an ad break for Big Brother.
That ITV has seen ratings for “Red Or Black” decline on a night-by-night basis should not come as a great surprise. It may signal that using it as an every-night show wasn’t such a hot idea. Perhaps if they’d just run it weekly, it might have worked out better, ratings-wise. There would not have been the question of “overload” that is the risk factor with any stunt of this nature.
From what I have seen on YT, the show has some good points. Some of the games are clever, while others are more mundane. The suspense–real or faked–is, at times, laid on with a trowel.
But it did serve as an “event”, and the earlier shows got better ratings.
Will Simon Cowell try to peddle the format over here? We’ll just have to see, won’t we?
The strongman race tonight I thought was really good, given that they had both sides set out did they really have to run them both separately for any reason other than killing time?
I’d be interested to know if the ratings went down every time the million was won, because by my reckoning that’s 4/5 wins so far and last night the ratings were at the lowest they’ve been.
It’s 4/6.
Hypothetical: Would Red or Black have worked better if it was shown once every few months like Schlag den Raab or Wetten Dass..?, rather than stripped mostly nightly for a week?
The show is rubbish, but yes, it probably would have. Airing it 7 nights in a row was a massive mistake as it made viewers realise very quickly how rubbish the show was. Doing it once a month or a couple of times a year would’ve meant no fatigue.
So this show is a prime candidate for the Hall of Shame this year, shall we safely say?
Worked better? Placed around The X Factor on a weekly basis almost certainly. Unfortunately that means it would have to come from a different studio and book out several weeks at a time which would add to the costs significantly, I’d have thought.
And it’s a full house. 7 shows, 7 men in the final spin.
I think they didn’t mind that 1 in 128 chance hitting (based on the original odds- not counting variances like what the breakdown of the final 8 people were each night).
Better to have that go 7 for 7 than have the final spin wins be 7 for 7, which of course would have caused a whole lot of rigging rumors. 4 out of 7 wins was just about the expected outcome (3 or 4 wins occur in about 55% of the possible combinations).