ITV News

ITV and BBC networked bulletins are pretty close - though ITV have been playing catch-up for a while. However I don't see any problem with also mentioning the regional components of both channels' news hours.

The BBC 1830 regional news normally, on average across the UK, is the highest rated news programme in the UK, regularly beating both the ITV and BBC networked bulletins, with the ITV regional bulletin at 1800 usually the poorest performing of the four programmes in the two news hours.

If you look at the performance of the 1800-1900 news hours as a whole - the BBC usually come out best (aided by ITVs poorly performing regional news)

How much does ITV regional news at 6pm usually get? And is there any particular region that performs poorer than others in terms of audience share?

Don't have the figures to hand at the moment - but if you do a search you may well find a previous post I made.

Don't have the regional breakdown s- just the total across the UK.

Well if OFCOM allow ITV to go ahead with slashing the number of regions it's inevitable that local news ratings will only go down further - which is probably what ITV want so they can appeal to OFCOM to get rid.


The Evening News though has quite quietly been doing it's job since 1999, and certainly since 2001 when Trevor McDonald moved back to News at Ten and it became a co-anchored format, and especially since 2003/4 when Mark and Mary became established as the programmes main hosts.


All the attention in the last decade has been on the later bulletin, but the Evening News has definately benefited from being able to establish itself in the slot and know it's audience, while each of the later bulletins seem to have been axed pretty much as they were finding their feet.

I think the ITV National and Regional bulletins 1800-1900 have suffered a bit since the BBC relaunched the Six with Huw or Fiona, then George and Sophie/Natasha. The Six became far less "distant" and began to become a lot more accessible. Some accused it of dumbing down - though with a few exceptions this was probably a bit unfair. What it did do was build an audience (ITV used to be quite a bit ahead of the BBC national and regional bulletins in the early/mid 90s)

What is interesting is how people here loved the blue virtual era with the orchestral music, the cut glass semi-virtual CGI graphics and the blue set, with the formal presentation style and the very formulaic formats. However the audiences didn't - the music was deemed pompous and bombastic, the set and graphics cold and distancing, and the presentation style a bit too "old fashioned".

The introduction of the David Lowe music, some warmer tones into the studio, and presenters with naturally conversational delivery who speak plain English and who deliver succinct scripts without patronising, delivered audiences.

Here are the figures you posted four or five months ago in the ITV London News thread...



Things may have moved on since then but when it comes to share of the audience and, even more so, when considering the share of BBC1/ITV1 viewers at the time a simplistic view of things would suggest that the ITV Evening News doesn't perform as well as ITV's regional offerings.

OK. But it would be interesting to see if any region in particular is "letting the side down" so to speak. Obviously some regions are bigger than others in terms of population so it would have to be measured by audience share.

Yep - they can make interesting reading. From memory - the last time I checked the long term figures - only one or two ITV regions were ahead of their BBC rivals, with the BBC winning in most regions.

Until Dancing on Ice moved to a Sunday, the most watched bulletin of the week was the 6.40pm one on a Sunday which sometimes crept past the 5m mark.

BBC News 24 newpaper review - an article saying that News at Ten has been axed, that the news is moving back to 10:30 with Mark Austin. (Details coming from an "insider")

Only reported in one paper - the headline reads something like "Grade blamed for second failure."

More details to follow tomorrow I suppose.....

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Yup - didn't catch which paper it was but apparently ITV NEWS AT TEN AXED!

The Sunday Express have this on their website. Wonder how this will affect Julie IF it is true.