Peston on Sunday to move to Wednesdays

The brightly lit view out the windows made up the majority of the Peston on Sunday set. If they'd have replaced it with essentially a black background, it would have looked ridiculous.

Plus they had use of TLS Studio 3 to strike the set after Friday’s Loose women for the Sunday morning, the new set is more modular for a quick turnaround mid week at TVC, plus we have to consider the lack of set storage at TVC too.

https://pressgazette.co.uk/first-episode-of-itvs-peston-beats-bbc-newsnight-in-late-night-current-affairs-ratings-battle/

Hmm - comparing an ITV show with a BBC Two show - wouldn't you expect ITV to do better irrespective of content? It will have bigger inheritance and is the more 'mainstream' channel. Be just as interesting to compare Peston with Question Time (different days but similar slots on the two mainstream networks)?

Question Time got 1.9m 2245-2345 / 23.4% share on Thursday
Peston got 0.5m 2245-2345 / 6.8% share on Wednesday
(Figures I have may not match other quoted figures - as sources may round differently or report slightly differently)

If you want to compare two mainstream channel shows covering politics etc. - that feels like a fair comparison...

This strikes me as a desperate attempt by the BBC to disguise the fact that Newsnight has been performing terribly in recent years.

Even if we were to take the inheritance argument, Question Time should perform that well or even better, with BBC News attracting 4x the viewers of ITV at 10.

For completeness then :

BBC Two Wednesday
2200-2230 Motherland 300,000 / 2.5%
2230-2315 Newsnight 300,000 / 3.4%
(So BBC Two built in share terms and retained inheritance)

ITV Wednesday
2200-2230 News at Ten 1.6m / 12.1%
2230-2245 ITV Local News 1.1m / 9.6%
2245-2345 Peston 500,00 / 6.8%
(So ITV share dropped by ~ 30% and there lost more than 50% volume of their inherited audience)

BBC One Thursday
2200-2230 BBC News at Ten 3.1m/ 22.9%
2230-2245 BBC Local News 2.7m / 23%
2245-2345 Question Time 1.9m / 23.4%
(So QT actually increased their share a tiny bit compared to the previous two shows, and lost only around 30% volume of their inherited audience)
2345-0040 This Week 600,000 / 16.1%
This Week - which airs an hour later than Peston still got 100,000 more audience and a share more than double Peston's.

Sure - you can absolutely question Newsnight's audiences and relative merit - but Peston's ratings aren't setting the world on fire for mainstream current affairs either.

It’s a new show, at least it’s a new slot. QT and TW are established and it will take potential viewers time to find it.

If Andrew Neil left and Robert Peston went back to the bbc took over TW he’d get a lot more viewers than on ITV.

Outside of Question Time and the main news bulletins, political shows are really only watched by the Westminster bubble and politicos.

Personally to beat Newsnight which has been in the doldrums since Ian Katz was editor and now only being repaired by Esme Wren is an acheivement in itself, considering how low the numbers are for such programmes.

I'd add Marr into that list too. Regularly getting more than a million on a Sunday morning isn't to be sniffed at. That's a pretty mainstream audience at that time of day.

I thought there was one that I missed out. Has it actually added numbers since it moved to 10?

Too early to tell for sure - but it looks a little down at 1000 compared to 0900 - but is getting significantly better figures than Sunday Morning Live or The Big Questions did in the same slot.

Evan Davis leaving should help the show - despite his radio credentials he was never the right person to fill Jeremy Paxman's shoes.