The Late Late Gay Byrne Irish Television Thread

I wouldn't give them any credit to be honest. Dropping it was another ridiculous move by management at the station. During 2019 This Morning was in the Virgin Media One Top Twenty more than a few times, beating all home produced programmes except for the news and the Tonight Show. The 60% or so that can still get ITV/UTV may be slow to return after getting used to watching on ITV/UTV.

It's only a matter of time before they make another daft Decision. The only shows that are safe are probably Emmerdale and Coronation Street.

How do VMTV handle the new format of the ITV daytime programmes being quite seamless into each other? Especially if they only dip in and out of the schedule for certain programmes?

This was probably one of the reasons why they axed This Morning and Loose Women from their schedules as they knew this new look would start in early 2020.


VMTV will simply crash into the programme at the start and have their continuity announcer link in

Emmerdale and Coronation St are the cash cows for the channel, they will be going nowhere.


VM management have this overarching desire to try and out perform RTE in their home produced shows, this was the main reason for the schedule changes. They want to show the Irish broadcasting industry that they can provide a lot of hours per day of their own programming.

This always goes back to the early days of TV3 from 1998 where they were hammered for providing very little Irish content, happy to rely on UK and US imported shows and just having news and sport as the only home produced programming.

Surely the main reason they did it was to easily fill their quotas for locally produced shows? Presumably having more cheap stuff in daytime meant they didn't have to do as much expensive stuff in prime time. I guess the ratings for this line up have been so awful they can no longer justify it.

That was part of the reason, also pride comes into it. VM have always wanted to dump the TV3 heritage, as they felt TV3 did not do enough home produced programming.


VM mantra is to do as much home produced programming at the fraction of the budget RTE would use. That of course then fulfils their quota, however I guess they are doing more and above the quota at the moment, so bringing back This Morning will not hurt their quota hours in 2020.

They already fill whatever quota the BAI set, and if as in the past the BAI complained, they'd say that job losses were on the cards. The extra hours had nothing to do with pride in the station or some ambition to produce more home produced programmes. It was a cost saving measure which backfired. producing the extra 3 or so hours of Studio based TV would have cost little or nothing. The staff are already there. On the other hand This Morning was costing money. They thought that if they dropped This Morning and even kept about half the audience it would make more financial sense. Obviously that hasn't worked. None of their daytime studio based programmes get high audiences, It's TV for old age homes at best (and having visited one a few weeks ago, they had switched to ITV in a day room!)

Ratings must have been shocking for This Morning to return. However it might not be there for good if they get another one of their bright Ideas. Rodney and Del Boy would do a better job at running the operation.

(Kinda wonder if they actually knew they’d been off air in Ireland until they were asked to film this.)

How will the competition segments work?

I also wonder what the fee was that Virgin Media paid to get them to film that segment.

Like they always have. A bumper reads “This competition is not open to Rep. of Ireland viewers” each time the ITV feed shows the competition details.

Usually things like that are included in the contract.