ITV Discussion Thread

Why is it the words "told you so" spring to mind?


A big no to moving the news to 5.30pm - doing that now would be worse than everything they did with News at Ten over the last few years, and ITV shouldn't want to risk having the same problem at 6.30pm as it's had at 10pm for the last few years. It's also much riskier as lose the audience then, and you risk losing them for the entire evening.

Also, the 5pm hour is now a key time in the schedule - there is money to be made there, and they wouldn't want to lose half an hour of it to news.


There are definite tweaks required, and tweaks which are more likely with this new schedule IMO.

The first is stripping Corrie across the 7.30pm slot, leaving 8pm + soap free every night.


I'd axe Friday's edition of Tonight and concentrate on the one a week, on Mondays - ditching the more repetitive topics they cover. I think something like TV Burp could work at 8.30pm, with Corrie getting the slot when it's booted out by football in Champions League weeks - and making the Monday doubles special by not having them every week (or twice a week as is now the case!)


I'd move Thursdays edition of The Bill to Tuesdays, either at 8pm or 9pm, but dropped completely in Champions League weeks. Quiz formats like Duel would take the Thursday 8pm slot.


By axing Friday's edition of Tonight and moving Corrie, 8pm+ is free for feature length drama - and ITV1 should be unashamed in repeating it when something like Midsomer Murders can get decent figures on it's third or fourth airing.


News at Ten would get a Friday slot, followed by a film at 10.35pm (instead of airing on Saturday).

Al Murray would move to Saturday at 10pm - but the weekend schedule still really needs looking at.

There is no way the number of soap episodes will be reduced at the moment especially with the new schedule misfiring in some slots

Also the drama repeats on Friday have been criticised for being lazy scheduling for years (although seen as a brilliant chance to watch an old show when BBC1 does it) so I doubt they will come back soon

Haven't you learnt that the schedule moves have been contraversial already (people won't shut up about the Sunday moves on another forum), yet you want to move other major programmes out of their established slots?

Problem with that is arguably they would struggle to get the audience back at 8.30pm on Monday and Friday for the 9pm dramas if you stripped Corrie at 7.30 Monday to Friday.

Also, what would the BBC do with EastEnders, and subsequently with Holby Ciy/Waterloo Road? Wouldn't The Bill die a slow death against Tuesday's Holby?

I don't think that much is wrong with the new schedule myself.
The only problems that I can see are with Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

I could see what they were trying to do to take away the young viewers who watch Channel 4 and BBC One on a friday night, but I don't think it will work that well.

Surely the best way to do it would be to put Moving Wallpaper & Echo Beach back onto Thursday with ITV2 on ITV1 with programmes like Secret Diary and even Streetmate on from 10.35.

I don't see what's wrong with doing a straight swap and airing Trial & Retribution on Friday instead of Thursday where it lies this week. That way it would have the same Corrie lead in that it did when it aired on a Monday.

I like every other it seems would like News At Ten on Fridays, and followed by a film at 10.35, it makes more sense to air a film when no other main channel does.

I think that Sunday's work quite nicely, well they would if they started at half past and on the hour, very strange to have things starting at :40 and :10, etc in this age.
The only thing that felt wrong last week was Dancing on Ice followed by Heartbeat, but it does improve with Wild At Heart this week. I still think that they should make a mini entertainment block with something like Millionaire airing before Dancing On Ice.

I also think that Al Murrey should be moved back to Saturday night after thank god you're here.
The rest of the schedule isn't actually bad, and they will replace Primeval with Ant & Dec in February at a guess, to keep the number of programmes down.

I still would like to see an ITV where they commission 4 sets of 13 ep programmes for prime time (obviously not counting long running series), the only problem with them not is the fact that they don't want to put too much pressure onto a new programme if it won't deliver.

Well that would be the BBC's problem, but it wouldn't be as easy as moving EE to 8pm each day as it screws up their scheduling of Holby / Waterloo Road etc.


They'd have to implement it at a time to catch the BBC out, and of course also have the strength in the 8pm slots to fight whatever the BBC threw at them. As you say at the moment The Bill probably isn't strong enough for that battle.

True. Perhaps The Bill should revert to 3x30 a week, on Tues/Weds/Thu at 8.30pm.

then it would Screw bbc Scotland to death!

I notice the regional weather is still hanging around the afternoon schedules despite the loss of the afternoon bulletin a good 2-3 of years ago. It's rather randomly scheduled at 4.30pm at the moment.



Now surely if OFCOM have allowed them to scrap the news bulletin they'd be allowed to scrap the accompanying weather summary too - though I suspect it's only there to satisfy the sponsors. Still though, ITV should be told that if they want to lose the bulletin, they lose the sponsorship from that slot too.

Do you mean Weather forcast? I agree though, a daft time to show it, only 90 minutes before the main regional news airs. I guess the reason they kept the weather forcast when that news bulletin was dropped is because the weather is pre recorded and it isnt much trouble to record a 1 minute forcast unlike the news bulletin which would be live. Its the same situation with the late regional weather at the weekends.

God I think I need to go back to school. I even spelt "two" as "too" before - it's getting ridiculous!

A bad night for ITV then - Honest lost a quarter of it's audience, down to 4.3m - while News at Ten was down to 2.6m, 2.1m behind the BBC.


I wonder if they have a "Plan B"?

they really need to just stop utv messing up their secheduals, the 5 0 clock show is non-existant because of the (crap) utv live and to be honest all regional programming on BBC and UTV is really drab and depressing, it dosent show the true vibrant NI we live in nowadays