Late late show in London

It's interesting, daily shows like This Morning, Lorraine or things like The One Show seem to have no issues with guests and are successful but i guess those shows are different in nature from something like the late shows in America.

Probably because the likes of Fiz from Corrie and Chas from Emmerdale wouldn't cut it on a prime time chat show.

Neither would half the randoms that pop up on The One Show

You mention the time as well, which is another factor. All the US talk shows are on really late, long after we've stopped showing new shows, and also all the channels show the same programmes every night at the same time. You can put them in your schedule and they get a loyal audience. When they did The Nightly Show, it was on at 10pm, which meant it was opposite different shows every night - I know there was the news on BBC1 but the other channels were all showing different things, some nights more appealing than others, so it's much harder to get a loyal audience watching. And 10pm is really early for this kind of thing, you're often in the middle of watching something else. There's too much of a floating audience around for it to catch on.

The One Show is different because at 7pm that also fits into viewers' schedules - many viewers will have only just got in from work and will be having their tea - and it almost always has Emmerdale as opposition. Similarly the daytime shows. So to catch on you need to be really early or really late so the audience can fit it into their schedules.



Of course, we did have five nights a week of Graham Norton for a bit, and he was very enthusiastic about it. But he got very disillusioned with it very quickly, and in the end you went from one brilliant Graham Norton show once a week to five pretty middling Graham Norton shows a week. It might have worked had it been a daily show to start with but you couldn't help but compare it to the big shows we had before. It was still quite good, but it didn't become a must-watch.

It used to be that you could see most of the US talk shows on the various channels, CNBC used to show The Tonight Show, and I used to subscribe to a mailing list which included the line-ups of the talk shows so I would watch them if there was an interesting British guest. I remember watching The Tonight Show once and Leno's Headlines sequence, where he showed funny newspaper cuttings, went on for about five minutes, he must have shown about a hundred of them. Obviously you've got the whole of the USA sending you stuff so you can generate loads of material.



But on these shows it's often not about the biggest guest, it's about the right guests. I know it didn't work out, but when Jack Docherty started they asked him about the availability of good guests and he said it didn't matter, he said "If you've been on Neighbours for half an hour, that's enough, there'll be enough funy things to talk about". And similarly when Tel was doing Wogan three days a week he said that one of the reasons why he wanted to do more than one show a week was because when it was once a week people would get unrealistic expectations and expect every show to be amazing and have brilliant guests, whereas he wanted a show that would happily tick along and if one wasn't very good it didn't matter because another one would be along shortly.

You could argue that you don't even really need any big guests at all. The One Show certainly doesn't live or die on its guests, people watch it for the reports and the regular features. And if you've got a good host like Graham Norton, you watch them regardless of the guests. People watch the US shows for the monologues and comic bits of business. You could do a whole show of that, if you had a presenter and writers with the skills to do it.

Besides, the best daily late night show we've ever had in Britain was The RDA, and one of the reasons for that was because they could never get any guests.
http://www.desandmick.co.uk/television/bbcchoice/therda/

Don't the late shows also go out quite late in the US? By which I mean 11:30pm or even later? Most UK viewers would be in bed by that point - even compared to our continental cousins, we go to bed fairly early as a nation, wheras elsewhere 11pm is slap bang in the middle of primetime! I always felt that was what harmed The Nightly Show - it should have gone on at 11pm.

Something like Last Week Tonight with Jon Oliver meets The Graham Norton Show going out in the post late news slot would be awesome, but again could you pull off four hours of that a week in the UK?

On point one, I think you answer your own question there. How many viewers would actually be up for a Nightly Show screened at 11pm, and as a result what calibre of guest could you expect?

I could be wrong, but I'm sure I remember someone at ITV complaining that the end of News at Ten was giving people a signal to go to bed, and that by habit we pretty much switched the TV off and that was up for the night. I'm not sure how true that is, but certainly post-10.30pm is often a bit of a wasteland in terms of the main channels.

A Last Week Tonight approach to a nightly show was attempted with 10 O'Clock Live. In theory it should have worked as it had a ton of funny people presenting it but it was catastrophically unfunny. I suspect the main issue there would have been in resources - US comedy shows have a ton of writers and the likes of The Daily Show are almost run as a newsroom in their own right. A Channel 4 show serving a smaller population and with less advertising revenue could never compete.

If you look at the audience ratings in the US, their ratings are very poor compared to some years ago. They are getting audiences near what Graham Norton gets on the BBC for his Friday show.

Stephen Colbert's Late Show is number one at the moment with nearly 3 million viewers each night, followed by Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show which is close around 2.5 million. Jimmy Kimmel gets around 1.8 million. James Corden and Seth Meyers who both air at 12.37am, yes 12.37am still pull in near 1.3 million each with cable's Daily Show with Trevor Noah getting a million a night.

So even in the US, home of this genre, the ratings are really low, so the UK, which does not warm to nightly talk shows will always be way behind in ratings.

That would explain why ITV and also BBC One, particularly post-DQF, also pretty much give up after the late regional news. I suppose in a way, moving the news didn't help BBC One's cause there; with a 9pm news you can hook the audience back in at 9:35-9:40pm. But moving the news back I think would be counter-productive.


I wonder if that was part of ITV's controversial rationale to move their late news to 11pm in 1999?

It is amazing though that you get to 11pm/midnight and there's literally nothing on.

There is literally something on.
The problem is that it can be awful, and you are right to shame ITV, a major commercial channel, for having the gambling on for those watching after 1am.
What would the founders of ITV would have made of that, I wonder?

It really is "A licence to print money baby" Pound signs in their eyes.

Well the founders of ITV wouldn't have been scheduling anything after midnight given that the channels back then used to closedown.

When night time broadcasting was founded in the 80's there was an untapped market for TV, however, that is no longer the case. There are hundreds of channels broadcasting 24 hours a day, people own recording devices, they can stream practically anything, anytime. Viewing habits changed. The overnight audience is tiny and there is no demand for airtime. It's dead air.

So what do you show, something that brings in a revenue stream or closedown ?

Why not show repeats of programmes for those awake at that time?
The gambling is just pathetic, and it may well make money from those who call in, but in no way can it realistically be defended as PSB.

The founders of ITV may not have had to schedule anything past midnight, but equally they would never have considered broadcasting something as desperate as this at any time of the day.