Late late show in London

Although I think it’s pretty rubbish, I can forgive ITV for airing Jackpot 24/7 as pointed out it will bring in a revenue stream for them, however I’m less forgiving of the “ITV Nightscreen” which airs from approx from 3am-5am everynight. Some nights it’s on much less but considering ITV 2, 3, 4 go to teleshopping or nightscreen I think the main channel should air some sort of programming during that slot. Some nights they show Loose Women repeats which isn’t a bad idea or a repeat of the soaps from the night before. I do think with the money they must get from airing Jackpot they should fill the rest of the night time schedule with repeat programmes etc.

I dont agree about your assertions of Americans and panel shows. Yes its not a huge format in North America. but @Midnight a nightly panel show on Comedy Central since 2013 only ended because presenter Chris Hardwick (a UK panel show aficionado) wanted to work on other projects (recently he got #metoo'd). Not because it wasnt popular or didnt pull in ratings. So I think the right style of panel show works in America.

Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me is another American panel show, which has been around for many years,and of course they have had versions of Whose Line running for longer than we did.

However they quite often miss the point that they're for fun rather than an actual game. So they either have a quiz element, like Wait Wait or have to explain that the points are 'just for fun' as in Whose Line. Though I'm not sure if it's the audience who don't 'get it' or the management, I suspect more the latter

Happy to be corrected on my interpretation here, but I have a feeling there's four reasons for this:
1. The US has a far bigger population, so your market share of 20% of many local markets in the US will be bigger than the equivalent 20% of Grampian or Yorkshire.
2. Accepting some areas are really quite small, another reason is a lot of people in north America have to travel quite a distance for work so have to get up a lot earlier. The nearest equivalent I could give in the UK is London, because so many people live a bit out of the capital due to house prices, and a lot of people work irregular hours. In most of the UK very few people need to be up at 5am to get into work.
3. Aligned with that, the US is much more spread out than the UK. A huge percentage of the UK population live relatively near London. Not the case in the US for LA and New York.
4. It allows the affiliates to stamp their authority on their channel. They all take network programming during the actual peak hours.

Population is bigger but TV audiences outside the Superbowl or mega hits aren't that huge. A hit show might get 15-20m but some steady shows survive on 5-10m. The CW rarely tops 5m, but with a young audience.

As stated above the late night shows rate similarly to our less frequent equivalents, but clearly have a significantly higher budget. The equivalent advertising rate in the US must be so much more expensive.


On the flip side BBUSA gets about 8m viewers nowadays but it's budget on screen seems far less than BBUK and BB Canada who both survive on 1-1.5m viewers.