Prime Suspect Ratings

True. It's good enough to be recommissioned I suppose. Spooks is a prime example of falling ratings. When it started it was getting 9 million.

With all this about ratings - how do TV companies decide whether to recommission or not - is it actually based upon the number of people watching or the percentage of potential viewers at the given time slot?

for example 22%, for Vincent - one of my favourite shows due to me being in a scene in the first series when they were at Manchester Airport, of the potential viewership is actually damn good but 4.8 million viewers sounds very poor!!!

Well ITV used to have the famous 10 million rule - get less than that and your axed!

Nowadays though you can pretty much half that. Everything is taken into consideration, including share, ratings and of course value for money, but it's demographics which are probably seen as quite important now, especially the 16-34 age group - and probably males.


Quite often when a show gets what appears to be poor ratings the networks will put out info telling you that actually they were number 1 in the "crucial" demographic of say "16-34 year old males wearing green jumpers and sitting on leather sofas in two bedroom flats eating pot noodles".

The X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing is a prime example - whenever SCD beats the X Factor ITV will usually make sure we're aware that The X Factor had a higher 16-34 audience share.

Well its the share that is more important really. Depending on what time of day a programme is shown anything from 2 million to 8 million could be classed as good!

I think it's a fair enough comment to make. That's the audience that matters to ITV, and the advertisers. In ITV's eyes, that's seen as a success.

Although it would be a success anyway, even when it is beaten by SCD it gets very good figures.

The use of the 16-34 demographic always intrigues me, what do TV companies suppose happen to 35 year olds ?

That they suddenly turn to watching Heartbeat & Last of the Summer Wine ?

It seems to be an odd cut off point, but apparently on average, 16-34 year olds have more spare cash - it's not necessarily the shows they watch, just how much money they're willing to spend.

You are right, ratings have fallen but with Spooks you have to also take into account that people watch ahead on BBC Three- take last night's episode for example (fantastic by the way) which Vincent was up against. It got 5.6m on BBC One, but the next episodes on BBC Three have been attracting about 1m viewers.

So the total Spooks audience is closer to about 6.5-7m, where it initally got 8-9m when it launched in 2002.



Presumably they are less likely to make impulse purchases and more likely to be tied down with young families and heavy mortgages.

That's the theory anyway, but then many products advertised specifically want to target an older audience (watch those ads in Countdown breaks!!)- how this sector would love an ITV version of Strictly Come Dancing!

It's a similar story for Lost. It's C4 ratings have plummeted, but the E4 First Look screenings afterwards, plus the "Second Chance" editions on Sunday nights, account for much of the lost audience. First Look Losts on E4 usually rate higher than what's on C4 at the time too!

Spooks is absolutely fantastic TV - and the ratings reflect this. As you demonstrated, the "first look" fragments the ratings, but ofverall it's not too much down, fantastic considering how much ratings have fallen across the board.

It has a huge cult following.