World Idol

Even ITV don't know the difference between Ant and Dec. On ITV.com yesterday there was a picture of Dec leaning towards a door and the caption said "Ant listens in on more Pop Idol hopefuls" !

Pop Idol was again GREAT last night!

The thing that I wasnt looking forward to was an extra 90 minutes edition of Pop Idol EXTRA on ITV2 - how could they surely fill this 90 minutes with stuff that hasnt already been shown over on one.....?

Well Pop Idol extra has excelled this year and has been really good with Kate 'freckly' Thornton.

Well done Kate - cant wait to see you in London

So how many weeks is it until Pop Idol goes live on a Saturday night and we can start voting? Next week is the second stage of auditions with the final 100 so is it the week after?

Digital Spy is reporting that from Monday 8th September, Pop Idol Extra will go out live every weekday from 4pm-7pm. The show will follow the finalists as they prepare for the Saturday performances, viewer phone-ins and competitions. Pop Idol Extra will also go out live before and after the live performances on Saturday.

I'm watching Pop Idol Extra on 2 right now, and you were right this week's extra show is really good!

Finally caught up on this weeks Pop Idol... well that's the good bit (laughing at the deluded crap singers) over then, it's not really worth watching now until there's about 4 or 5 people left.

Remember of course that it did do very well when it was on Wednesday nights. The whole Pop Idol/Fame Academy rivalry thing is over played - they've only ever overlapped by 15 minutes maximum.

Both programmes have been affected by the fact that they were started at the wrong time of year - August (especially the hottest August on record) is not a good time to launh such a big TV show. Fame Academy also has a lower than potential audience because it's on far too early on Saturday

Remember of course that it did do very well when it was on Wednesday nights

"Very well" being a highly relative term! It might have done "very well" by Fame Academy standards, but it's still eating Pop Idol's dust.

The whole Pop Idol/Fame Academy rivalry thing is over played

Ah, the classic "our show is losing, so let's try and make out that it's not important" ploy!

Both programmes have been affected by the fact that they were started at the wrong time of year

But Pop Idol has quickly recovered from its 6 million first-episode figure and is now dominating its timeslot, getting almost identical ratings to last year, while Fame Academy is doing just as badly as it did last time.

The only logical conclusion is that the BBC really can't use the time of year as an excuse for the poor showing of its extremely expensive product.

It's not my show!

The thing is that both shows can (and do) co-exsist - they both have diffrent things going for them and go about their (similar) aims with diffrent treatments.

I enjoy both as do many others..... it is possible, kids!



Exactly, for the biggest most hyped programme of the year on ITV, the first show got 6 million, if it had started when originally planned in September it would have got double. Bad luck choosing the second hottest weekend in history

FA might be doing as badly as last year, but that means in real terms it is doing better as the competition against it last year was less. Both PI and FA picked up audience as the series went on - the last few episodes of FA were a success.

Exactly, for the biggest most hyped programme of the year on ITV, the first show got 6 million, if it had started when originally planned in September it would have got double. Bad luck choosing the second hottest weekend in history

How do you figure it as "bad luck"?

Pop Idol was NEVER going to get 12 million for its first episode, even if it was the middle of winter. For it to pull 6 million on the second hottest weekend in history, at a time when Saturday night TV audiences are at their lowest ever and even major shows have been rating just 4-5 million, is actually a significant achievement.

It could very easily have done a Fame Academy and pulled 3-and-a-bit million - now THAT would have been bad luck!

Both PI and FA picked up audience as the series went on - the last few episodes of FA were a success

That sounds a lot like desperate BBC spin, to be honest, Larry!

Fame Academy was nothing less than a disaster for the BBC. Lorraine Heggessey saw the mega-ratings Popstars was achieving and decided that she wanted a piece of the action (so much for public service broadcasting), so she threw a huge amount of taxpayers' money at a copycat project that failed. Typical ratings of 3-4 million for a primetime show that cost that much money are appalling.

Will, Gareth and Darius have become household names - but Dave Sneddon? Who he?

Because any other year it would have been pissing it down that day and everyone would have been inside watching TV.



The amount of trailing and newspaper promotion it got, as well as the inheritance from the last series, it could have got lots more.

Don't forget this is ITVs big autumn banker..... they don't have any programmes bigger than this!




The figures are there, the last few and the final did very well for their timeslot, The celebrity version did even better.

Don't forget this is ITVs big autumn banker..... they don't have any programmes bigger than this!

And ratings-wise it's left Fame Academy for dead and is generating large amounts of Press coverage and word-of-mouth - in other words, it's doing its job! In just a few weeks Pop Idol has created several national celebrities (albeit short-lived) from the worst auditionees, whereas most of the country wouldn't know a FA contestant from a dead hamster.

The figures are there, the last few and the final did very well for their timeslot, The celebrity version did even better

So the fact that the final few programmes from a very long and hugely expensive series did reasonably well justifies the overall failure of the project to deliver what was intended of it - i.e. huge ratings and household names?

ITV's Survivor performed almost identically to FA - it was enormously expensive, there was major pressure on it to succeed and nobody gave a toss until the last few shows - so would you call Survivor a "success" too?