No risk, no fun, no originality… viewing figures on woke mainstream TV are diving – but we’re still paying £159 a year!
IT is Sunday, December 12, 2010, and the streets of Wembley are full of Rolls-Royces and their high-rolling passengers desperate to get into the hottest show in town.
But this is no reunion of a once-iconic band. It is no comeback show for a legendary diva.
No, this crowd crush is for a television show, being broadcast live on traditional TV.
This is The X Factor final. And the winner will be a young man called Matt Cardle. Remember him? Maybe not.
But I remember the ITV audience for that night — a staggering 19.4million viewers.
Even Captain Confidence himself, Simon Cowell, couldn’t quite believe it. It was a gold-plated TV masterstroke.
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Fast forward to Monday this week and ITV’s hyped-up reality show Love Island limped to its lacklustre conclusion with a meagre 1.5million viewers — 2million down from last year.
Even its producers couldn’t wait for it to end.
Plummeting numbers
And they’re not the only people fed up with a lot of what’s on the box right now.
New figures out this week show audience numbers for “terrestrial” telly including ITV and the BBC — £159 a year, please — are plummeting like an X Factor winner’s career.
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Less than 80 per cent of viewers tuned in to the traditional broadcasters last year — the sharpest fall on record, despite some stand-out moments like Prat Hancock appearing on I’m A Celeb.
And in the past eight years the number of shows pulling in more than 4million viewers has halved from 2,400 in 2014 to just 1,200 in 2022.
Telly regulator Ofcom, which conducted the research, puts this down to the rise of the streamers — Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime and all the other digital offerings desperate for our monthly subscriptions.
Ditto TikTok and YouTube, where all the under-25s gather.
It’s easy to see why that might be. With the streamers, there is more immediate choice funded by bigger budgets.
Just look at Disney (market cap $160billion) and its cinema-quality Star Wars spin-offs.
And with TikTok and YouTube, it’s just so much easier to engage mobile phone-addled brains.
Twenty seconds of “snackable” content is enough. What’s next?
But it’s not just the variety of the digital services that’s the draw.
Viewers are fed up with the traditional TV broadcasters’ endless diet of smug cookery contests, PR puff-filled chat shows and tiresome quizzes.
Most significantly, viewers are sick of the seemingly pathological aversion to risk. And no risk equals no fun.
The ludicrously well-paid telly execs who strut about the plush carpeted floors of the BBC and ITV see risky TV as “problematic”.
They have long become suffocated by the woke smog blowing through our once-cherished organisations. Good ideas are strangled by diversity quotas and “sensitivity” busybodies.
For these people, the idea of Simon Cowell tearing into narcissistic teenagers for failing to hold a tune would bring on a seizure.
“What about their mental health?!”
So nothing decent is through to the next round any more.
And that which does make it is the safe bet, the thing we can all agree (because everything is subject to a committee now) won’t upset anyone.
And why is that? Because, usually, it has already happened.
Primetime mainstream TV is a non-stop parade of “true crime” re-enactments.
From ITV’s Litvinenko to BBC One’s recent The Sixth Commandment.
Stories that have already been told. Narratives already agreed.
So desperate are they to retell these tales, they’re often on air moments after the thing they’re depicting happened.
See Vardy v Rooney: A Courtroom Drama, aired by Channel 4 just seven months after the verdict.
But you will struggle to see many decent original shows on traditional TV.
If the grisly story of the Maids Moreton murders, as depicted in The Sixth Commandment, had been a work of fiction, the writer would have been pulled up at page one.
“Wait a minute, this village is too white and everyone is too middle class.”
Decent comedy has also gone AWOL.
The prospect of someone like Ricky Gervais, who dares to question woke orthodoxy, ever being given a berth at regular TV again seems remote.
No decent comedy makes it on to the big UK channels any more because the essence of all the best comedy is to question and mock agreed positions.
Wake-up call
In a world falling over itself to create a trigger-free manifesto for everything, that task is impossible for the White City wets.
So it falls to streamers such as Netflix to take a punt and deal with the real–life consequences (type “Dave Chappelle” and “trans” into Google to see what I mean).
The once-big channels have also ruined the soaps, formerly a guaranteed ratings banker with their depiction of “real life”.
Not today. Execs just don’t care about what might affect the working classes any more, so the shows become Trojan horses for right-on issues.
On EastEnders, out goes Danny Dyer’s edgy geezer Mick Carter and in comes Kara-Leah Fernandes’ right-on teen Bailey Baker and her tedious lectures on veganism.
And Enders’ strategy of bringing back characters who have ALREADY DIED is as insulting to the dwindling group of viewers still tuning in as it is ludicrous.
Ofcom’s new audience figure data should be a wake-up call to the self- satisfied controllers of these once-mighty channels.
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Without genuine innovation and risk, the streamers will continue to eat more of their lunch and — for the BBC — the licence fee will become more of an outrageous tax than it patently already is.
Mainstream TV urgently needs to rediscover its X Factor.