One thing that no one ever talks about in a straightforward manner when in the company of actors and production crews is the fact that in the eyes of advertisers, all television viewers are certainly not equal. But this is a fundamental issue behind the reshaping of ITV’s output in particular, taking place before our eyes as it battles with Channel 4, and in decisions about casting and the hiring of talent.
It is a fact that television advertising is sold against 14 different groups of people, divided up by age and class, with the young, the upmarket and the light viewer some two and a half times more valuable to sales forces than the old, downmarket heavy viewers who traditionally lap up ITV.
Once you grasp this, and combine it with the clear evidence that a ton of advertising money is switching to the internet, you’ll understand why ITV’s director of television Simon Shaps spoke recently about the network breaking with the past and experiencing a “Clause IV moment” where volume without value is no longer to be tolerated.
What he meant by volume without value was that ITV could no longer squander budgets on programming bringing in audiences of the same type of people, ie heavy viewers that advertisers had already got their message through to, or who were unlikely or unable to buy the products and services in the adverts.
I am afraid that this hard-nosed approach will inevitably mean a cutback in the volume of original, if traditional, drama skewed towards older, female viewers that ITV has made its hallmark for the past decade.
In fact it is already happening. This week sees the launch of Soccer Aid. Once again it follows that there is no 9pm drama until tonight (Thursday) when Tamzin Outhwaite’s Vital Signs medical saga concludes.
If the currency increasingly used to decide whether a programme is a hit or not is a more cold blooded callibration of ratings and demographics, there is an uncomfortable outcome. It is perfectly possible for ITV to have the wrong kind of hit. Its current series of press adverts and posters, posing interesting questions and facts, are trying to tease light viewers, to look at ITV with fresh eyes.
Shaps has announced that four rather stale but quite different programmes are not returning – Rosemary & Thyme, the lightweight gardening detective series starring Felicity Kendal, was cold shouldered by anyone under 50. It’ll be Alright on the Night, along with self-effacing veteran Denis Norden, now well into his eighties, has been used as a kind of timeless telly filler every time there ıs a crisis. Footballer’s Wives is an interesting one – it survived so long because of its appeal to the under-34 female audience, but had become absurd. Celebrity Fit Club had run its course.
Shaps acknowledged that ITV was lacking the kind of factual event programming the BBC has been creating for some five years now, partly due to a productive deal with Discovery, such as Pompeii, Krakatoa, Blue Planet, and Planet Earth. And that it had largely missed the boat in formatted factual programming, of the type Channel 4 excels in. That’s where a lot of effort will be going. To return to the big one, under the outgoing ITV drama regime of Nick Elliott, the aim was to play original drama at 9pm for as many nights as possible. It is a legacy that has made ITV3 such a well-used digital channel.
But that policy is no longer possible – it is too expensive and not producing the returns. ITV is currently shopping for US imports. I wonder where that leaves the kind of feelgood drama that Yorkshire Television, allied with David Jason, has been so adept at.
- Maggie Brown’s column appears every fortnight in The Stage.
If ITV want to bring in new viewers, they really need to up their game, and quality drama is the way to go, I think, because they can do that. I can't imagine them doing something on the scale of Planet Earth, but maybe they'll surprise us.
I honestly can't remember the last thing I watched on ITV.