A last-minute schedule change to Tuesday nights has failed to rescue Seven Days, the Notting Hill reality soap, from ratings ignominy, after the latest installment left the show with just over half of its opening audience.
Tuesday’s episode drew just 0.59 million viewers, a dismal 3.5 per cent of the total audience. The average for the 10pm slot is about 11 per cent.
Seven Days began three weeks ago with one million viewers, itself a disappointing figure given the show’s extensive marketing campaign.
This week Seven Days got caned by the BBC Ten O’Clock News (4.6 million) and fell behind CSI on Five and even Newsnight on BBC Two.
It looks like the producers’ dream of running Seven Days all year round will be strangled at birth. So what went wrong?
Channel 4 tipped the show as an ambitious replacement for Big Brother but doesn’t seem able to leave the axed reality daddy behind. Seven Days featured attention-seeking characters, like the opening episode’s excessive focus on the widely-disliked It Girls, just like Big Brother.
The IT Girls were chosen to generate some red-top heat. But why should the target audience watch a Big Brother-lite?
Seven Days was actually a more thoughtful project but the opening episode felt over-produced and suffocated by its high-concept. Why would you want to interact with these characters on line?
Without the misdirected marketing campaign, Seven Days might have developed quietly and become a sleeper hit with viewers who felt disenfranchised by Big Brother. But launching a new show is all about impact.
There’s a huge challenge for Jay Hunt, Channel 4′s incoming chief creative officer. Will C4 do more than fill the BB slot with diluted reality shows?
There’s a stale feel to Shameless, now into series eight and Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant shows. Can they be revitalised or replaced?
The schedules are packed with lightweight, factual shows like The Wedding House, which also launched on Tuesday – and its weak performance gave Seven Days a poor audience inheritance.
Can the Channel regain its edge in comedy and drama and reputation for delivering ambitious new formats. The success of This Is England ’86 could be the building block. Can Channel 4 bury Big Brother for good…or will it be back to the rescue in 2012…?
