Some good news to cheer up Piers after his box office bomb on Wednesday: last night he got 73,800 viewers, beating Mark Steyn in the same time slot with 57,000 and Dan Wootton on 59,100. Piers is already boasting about it on Twitter. Guido couldn’t help noticing how unusually quiet he was yesterday, although admittedly there’s not much to say when your primetime show gets 24,000 viewers…
Farage is still at the top of the pile, with 99,300 people tuning in last night. Happiest of all will be Tom Newton Dunn, who’s finally managed to take his ratings into five figures with 16,800 viewers yesterday – an audience share of 0.1%. The content was noticeably more tabloid than previous middlebrow political discussions: a bit of partygate, Tom Cruise’s new movie, Wagatha Christie, something about a serial killer and a piece on coked-up football hooligans – more Sun than Times. It clearly worked better. Rebekah will be thrilled…
Guido flicked between GB News, TalkTV and Sky News last night over a bottle of wine, giving Thursday night Question Time and Newsnight a miss. Farage is broadcasting from Westminster – well, Lambeth overlooking Parliament – and it was his winning mixture of news and opinion with damnation. Well honed and agenda pushing.
Talking of agenda pushing, the Daily Climate Show on Sky News is still terribly doom laden propaganda. By now Guido was half-way down the bottle and watched Morgan’s show for only the third time. It’s slick. He does short “brain dump” monologues on hot topics that are clearly made for social media, Guido was nodding along if not cheering. Over on GB News, Mark Steyn was worrying about vaccines causing heart attacks or something. Ann Robinson was on with Piers and she was good fun.
By the time Dan Wootton was on, Guido was at the port and cheese stage of the evening and enjoying the sparky banter where Dan’s left-wing panellist was giving him as good as she was getting. Guido did flick over briefly to see Beth Rigby interviewing someone he didn’t recognise, so flicked back to the fun with Wootton.
After reviewing all the shows the thing that is clear is that there is now much better choice in primetime than there was before; Sky News and the BBC are looking a little staid and boring with their formats. More viewpoints are being represented, clearly GB News has a more ideological slant and the core audience is there, it now seems to be consistently ahead of the increasingly left-leaning Sky News, which is most nights now in third place. TalkTV’s formula is being refined, if it mixes infotainment and entertainment it will win more viewers. Trying to be The Times on telly is a losing commercial proposition best left to the BBC. Incidentally, after he polished off the port, Mrs Fawkes made Guido sleep in the spare room…
