The slow motion collapse in ratings of Talk TV is astounding. Until now, Piers Morgan has always held his lead in his slot against Mark Steyn on GB News. Last night Steyn beat Morgan for the first time…
In every primetime slot last night Talk TV got walloped by the rival start-up. Unsurprisingly, Piers is now switching his metric of choice from actual television viewers and telling people the future is all about online platforms, something Guido agrees with. Yet he’s not doing so well on YouTube or the streaming Fox Nation either – hardly surprising that the latter platform, targeted at Trump-loving gun nuts, isn’t terribly keen on the gun ban nut who has publicly fallen out with the Donald. According to a report from Popbitch, his Sky News Australia syndicated show is also bombing in the slot and the station is as a consequence doing worse than it did with the much cheaper previous presenter. Piers counting zillions of supposed impressions on Twitter or TikTok doesn’t make sense or revenue. All this despite the millions being spent on marketing…
Piers Morgan took to Twitter this morning to laud his viewing figures from last night. According to Piers, his Trump interview viewing figures impressively beat the BBC News, Sky News and GB News broadcast offerings combined, with around 400,000 viewers. Ironically, the last time Guido can remember GB News beating Sky and the BBC was also a Trump interview...
What Piers doesn’t tell his followers is what happened to views either side of his debut. According to broadcast industry overnight figures from BARB, whilst Piers did beat BBC News, Sky News and GB News his colleagues flopped quite spectacularly. Newton Dunn’s News Desk was beaten by GB News, as was Sharon Osbourne’s show immediately after Piers, as was Daisy McAndrew at 10pm, as was the re-run of Piers’s show at 11pm. Ouch…
In light of these viewing figures Guido can’t help laughing at Grace Blakely, who when she was announced as a regular panellist on Tom Newton Dunn’s show a couple of weeks ago took to Twitter to explain her rationale for getting into bed with Rupert Murdoch, while refusing to appear on GB News:
Looks like Grace’s decision may, as we always suspected, be less about tactical or moral reasoning and more about cold hard cash…
Amongst the exciting new lineup for Tom Newton Dunn’s new TalkTV show is none other than Moët Marxist Grace Blakeley, who is joining as a panellist on The News Desk alongside the likes of Adam Boulton, Douglas Murray, James Slack and Anas Sarwar. Guido looks forward to hearing her wax lyrical about the dangers of capitalism at the pleasure of a 91-year old media mogul worth nearly $21 billion.
It’s quite the departure for Blakeley, who will now be cashing cheques from the Murdoch Empire for the first time despite warning about the dangers of the “corporate media” and the threat it poses to “our BBC”. Here’s what she said in February last year about Rupert himself after an Extinction Rebellion protest:
“So whether we’re thinking about, for example, in the UK Extinction Rebellion, which has had some good organising tactics and some howlers as well, but they did a good one recently, which was shutting down the Murdoch-owned press, which put all this stuff out about how climate change wasn’t real, wasn’t as big as everyone said. It was a really good example of an interesting direct action that highlights this antagonism, highlights a bad guy and encourages people to feel powerful.”
Thankfully Extinction Rebellion can’t blockade a TV broadcast…
While Guido is surprised to see Blakeley board the Murdoch train, the same can’t be said of Adam Boulton. Rupert reportedly had his eye on his ex-employee for months, as Guido first revealed back in November. Now he’s back in the fold. Should be fun viewing.
Grace Blakeley returns for yet another Twitter Bitch Fight bout, this time facing off against The Sunday Times‘s Hannah Al-Othman.
The opening bell rang when Blakeley quipped “rules are dumb. I got expelled twice and my life is great” in response to a thread on school discipline. Tongue-in-cheek, apparently – although it’s hard to tell with Grace, who once declared class has nothing to do with family, education, or background…
Al-Othman was having none of it. Insisting “it isn’t funny“, joke or not, Al-Othman took the first swing:
And that’s privilege for you. If you’re working class & are expelled, it’s likely to change the course of your life forever.
— Hannah Al-Othman ⚽️➡️🏠 (@HannahAlOthman) July 4, 2021
PRU — groomed by older, badder kids — criminality — prison etc. https://t.co/FYHnhAWHki
Never one to back down from a fight over class and privilege, Blakeley immediately pushed back:
Wow it’s almost like the course of your life is determined much more by your class upbringing than ‘discipline’ in school
— Grace Blakeley (@graceblakeley) July 4, 2021
Fortunately, Al-Othman decided not to get dragged into the weeds over what Blakeley understands class and privilege to actually mean. Instead, she simply said:
Parklife!
— Hannah Al-Othman ⚽️➡️🏠 (@HannahAlOthman) July 4, 2021
This apparently pushed the fight straight into the gutter, with both combatants going back and forth over who’s the more competent journalist (“Mate if you can’t understand any of the words I’ve used in that tweet you really shouldn’t be a journalist”, claims Blakeley) and who’s surrendered the moral high ground:
Grace, I wasn’t going to respond, but you kept going with your salty quote tweets.
— Hannah Al-Othman ⚽️➡️🏠 (@HannahAlOthman) July 4, 2021
I understand all the words, they just don’t sound as clever together as you they think they do. https://t.co/R1dzf6zv2P
Clearly Al-Othman hasn’t learnt from her betters that the longer the words, the cleverer your interlocutor. As ever, we’ll let co-conspirators decide the victor…
Grace Blakeley and Faiza Shaheen waged an ideological class war last night on Twitter, after Blakeley declared that class has nothing to do with your family, education, or background and is instead ‘a social relationship rooted in production‘. A bold take from the privately-educated, ex-management consultant turned Marxist influencer…
Things escalated pretty quickly once Shaheen caught wind of Blakeley’s take.
What does one even say? Thank her for ignoring all the lived experience of working class people?! 😡 https://t.co/crkwvXTXYa
— Faiza Shaheen (@faizashaheen) May 11, 2021
Blakeley tried to backpedal by claiming the tweet was ‘poorly phrased‘. Too late.
Feeling the heat, Blakeley then tried to wriggle out of the exchange altogether…
Shaheen wasn’t interested in a debate, though…
Things reached a boiling point when Blakeley accused Shaheen of instigating ‘a pile onto another woman on the left‘. Poor Grace…
Lefties arguing over who is really working class seems to neglect one important signifier – how they vote:
The working classes, or at least those on lower incomes, vote Conservative. High status, high income IYIs like Blakely vote for the Labour Party…
After misspelling her own name on the cover of her forthcoming book, Grace Blakeley’s laser-like attention to detail has now turned to Rishi’s Eat Out to Help Out policy. In her weekly Tribune newsletter, Grace wrote:
Yesterday, I had my first experience of the government’s ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ scheme. On my way to the station I wandered into a Pret a Manger to buy some lunch, picked up a sandwich, went to the till to pay and – just as I was pulling my card out of my bag – was informed that my lunch would be free due to a £10 subsidy from the government.
Vice’s money columnist was clearly using invention about her trip to Pret, as that isn’t how the discount works. Rishi’s voucher gives you 50% off participating restaurants up to £10 – you will never get a free meal. The discount also only applies to eat-in customers – not takeaways. Given Grace claimed she was just popping in on the way to catch a train it seems unlikely the discount would have been applied full stop. The article has since been amended to say “effectively free“. It might be easier to just admit the anecdote – like Grace’s financial commentary qualifications – was just made up…
