Eight months and dozens of viewers later, TalkTV are making essential cutbacks to keep the show on the road. The channel has announced it’s moving Piers Morgan’s show into the baby-Shard, meaning Piers will no longer air from his fancy, bespoke studio in Ealing. He’ll have to put up with being in the same building as everyone else…

Head of TV at News UK Broadcasting Richard Wallace announced the move in an email earlier today:

“Having the whole of TalkTV in one place was always the long-term plan as it means we can reap all the creative benefits that come from having our teams together… Moving into the News Building is also more cost efficient as after fit-out costs, ongoing operating costs are far lower than in an external studio. We are always cost conscious but never more so than in the current economic environment with cost inflation and economic uncertainty.”

Piers likes to boast that while his BARB figures are, well, not fantastic, his online clips rack up millions of hits. Shame that doesn’t pay the bills…
Hat-tip: Press Gazette

Every winner at last night’s Spectator Parliamentarian awards gave a decent speech, though Guido tips his hat to Theresa May for bringing the house down with this one. No wonder she was up there to accept the award for “Speech of the Year”.

“Piers told the story of having spoken to me for 20 minutes at a Spectator party, gone home, and said he couldn’t remember a single thing I had told him. I don’t know if it’s any consolation, Piers, but I couldn’t remember a single thing you asked me… indeed I don’t remember speaking to you at all. 

Of course that hasn’t stopped him from constantly asking me to do an interview. But I guess that’s just because it’s hard to get guests on TalkTV.”

Ambulance for Piers…

TalkTV is proving a costly, and so far fruitless, endeavour. Despite ploughing in over $20 million to get the station started, not counting the free promotion in News Corp titles, TalkTV continues to lag behind GB News. This comes despite their revamped programming schedule. Murdoch hoped the station could rival the BBC, perhaps he should consider rivalling the corporation’s cost-cutting measures…

The increasing costs of TalkTV are starting to hurt News Corp’s bottom line. The company’s profits fell 50% in the previous quarter and it racked up $20 million of TalkTV attributable additional costs in its latest quarter. Revenue so far appears to be as negligible as their audience. They’re now at a point where Nadine Dorries stepping in increases views. Perhaps making Piers Morgan work out of the mini-Shard rather than a separate, dedicated studio near his home is an obvious place to begin cuts…

Away from the SW1 drama, and after failing to get Boris back into No. 10, Nadine Dorries has turned her hand away from trying to privatise broadcasters to hosting shows on them. She has stepped into Piers Morgan’s shoes while he’s on holiday, and has clearly been given free rein over the topics up for discussion. Last night we got a lively debate about Channel 4, leading to Nadine’s best quote of recent times, “Should we be proud of programmes like ‘My Massive C**k’?”

While her hosting hasn’t gone entirely smoothly, as the above clip shows, Guido notes that with an average viewership of 8,000 during her first episode she is only 3,000 views or so off what Piers Morgan was achieving in September. There’s a future in broadcasting for Nadine yet…

UPDATE: Nadine beat Piers on viewers last night. Dorries pulled in 26,000 viewers, beating Piers’s interview with Kanye West by 1,000 and thrashing his now-typical viewership of 14,000-19,000 views.

A vintage Question Time bust-up last night as Piers Morgan and Nadhim Zahawi locked horns over the mini-Budget. No doubt Piers will be happy he managed to get a Cabinet Minister to actually say sorry for something – that and appearing on a show with a six-figure audience watching…

According to BARB data, the screen message telling viewers last night that TalkTV was off air was watched by one of the channel’s highest ever audiences. An average of 141,000 people tuned in, which is double Piers Morgan’s usual figure for his slot. The debate peaked with 183,000 viewers tuning in shortly after starting. Even so, BBC News, Sky News and GB News all recorded a greater audience than TalkTV did across the whole of primetime, according to the overnight data. Disappointing for the station which is reportedly on the verge of rejigging its primetime schedule…

You didn’t dent my studio floor, right? https://t.co/VUjwHGxvpU

— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) July 27, 2022

Although the debate last night was broadcast from Piers’s Ealing studio, the media advisers of both Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss were adamant they did not want Piers Morgan to host the show. The honour went to Harry Cole and Kate McCann, however Harry dropped out on the morning with Covid. Given Tom Newton Dunn was on holiday the pressure was now entirely on Kate McCann. There was no back-up plan for her…

Richard Wallace, a former tabloid editor who worked on The X Factor, is reportedly revamping TalkTV’s line-up. It is also rumoured that Jeremy Kyle could be shifted to the 7pm slot with Tom Newton-Dunn’s News Desk show moved to after Piers Morgan Unwatched. Rather than the current video-of-a-radio-presenter format this would be a real TV show. Jeremy Kyle’s former daytime ITV show used to garner a million viewers before it was cancelled. If Kyle could win back a fraction of that audience it would dramatically boost the numbers handed on to Piers from the few thousand he inherits currently…