Piers Morgan has wrapped up his first week at TalkTV, and on cue, Guido is here to report the BARB viewing figures. There’s good news and bad news. The good news for Piers is he has managed to slow the trend of losing over 100,000 viewers with every consecutive show. The bad news is last night’s broadcast was still the lowest-rated yet, pulling in 117,900 viewers in his primetime slot – compared to 316,800 on Monday…
Piers keeps boasting how well the show is doing on social media, which is hard for us to measure without access to his logins. We can however see that the show’s Twitter account has, at the time of going to pixel, just 42,056 followers and is getting signal digit retweets. Early days yet…
Piers will be pleased that despite the decline he is still leading against rivals in his time-slot. Tom Newton Dunn’s The News Desk now has a dedicated fan club of 14,300 viewers. Which means 39,900 people have, since Monday, decided to watch something else instead. Celebrations are in order for the team over at The Talk with Sharon Osbourne, though: viewership leapt up to 37,900 last night, after pulling in just 9,700 on Wednesday. The show beat Beth Rigby Interviews with a mere 28,600 viewers, though it trailed behind GB News’ Dan Wootton on 53,200. All well and good – except Sharon wasn’t even on the show last night… will she even return?
If Piers thinks Guido’s TalkTV view count feature is going let up soon he’ll be disappointed. The BARB figures for last night’s broadcast are in and once again the viewership has almost halved, this time from 215,900 to 123,000. While they don’t appear in the same time slot, despite Piers’s blockbuster salary, international advertising and front-page paper splashes, he’s now a mere 23,000 views off what Nigel Farage managed during his 7pm GB News time slot. Given 8pm is a more watched slot, Piers and Nige actually matched the percentage of total viewers with 0.8% each…
Across TalkTV’s other shows, Tom Newton Dunn’s The News Desk crashed to just 15,300 without the star attraction of the PM, and Sharon Osbourne has fallen below five figures to a paltry 9,700 – over five times shy of her Dan Wootton competition. See you bright and early tomorrow morning for this evening’s figures…
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…
