ITV Binning Series

Today’s Mediaguardian has a piece by David Liddiment where he tries to avoid any kind of blame attached to the axed drama Making Waves. If I’m reading the piece correctly he’s saying that he and Nick Elliot both had their doubts about the series and weren’t going to go ahead with it until the BBC got interested, at which point, scared that the BBC might have a hit series on their hands that ITV had missed out on, they commissioned it. Hmm. I’m sure there’s some logic there somewhere. I just don’t see it.
If the series really was no good, then wouldn’t you be happy letting the BBC have a go with it? If it was a lame duck, then that’s six hours of prime time that it’d have been easy to schedule against, mopping up the audience. Sorry, I don’t buy it. Obviously ITV weren’t happy with the series otherwise they’d have scheduled it earlier in the year, but that’s something that should have been addressed at script stage.
He ends the piece by saying that over the time it has taken for this series to gesticulate, its time had passed. I don’t disagree that this series is not perfect, but what’s he trying to say here? That now is not the time for a series about the armed forces? I’d say that now is precisely the time. In due course we’ll probably get some TV dramas based on the experiences in places like Basra, but for the last few years, with the fear of terrorism around the globe increasing, I’d have thought that there were plenty of scenarios to be dramatised right now.
And on a final point, he mentions that the unpublicised replacement for Making Waves last week, It Shouldn’t Happen on a TV Soap, pulled in five million – up from the 3.7m to which Making Waves had fallen. But who are those people? I’d suggest that Making Waves pulled in a younger, more male audience than ITV would usually get. Whereas the replacement is bound to attract an older more female audience. Absolute numbers are not the whole story.
ITV must also address the issue that it’s going to find gaining an audience for its less mainstream drama in the firstplace that much harder. If I think that there’s a possibility that a new series is going to be yanked out of the schedules after a couple of episodes, why should I invest my time in watching it in the first place? I’m less likely to give it a trial at all. I watch little enough ITV as it is, and they’re not going about it in the best way to gain me as a viewer.