Commercial TV woes continue

There are suggestions in the beleagured TV industry that property shows could fall victim to the Great Crash. Most channels have run them in one guise or another but given the collapse in building they have lost much of their relevance. They are said to be a ‘switch off’ for audiences who are “sick and tired of anything to do with property.”

An insider at C4 said: “ It’s getting difficult to keep revamping the shows. Primarily they were all about telling you how to tart a house up and sell it a profit. There’s no point in doing that now because the market is virtually static. So they’ve tried to turn them into advice shows. But they’re looking a bit thin.

“ The trouble is that the shows have a long lead time. They were in the pipeline before the Crash really started to take a grip. They’re made by independent production companies and commissioners would now like to junk them. They’re expensive to make and the audiences are declining. TV stations are under enormous pressure to get big audiences at the cheapest possible price.

Show such as Property Ladder and Location, Location and Grand Designs are said to be under threat. Advertisers are twitchy because they don’t want their products to associated with a market that’s in the doldrums.

Meanwhile ITV’s instability continues with rumours that boss Michael Grade would like to lead a management buy out. Other hoary old names said to be hovering around ITV include David Elstein who’s been in broadcasting longer than anybody can recall and Greg Dyke who ran the BBC and was the inventor of Roland Rat on Breakfast TV.

With ITV’s shares a disaster there’s the possibility of a foreign conglomerate coming in if they think it’s cheap enough. Big Brother maker Endemol is regularly cited as a possible suitor. ITV has suffered from layoffs, reorganisations, managerial shuffles and a plummeting share price. Such factors have all but wrecked a once proud federal structure.

A source said: “ ITV used to have real TV stations in the regions. But it’s followed a mad policy of badge engineering as in the car industry. You keep the name of the ITV station but they don’t make any programmes or so few of such unimportance that nobody notices. They just act as branch offices feeding stuff from a centralised system. Apart from their six o’clock shows their regional commitment is all but dead and buried.

“ For instance Anglia TV has been decimated. A few years ago Anglia was a serious programme producer making fine network shows such as the award-winning business series Enterprise, The Stocks and Shares Show, Survival, Heartland and various dramas for C4 and the ITV network. It was awash with gongs and was profitable offering a good network and regional service. It employed 800 people. Now it’s down to about 70 people and operates from a converted bowling alley. They’ve just laid off another 35 people.”

C5 has cancelled the Tricia daytime show with 85 people.being made redundant. C5 said it was too expensive. It attracted a small audience compared with the heavily criticised ‘Zoo TV’ Jeremy Kyle show. It was made by a small company called Townhouse with offices in Norwich and Maidstone and accounted for most of its output.