Talk TV's Troubles
Talk TV's Troubles
Piers Morgan - from 'uncensored' to 'unwatched'
This is the fourth week of Talk TV being on-air and so it feels like an appropriate juncture at which to assess how it's doing. The answer, based on most metrics, seems to be a resounding "not very well."
Slick Start
As I wrote at the time, launch night was a slick-looking success with Piers Morgan’s centrepiece show picking up decent numbers.
Since then, the numbers have fallen dramatically. There have been reports of Tom Newton Dunn's 'The News Hour' not recording any viewers at certain points. Even Morgan has not been able to hold on to his audience. Guido Fawkes reported that on Monday the presenter had a night as disappointing as that endured by his beloved Arsenal, falling behind Mark Steyn on rival channel GB News.
According to PopBitch, things are not going much better in Australia, where the show is also broadcast.
The 'Piers Morgan Uncensored' YouTube channel has, at the time of writing, 42.7k subscribers. The only video to make anything like a major impact is one with boxing champion Tyson Fury, which has 442k views.
A few others are around the 100k viewing mark. To put this in some context, top tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee cleared 581k views in the first 15 hours for his latest video. His video looking at the latest Google hardware has two million views and counting.
A Fast Fall
In many ways, I'm shocked at how far and how fast Talk TV has fallen. I thought the combination of News UK's resources and Morgan's name would bring in meaningful numbers. The company itself was quietly confident this would be the case, but it has not (yet) proven to be.
Perhaps the somewhat downmarket feel of GB News is part of its charm, offering an air of intimacy that the expensive Talk TV sets do not. Perhaps we've just got enough news and political coverage already. Perhaps, though, there is a bigger cultural issue.
Save for the small number of James O'Brien obsessives and GB News junkies, Britain does not have the same media culture as the US. There, people coalesce around prime time TV and talk radio hosts. Plenty define themselves as Rachel Maddow (MSNBC) viewers or Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson (Fox News) viewers in the way you might support a sports team. For a variety of reasons, that is just not how things really work here. Digital outlets, and to lesser extent newspapers, have some of that, but not television channels or radio stations. The various linear broadcasters have different demographics that they appeal to, but UK regulation means that the hyper-partisan style of broadcasting you see stateside is not really a thing. It also appears that GB News has captured the small segment of viewers that want it to be.
I'm not going to predict what is going to happen next for Talk TV, but it's clear that despite good guests and high production values the current mix of radio, tv and digital is not (yet) working.