The birth of London Live

The launch of London Live on Monday was lively, fresh and, above all, competent, says Raymond Snoddy – however, there are a number of fundamental weaknesses with the channel that will be difficult to do much about…

It would be churlish and curmudgeonly to do anything other than give a warm welcome to the birth of London Live. The launch was lively and fresh and, above all, competent.

Maybe there was an occasional sluggish handover but nothing fell off the air – the young, previously untried presenters kept going and did not stumble or dry.

The programme ideas which seek to draw on the life and vibrancy of what is rapidly becoming a world city, not merely the capital of the UK, are probably the best you can manage with limited funds.

Above all London Live reflected, as many have already observed, the youth and diversity of London in a way that the established broadcasters have manifestly failed to do.

If you had accidentally switched on to Freeview 8, Sky 117, Virgin 159 or YouView 8 without any prior knowledge you might have thought – a bit quirky by traditional standards but certainly not embarrassing for its government-mandated high EPG position.

The opening show, London Go, devoted to what’s on in the London entertainment scene could have been a total disaster if the stars at the Noah premiere had swept past them. Instead they pulled off their brief red carpet chats with Emma Watson, Ray Winstone and most problematical of all Russell Crowe.

It was perhaps harsh of one critic on Radio 4 to liken the initial offerings to the efforts of a bunch of media students.

There was a decent range of launch advertisers that ranged from L’Oreal and Sky to Royal Dragon Vodka and Guinness.

The channel, very much the flagship of former Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s great vision for local television will not be short of cross-promotion from the Evening Standard.

On launch night there was the wrap around cover, the main splash followed by all of page 2 and 3 and then the entire front page of the television section which became “Television in association with London Live.”

Perhaps most jarring, the London Live schedule was given the most prominent left of page slot ahead of BBC One, BBC Two and ITV.

A bit over the top, perhaps?

Only those paying attention would have noticed the references to the Evening Standard’s “sister channel.” After all, Rupert Murdoch was heavily criticised for the relentless puffing of Sky in his newspaper columns. On the whole though, it’s a case of so far so good.

Now the real mountain has to be climbed and it will not be easy.

Almost anyone can sell a launch schedule because of the attention it gets, although the publicity was not great in the national newspapers because London Live is not a national channel.

By the second week, if not before, the ad industry will be looking at the hard numbers and it’s not clear how impressed they will be.

Despite the pre-launch publicity, the top-rated programme, London Go, hit a peak of 59,000 and an average of 39,300. Not The One Show, got an average of 22,000, although it was beyond quirky to go behind the scenes to show that it was set in what looked like a corridor with a robot camera on a rail.

The policy of supplementing live programmes with bought in re-runs of London themed programmes didn’t work well at least on the first night. Channel 4’s Misfits at 10pm pulled in an average audience of only 2,000. Later a web series called Brothers With No Game did better by reaching 13,000.

Overall London Live had a total of 244,000 viewers from 6.30pm until 3am – an average of 10,400.

There are two ways of looking at those numbers: That they are just about OK verging on poor and will only decline after the launch excitement, or that most people still hadn’t heard of London Live and the numbers will slowly build as the word spreads.

There are, however, a number of fundamental weaknesses that will be difficult to do much about at least in the short-term. The virtues of the new approach could turn out to be its greatest disadvantages.

By focusing on 16 to 34-year olds London Live is aiming at a minority of a minority. And to make things even more difficult a high percentage of the target audience in London are working hard and late and then playing harder and later.

It is not clear how much time they have got for watching local television. A number of the programme formats are fragile to say the least.

London Go managed on launch night because it pulled in some stars even though such brief conversations are usually banal and self-serving.

The difficulty emerged on night two when there were no big premieres and no stars before the cameras and there was little else to do but ask people in the queue where they had come from and how they were going to get home after the O2 concert. Dreadful.

Programmes focusing on street food and the best places to eat in London, as in Food Junkies have more legs but there is a clear danger that you can take only so much lime and yoghurt corn fritters cooked on the street.

Of course it is mildly interesting to hear from a wide variety of Londoners about their work and lives but in the end it could begin to look and feel like visual wallpaper.

At the moment despite the ownership links with both the Evening Standard and The Independent it’s more London Lite than London Live at the moment, though there was a decent launch night investigation on bad landlords.

London Live is entitled to at least three months grace to get into its stride and see whether it can begin to attract feasible audiences that would interest advertisers.

After all they were coming to turn off the electricity at TV-am before it enjoyed a period of considerable success, though that was a national channel.

The chances are that by the autumn London Live will have to think again and consider producing programmes for all Londoners and see its present youth focus as severely self-limiting. Even then it might not work but at least there might be a chance of cutting through the horrendous competition it faces.

My relationship with London Live is rather like a one-night stand. Intriguing to see the fresh launch and the obvious effort that went into it. But now I’m off – there’s little there for me apart from maybe the promised London football show. Wrong demographic.