The curse of the television re-launch

Good Morning Britain and London Live have started out suffering in the television ratings, writes Raymond Snoddy – can there be any chance to win audiences over?

With television re-launches you very quickly get into the law of diminishing returns. ITV knows this already with its breakfast imbroglios and London Live is going to learn the harsh lesson before long.

The breakfast legacy from TV-am and GMTV, and Daybreak to Good Morning Britain suggests that more or less whatever you do and whatever you spend there is a settle-down audience for a commercial breakfast service of around 600,000 to 700,000 with the BBC pulling in around double that even when it ties one hand behind its back by moving to Salford. Whilst breakfast radio still rules supreme for the perfectly sensible reason that most people have more important things to do at that time of day than watch television.

You can get a temporary uplift through the re-launch and the attendant publicity resulting from throwing star money at perfectly decent BBC presenters. The move rarely does as much for their careers as their bank balances as Christine Bleakley will testify.

Sure, GMB can claim that on its first morning it took Friday’s Daybreak average of 553,000 to just under 800,000.

But that compares with a Daybreak launch curiosity audience of more than 1 million.

Already, under the law of diminishing returns around 200,000 re-launch fans have been misplaced and there is the real possibility that the iron laws of television could rapidly take that figure down to, if we are being generous, around 650,000.

The exception to the rule is of course Greg Dyke’s relaunch of TV-am with the help of the re-scheduling of Roland Rat. You could argue that what went before was so dire that almost anything was an improvement for the better and tells us very little about the general principle.

Any television executive who gets a slightly less than stellar ratings performance for a re-launch – and we must include GMB in that category – reaches for the obvious comfort blanket. The previous production blighted expectations and the ratings for the new effort will start to rise gradually when the cleverness and cunning starts to take effect.

It is just as likely that the re-launch programme represents the zenith and the nadir will not be far behind as some of those who have sampled the show scurry back to the BBC.

The divided response from critics and viewers who have been tweeting on the subject – hardly a scientific analysis – does, however, suggest that the audience will now start reverting to the commercial breakfast mean. Some may like the Good Morning America approach and the “four’s a crowd” presenter line-up. Others will be irritated by the crowded studio and see through the style to the unchanged, relentless populism.

At the very least it seems odd to spend a lot of money to hire a star striker in Susanna Reid and then play with four strikers up front who are in danger of getting in each other’s way.

Leaving aside the all-embracing issue of where Susanna’s legs should be, her salary must have seriously denuded the budget. Surely the portable wheel of fortune being carted around the country to plug the usual scam – win £50,000 – texts cost only £1.40 – is not really made of chipboard?

There was also the small irony of all the presenters getting ecstatic about a large bloke winning the special prize – a Kindle – on the wheel before reporting on a planned government crackdown on bookies’ betting terminals.

Then there was the reporter blaming Harry and Cressida’s break-up on all that media attention…

So best guess on Good Morning Britain’s settle-down ratings? How about 650,000 unless some bright spark decides in the Spring that maybe four presenters and the Good Morning America look was not such a good idea after all and goes for another re-launch – or tweak, as they will probably call it.

Of course over at London Live they would give a lot to have more than 800,000 viewers for their breakfast show. A grand total of 2,400 has a terminal ring to it and that of course is itself better than the ‘zero’ – as in too-small-to-measure programmes.

It’s not clear where you go from numbers like that. Except for planning a re-launch and starting again, but what if you spend a lot of money and only manage to treble the ratings all the way up to 7,000 at breakfast?

London Live bosses appear to have fallen for the percentage fallacy. There are 9 million people in London so we only have to get X – fill in any implausible figure that comes to mind – and we will all be rolling in the wonga.

There was a time just before the launch of the international edition of the Financial Times when the fallacy was deployed.

We would only have to reach one Basque shepherd with an interest in commodity futures…quite forgetting that the chance of finding even a single Basque shepherd who would want to buy an expensive pink financial daily in English was as close to absolute zero as makes no difference.

The obvious has now happened. Stefano Hatfield, London Live’s editorial director, has gone. His was the usual crazy appointment made by newspaper people when they get their hands on television for the first time. Hatfield is an excellent newspaper editor. What was needed for one of the toughest telly gigs in the UK is someone who exudes TV experience from every pore.

It’s only anecdotal, but a moderately priced indy producer of my acquaintance put forward a series of extremely practical, cost-effective ideas for shows. They never came back.

The case for the defence and for any residual hope includes the argument that BARB is not very good at handling small numbers. True, but the way to avoid such a problem is not to have tiny numbers in the first place. BARB is also not good (at present) at tracking mobile and online. That is also true. But if you are relying on online and mobile numbers for your reach wouldn’t the logic say go online and save a lot of money on broadcast costs?

London Live’s chief executive, Andrew Mullins, has an impressive background in consumer marketing and newspapers but his career so far has been unsullied by television experience.

Mullins believes that reach and awareness are rising and that London Live’s own surveys are showing more than 1 million are viewing the channel in a week. If so then it’s only a matter of time and keeping your nerve.

Still, I think it will be a case of a re-launch in the Spring trying to broaden the channel’s appeal beyond the current, narrowly targeted youth market.

But then, of course, the law of diminishing returns will inevitably come into play.