Channel 4’s New Saturday Night Slot Disappoints

Chris Evans’ new Saturday night entertainment show Girls and Boys limped into action with an average audience of 1.1 million this weekend.

The highly publicised show, features 100 men and 100 women competing for a £100,000 prize in a live studio, is set for an initial 12 week run. Channel 4 was hoping the show would provide it with the lucrative 16-34 audience that advertisers desire.

The show, which was shown from 9.05pm to 10.10pm, was easily beaten by detective series Jonathan Creek on BBC1, which attracted an average of 8.7 million viewers and It Shouldn’t Happen On A TV Makeover Show on ITV1 which attracted 6.8 million viewers.

The show, alongside Channel Five’s Live With Chris Moyles (see New Chris Moyles Show Pulls In The Punters For Five) is Evans’ first foray into television following a year out of the limelight. Chris Moyles’ show also failed to draw large audiences to Channel Five, and replacing Moyles with XFM DJ Christian O’Connell has done little to rescue the ailing programme.

Evans is best known as the brains behind The Big Breakfast, which was one of Channel 4’s big success stories. The programmes replacement RI:SE has been plagued by problems and ratings figures have sunk to just above the crucial 100,000 mark (see Channel 4 To Keep RI:SE Despite Drop In Ratings).

The problematic nature of attracting the elusive youth audience is also being felt over at new digital youth channel, BBC 3, which drew a weekly averages of 1% and 0.9% of the available audience in its first two weeks of launch (see BBC3 Programming Reaches 16.3 Million In Launch Week).

Channel Four: 020 7396 4444 www.channel4.com

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