BBC News ratings: something to brag about

In certain quarters, boastfulness is considered vulgar.

And the moment the BBC uses popularity alone as a measure of success it is doomed.

But it’s time for BBC marketing teams and press officers to take a lesson from Michael Grade in the eighties.

Grade cut out a headline from The Sun and pinned it to the wall. It read: “If You’ve Got It Flaunt It.”

And this is exactly what the BBC should be doing.

Some recent ratings should destroy the myths that the corporation is somehow irrelevant in this age of unlimited choice and that linear TV itself is dead.

On Friday night, The Traitors won 5.5m viewers. All three episodes this week scored above 5m in the overnights.

On some days last week, BBC One and Two had a combined all day audience share of around 33pc.

That is remarkable in this day and age.

So too are the ratings for some news programmes.

On Wednesday, the regional news programmes at 6.30pm got a collective rating of 4.9m.

Helped by the cold weather, the main part of the BBC News at One was getting up to 2.5m. The News at Six was comfortably above 4m.

These programmes have a healthy lead over their direct rivals on ITV 1. But much more importantly, they are the kind of figures those who claim the mainstream media is just a legacy can only dream of.

The BBC must make sure these figures are known about widely.

They are not only a crucial part of the case to justify its own continuing existence, they are also an important part of the wider defence of the mainstream media against those who want to see it weakened or destroyed.

It is worth questioning the motivation of some of those critics.

There is one other rating last week which is worth mentioning for entirely different reasons.

The film Where Eagles Dare has been shown countless times over the decades on major and minor channels. I think I still have a VHS recording of a screening on BBC One in the mid-eighties.

Last Sunday afternoon, it got around 1m viewers on BBC Two.

Yes, an old film on a major channel can beat much-publicised shows on streaming services and minor channels by a country mile.

It’s a good yarn but hardly historically accurate. There were no Nazi helicopters. That is the kind of nonsense you’ll find today in poisonous corners of cyberspace rather than harmless, but brilliantly made, hokum.

And the idea that linear TV and big channels are dead or a mere legacy is equally fantastic

There is no point longing for the days when unremarkable sitcoms would get 10m viewers. Viewers only had three channels to choose from and video recorders were a novelty.

But good programmes on major channels still have a power which minor channels and streaming services can rarely come close to.

The BBC needs to make sure this fact is understood – by the wider public, by politicians and journalists.

After all, it is a statement of the obvious to millions tuning in every night and those who regard streaming primarily as the modern way to “tape something you’d otherwise miss”.

Acknowledgements