Last Thursday night a group of us at work were lucky enough to be invited to a party on board the Dixie Queen at Tower Millennium Pier to celebrate the success of ITV's Royal Wedding coverage. It's actually pretty rare for our department to get invited to this sort of thing, missing out on both the programming events and sales parties by falling into an unglamorous gap in between, and in any case the recession has brought most of that sort of thing to a halt in the last few years. So it was nice to be remembered on this occasion, and great that the company realised that the coverage was something worth celebrating.
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| Team ITV Broadcasting in front of Tower Bridge (thanks to Jess for the photo) |
As well as the hospitality there was a screening of a short film looking how the coverage came to air, and a nice speech from one of the bosses, who celebrated how ITV as a whole - the regions, ITN, Daybreak and the entertainment team - had all come together to produce a great show. It was also mentioned that despite there being no commercial return it was exactly the sort of thing that ITV needed to be doing as a national broadcaster.
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| The 2011 ITV1 presentation scheduling team |
There were also tributes paid to the presentation team, at least three of whom - Phillip Schofield, Julie Etchingham and Mary Nightingale - were present. Most of our team were reduced to children again at being in the company of "Schofe", and after a few drinks one of us plucked up the courage to ask for a photo with him...followed by another...and another...until pretty much all of us had had a snap with him. To his credit he was a complete gent despite us all probably coming across as a bit mad. I explain that we work in presentation and are the ones that gave him extra time when Jeremy Kyle came in under - something he thanked us for! Those opening sequences where Phil and Holly (and Fern before that) stand and chat to each other for long periods owe something to the quite variable length of Mr Kyle's broadcasts. Through the broom cupboard, Going Live! and now This Morning he's been omnipresent through most of our lives, and having briefly met him you can tell how he's managed to stay a success. Put it this way, if it had been Eamonn Holmes we wouldn't have been that fussed about speaking to him...
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| "Call security..." |
On the way out we were all given a copy of the ITV Royal Wedding DVD, which had incredibly hit the shops on the Monday after the Friday wedding (beating the BBC's DVD, so we were told). Unfortunately it's a straight highlights package of the events, narrated by Sir Trevor McDonald, rather than of the coverage itself. You wonder if, had the turnaround not been so quick, they might have sourced the clips from the broadcast itself due to the reaction.
As expected the BBC's coverage had far more viewers than ITV's although not by as huge a margin as expected. One aspect that has been commented on internally is that ITV's audience held in the hours after the ceremony, whereas the BBC's fell away, which indicates people were indeed switching over as I suggested in my previous blog. You'd hope this would give some cause for concern inside the Beeb but, externally at least, it seems happy with how things went. Even this week's edition of Newswatch gives no indication of any dissent - the opposite, in fact. It's not long at all though before those mobile studios outside the palace are constructed once again - with the Diamond Jubilee being the next opportunity for a royal occasion. I hope ITV have already block-booked 2-5th June in Phil and Julie's diaries!
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