Castaway is cast away

[Teddy Bear]

Regarding bias and taste, the arrogance of the BBC more often than not has them simply refuting any accusations made against them, while 'justifying' their particular actions. So far they have no riposte for failing viewer figures, although one can be certain that the BBC internal attitude is probably to blame the viewer for not liking a particular programme.

In this case as the article notes, "With a supposedly winning formula of sun, sea, sex and struggle for survival, the reality programme Castaway was meant to be one of the BBC's surefire success stories. "

So what went wrong? No creativity! We've long seen that the media in general believe they have the formula for a 'hit', and use manipulation to try and make it happen.

BBC reality show is cast away to a midweek slot
By Geneviève Roberts
Published: 27 March 2007
It was a television show that was thought to have all the right ingredients for a prime-time hit. With a supposedly winning formula of sun, sea, sex and struggle for survival, the reality programme Castaway was meant to be one of the BBC's surefire success stories.

But it seems viewers no longer share the producers' enthusiasm. The broadcaster yesterday announced the show was being removed from its prime-time Sunday slot and well and truly cast away to the murky waters of early evening midweek viewing.

Though the launch episode of the reality programme attracted 4.1 million viewers, only half of that number tuned in to last night's episode, where a former drug addict, Jason Ross, was voted off the remote island off New Zealand. It was believed to be one of the lowest ratings ever for a BBC1 Sunday night prime-time series.

The BBC said yesterday the hour-long Sunday show would be replaced with three half-hour slots at 7pm on Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday nights, designed to give the series a "different pattern and presence," according to a spokesperson for the BBC.

"The feeling is that maybe Castaway needed to reach the audience in a different way. We are trying something new and there will now be an extra half an hour of programming each week," she said.

The show has also been screened nightly on BBC3, gaining 58,000 viewers on average each night.

David Butcher, a television critic for the Radio Times, said: "It's so easy to get the scheduling wrong, or the chemistry between contestants wrong, on a show like this. I don't know whether BBC1 is the right place for reality shows, and though moving the slot is not a disaster, it is a bit of an admission of defeat.

"Danny Wallace, the presenter of the show, has a great future in television, but it was brave making him the face of a big peak-time series when few people would have known him before."

Butcher said that while the original Castaway was more like a documentary, an engineered social experiment, in the seven years that have passed, expectations from viewers watching reality formats had changed and producers had to take account of that. "But lots of people thought this was going to be a hit, and it is easy to be wise after the event," he said.

An industry expert from a rival television channel, who chose to withhold his name, said that he could not understand why the BBC was removing the show from prime time. "The BBC should not just be focusing on ratings, it is acting like a commercial broadcaster. If the BBC believed in the idea enough to spend between £10m and £15m on it, they should believe in it enough to continue broadcasting it on prime time."

The first series of Castaway, also made by the production company Lion Television and broadcast in 2000, saw 36 people live for a year on the island of Taransay in the Outer Hebrides. Seven people left during the year, including Ron Copsey, who won an £8,000 settlement from the BBC after claiming he had been misrepresented. The carrer of the Countryfile presenter Ben Fogle was launched by the show.

Last year, BBC1's controller Peter Fincham was reported to have said: "Castaway is a BBC reality show that actually pre-dates Big Brother. It was a big success. What we're thinking about is, how could it work today?"

He will be hoping that the change in scheduling will make the show work in a post-Big Brother world.