Tuesday 29 April 2008

Dirt digs for viewers...

Tuesday 29 April 2008

The new season of Dirt got a measly 89,000 viewers last night on Fiver (the cheap and nasty new name for Five Life.) Clearly, that's absolutely terrible. But, speaking as someone who watched Dirt last year, and had every intention of watching season 2, here's what went wrong Five bosses:

1. Advertise the fact Dirt is coming back! Granted I don't spend a lot of time watching Five, Five US or Fiver, but I'm not alone in that fact. I'd have watched Dirt last night if I'd known it was on! Pure and simple. Try advertising on other digital channels, not just your own. Even a small advert in a Monday tabloid would have worked for me!

2. Fiver? Wasn't Dirt on FiveUS last year? Yes, it was. So you've confused people. Consequently, I don't have Fiver (formerly Five Life) favourited on my EPG. So I couldn't accidentally stumble upon it while surfing channels, either. And, with the absence of ITV1's The Fixer in the same timeslot now, Dirt would have filled a gap very nicely. So you missed out there.

Oh well. I now know that Dirt is on Mondays at 9pm because of this marketing mess-up. Fiver has been added to my "favourites" list, so I'll set an alert. I'd love to catch a repeat of Dirt this week, but the online Radio Times only finds "Dirty Sexy Money" when I do a search for "Dirt", and the terrible Fiver website is no help whatsoever.

So, guess what Five: you have a (probably) quite expensive US television show, and now everyone's going to download episode 1 from the internet this week. And I'd intentionally "been a good boy" and tried to avoid doing that. But crap like this is why people are disenchanted with TV channels and are turning to downloads more and more...


Dirt, season 2
Fiver, Mondays @ 9pm (repeated Saturdays @ 8pm)*

* yes, I found out when it was repeated, no thanks to the channel that broadcasts it. But I'm going to download it just to "make a point" this week.