Broadcast Now: More woe for Richard and Judy

Oh how the mighty have fallen. Richard Madeley and Judy Finnegan jumped ship from Channel 4 - where they had more than 1 million viewers for their chat show - to the new UKTV channel entitled 'Watch' in a blaze of publicity earlier this year.

To begin with, things seemed reasonably OK with a debut audience of 143,000 for their new show "Richard and Judy's New Position" (including the timeshift Watch+1), which wasn't brilliant but at least was a respectable audience figure for a new beginning on a new channel that isn't available on Freeview.

However from that point onwards it was rapidly downhill for most of the way, with New Position recording an audience figure as low as 17,000 on 28 November, but last night the show reached a new low point with an audience of just 12,000 (with 2,000 extra viewers watching on Watch+1) - a 0.06% share of the total TV audience at the time.

(Even ITV2+1 at 9pm had more than four times the combined audience for Richard and Judy's New Position, by way of comparison.)

This Broadcast Now article does have a glaring error though, notably: "Sky 1, which isn't on the Freeview platform like Watch..." - but the Watch channel (which is surely now the most ironic title for a TV channel ever, judging from its dismal ratings) isn't available on Freeview.

At this rate of decline, it will soon be more cost effective to personally mail out DVD's to anyone who still wants to watch it. That is, if you can find anyone who actually still wants to watch it, and moving the show to 6pm next year will probably be akin to shuffling deckchairs on the Titanic.