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Media
The Voice to go head to head with BGT
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 12 March 2012
The BBC’s latest attempt at a talent show to take on the ITV/Syco Machine – the much previously reported bought in ‘The Voice’ – is set to premiere on the same night as the latest run of Simon Cowell’s ‘Britain’s Got Talent’, with a 45 minute overlap between the two shows.
And while you might think that in the Sky Plus/iPlayer age such scheduling clashes shouldn’t matter anymore, remember this is also the ‘second screening age’, and shows like this are increasingly capitalising on an audience who have only a lukewarm interest in the actual show, but a big interest in bitching about it on Facebook or Twitter – making first airings important again.
The Beeb claims that it finalised the launch date for its new show first, and ITV then deliberately brought this year’s ‘BGT’ monstrosity forward to compete, though the commercial broadcaster says its talent franchise is having to run a month earlier this year because Euro 2012 and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee will steal some Saturday nights from the series in the early summer. And ITV, for its part, reckons the BBC is at fault here, deliberately scheduling its expensive talent show acquisition to compete with ITV’s big earner.
There is still some room for manoeuvre because the schedules for the weekend of 24 Mar will be properly confirmed early this week, though unless one side or the other is willing to postpone launch or move to a Sunday slot – and that seems very unlikely – the two big talent shows of the spring are likely to go head to head. Which means if you, like me, intend to watch neither, probably best to steer clear of the social networks that night.
