If You Could Live In Another Decade,...
ChatterBank4 mins ago
No best answer has yet been selected by blueeyedlass. Once a best answer has been selected, it will be shown here.
For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.There are a whole host of reasons, some more important than others.
The key reason that weekend programming has changed is the the average person is less likely to watch television than, say, fifteen or twenty years ago. We, on average, have more money to spend on leisure activities, have a broader range of entertainments on offer. Audiences for television have dwindled and TV companies (particularly the terrestrial channels) are far less inclinded to spend large sums of money for niche audiences.
The other main factor concerns the fragmenting of the audience. A decade or two ago, when there were only a few channels, programming at the weekend, especially Saturday afternoon, tended to target family audiences and work to please the broadest of audiences. The massive increase in the number of channels available to us has directly led to specialist, or niche programming, pandering to a narrower but more clearly defined audience. (Even on the main four, you can see this - Channel 4 Friday nights are clearly targeting a very specific demographic). This, in turn, leads to less family programming, which leads to more fractured viewing tastes. The cycle carries on, and leads, inevitably, to rubbish Saturday night TV.
When i was younger it was all about saturday night, my granparents would come for tea and we would watch the generation game then the rest of the family would arrive and we would watch tv and talk all night it was fab, its just not i like to stay in every sat night but when i do i wish there was something worth watching, the only way we can save sat nights "BRING BACK ANT AND DECS SATURDAY NIGHT TAKEAWAY PURLEESE"
weekend telly tends to be a little uninspiring during the summer because audiences are smaller as people leave the house more. television in the uk follows a similar pattern to that in the US. New and popular series are launched in the autum/winter and the summer is given over to repeats and cheaper programming as well as sports. All t.v. companies have a finite budget and will target the biggest portion of this budget to bring in higher ratings at key times.
jim