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Emma Barnett, one of the presenters of After the News.
Emma Barnett, one of the presenters of After the News. Photograph: Ken McKay/Rex/Shutterstock
Emma Barnett, one of the presenters of After the News. Photograph: Ken McKay/Rex/Shutterstock

ITV's After the News beats BBC's Newsnight in ratings

This article is more than 6 years old

Early success of current affairs show is boost for ITV and improves chance of four-week run being extended

ITV’s new late-night current affairs show After the News is beating Newsnight in the TV ratings battle, handing a fresh setback to one of the BBC’s flagship news programmes.

After the News has attracted an average overnight audience of 550,000 on ITV since it launched last week, ahead of Newsnight’s 500,000 on BBC Two, and has beaten Newsnight on six of the nine nights it has aired so far.

On Thursday night, the show attracted more than 200,000 more viewers than its BBC rival, according to figures provided by Overnights.TV for the Guardian.

The early success of the ITV show represents a boost for the broadcaster, which has suffered a series of flops in its attempts to fill the programme slots around the late-night news.

After the News is presented by the LBC radio host Nick Ferrari and Emma Barnett, a rising star at the BBC. It airs for half an hour, less than Newsnight, and focuses on studio discussions with high-profile guests rather than original reporting.

The ITV show was initially only scheduled for four weeks but its ratings pave the way for it to be recommissioned.

Senior ITV figures are understood to be pleased with After the News’s performance, although sources insist they are not judging it in comparison with Newsnight.

An ITV spokesperson said: “We will look at the series across the four-week run. We never really tend to make decisions on recommissioning until a series has ended.”

Previous attempts by ITV to launch a new late-night current affairs show have had mixed results. The broadcaster aired The Nightly Show in the 10pm slot for an eight-week run earlier this year. The chat and comedy show was initially derided by critics and viewers, with the average audience tumbling from 2.9m to 1.2m in the first week.

However, ITV has not ruled out The Nightly Show returning for a second series after some guest presenters, such as Dermot O’Leary, proved more popular with viewers than David Walliams, who fronted the first week.

The future of The Agenda, a weekly political discussion programme fronted by Tom Bradby, is also uncertain. The show was last broadcast nearly a year ago.

BBC insiders say the corporation is behind Newsnight and have pointed to a string of recent successes, including praise for its coverage of the Grenfell Tower fire and Donald Trump’s presidency. Last week, it aired an exclusive interview with the actor Emma Thompson about the Harvey Weinstein scandal, which has been watched more than 10m times on Facebook and Google.

The audience figures for After the News and Newsnight do not include viewers watching reruns of the programmes on ITV+1 or the BBC News channel. When these are included, Newsnight is understood to have an audience of more than 600,000 and reach about 4 million people a week. After the News also has the benefit of airing on ITV’s main channel, with Newsnight on BBC Two.

A BBC spokesperson said: “Over the last couple of weeks Newsnight has had a series of news-making interviews with the likes of Emma Thompson, Damian Green and European parliament president Antonio Tajani, as well as some of the most in depth coverage of the independence crisis in Catalonia and investigative reports about the Grenfell fire. It’s a great thing for audiences that ITV is offering more evening news.”

Newsnight has endured numerous controversies in the past few years, in particular for scrapping an investigation into Jimmy Savile’s sex crimes and then running a separate piece that led to Lord McAlpine wrongly being accused of child abuse. This triggered the resignation of George Entwistle as the BBC’s director general in 2012 after just 54 days in the role.

Tom Harrington, a TV analyst at Enders, said Newsnight had suffered a drop in audiences of about 50,000, or 10%, after Jeremy Paxman quit the show in 2014, but its viewing figures had now stabilised.

“Newsnight has seen a decline in viewing since Jeremy Paxman left the show, but probably not terminal, despite rumours,” he said. “After the News is a clear shift in strategy by ITV. Instead of trying to avoid the BBC and scheduling non-news programming like The Nightly Show, it is confronting its main competitor head-on.”

Harrington said After the News was outperforming other programmes that ITV has tried after 10pm.

“It’s early days but ITV will generally be pleased,” he said. “When you remove viewing of Uefa Champions League highlights from that slot average, After the News has been an immediate improvement. Having a regular title in a settled schedule is the aim for ITV and could go some way to addressing the dramatic loss of viewing share by the channel after 10pm.

“It’s probably too early to say whether After the News has had any effect on Newsnight’s performance, as news and current affairs viewing is unsurprisingly linked to current events, but television is a competitive game and ITVs decision to overlap a similar show with a BBC mainstay has so far been vindicated.”

More on this story

More on this story

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