Have you got your daily male?
The shock hit channel of the year is Dave, which transformed its fortunes by simply changing its name while dishing up a diet of rerun car shows and comedies
Dave, a rerun channel that targets men by showing old episodes of QI, The Catherine Tate Show, Have I Got News For You, Never Mind the Buzzcocks and Top Gear, has proved to be the surprise TV hit of the year. In its first four weeks on air, Dave, a rebranded but hardly altered version of UKTV G2, has averaged about 300,000 viewers for Dragons' Den, 350,000 for Top Gear and more than 400,000 for QI.
This suggests incredibly complicated quiz questions posed by a well-educated gay man are more interesting to the British male than the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
"Male entertainment doesn't have to be lowbrow," channel head Chris North explains. "You have to treat your viewers with respect and realise that the audience is much smarter than most TV people give them credit for. We know our viewers love the banter between Paul Merton and Ian Hislop, or Stephen Fry and Alan Davies. They wish their pub banter was like that - smart, funny, knowledgeable - and they secretly wish they could have a drink with those guys, but they know they can't so Dave will do instead."
Impressive performance
Simon Bevan, head of TV for Coca-Cola's media planning and buying agency, agrees, although he seems slightly shell-shocked by the speed of Dave's ascent. "In Vizeum's [media agency] research on the 16-34-year-old male audience in the UK, Dave comes in at fifth place behind E4, ITV2, Sky Sports 1 and Sky One - a very impressive performance.
"Dave seems to be achieving something of a Sun-like phenomenon here. Something that just keeps coming back in any qualitative analysis made of core Sun readers and how they feel about their paper - calling it My Sun. On Dave I'm hearing very much the same: 'It's my channel - it feels like it was made for me.'"
Of course, there is a different, slightly more embarrassing, spin you can put on this if you really want to.
"From a qualitative perspective, in the scores of comments I have picked up from both professional commentators and ordinary blokes, they appear to have cleaned up because almost every 16-44 male I know keeps talking about it - 'three episodes of Top Gear back-to-back: genius!'" says Bevan.
"Most of them thought that it was a completely new format and new channel. Yet incredibly it is almost the same as it was when it had the deathly dull, built-for-the-past moniker of UKTV G2."
In other words, most of Dave's offerings have been available on rerun channels across the cableverse for years and bunched together in exactly the same place, but named UKTV G2.
Simply calling the channel Dave and running a few ads has meant the chaps came flocking around - with viewing in pay TV homes jumping 40% since the relaunch. Effectively, this means most men have said, "Ooh, it's called Dave and it's for men, I'm a man, I'll watch." In other words, if you build it, and make it very, very simple to understand, they will come.
"Yes, it's a very good name," North agrees. "We were looking for a genre name, like sci-fi or comedy, but we don't really have a genre. Then we were thinking for something that was classless, had universal appeal and wouldn't alienate women - because, although we're a male targeted channel, even Top Gear has an almost 40% female audience. Dave came up and I think it's just stood out in an immensely cluttered marketplace."
Lucy Pilkington is senior commissioning editor for Bravo, which also targets men, particularly young men. However, it festoons its output with reality shows about fighting, crime and action in a Nuts/Zoo-style proposition that only lacks the weekly mags' propensity to display topless models embracing each other.
"We're always revising stuff that works well for us, like police, crime, law and order, or anti-social behaviour," she told a recent issue of Broadcast magazine. "But what we need is a new way of looking at anti-social behaviour. Subjects like drinking in England or the asbo nation."
Bravo's highest-rating programmes this year include Brits Behind Bars: US Toughest Jails, Dog the Bounty Hunter and various real-life football hooligan shows. Its top-rated offering was Blade: the Series, which pulled in 443,000 viewers in January, but the drop off from No 1 to No 2 is sharp. Second-placed Brits Behind Bars took 288,000; Dog snatched 217,000, The Unit 199,000 and Football Factories 175,000.
All in all, a depressing view of the British bloke's peccadilloes. But the success of Dave must be a strong indication that street-fighting drunks may not be the way to a man's heart after all.
Dave's approach is one that might work in other fields of media and marketing. We all like a nice brew. Maybe, as Gordon Brown struggles to rescue the image of New Labour, he could call it cuppa tea Labour. And, as for the unpopularity of the euro, why not call it a "bargain". Everybody loves a bargain. Now that's the kind of practical thing a bloke called Dave might do.
Stephen Armstrong
The Guardian, Monday December 17 2007
Guardian Unlimited
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
The shock hit channel of the year is Dave, which transformed its fortunes by simply changing its name while dishing up a diet of rerun car shows and comedies
Dave, a rerun channel that targets men by showing old episodes of QI, The Catherine Tate Show, Have I Got News For You, Never Mind the Buzzcocks and Top Gear, has proved to be the surprise TV hit of the year. In its first four weeks on air, Dave, a rebranded but hardly altered version of UKTV G2, has averaged about 300,000 viewers for Dragons' Den, 350,000 for Top Gear and more than 400,000 for QI.
This suggests incredibly complicated quiz questions posed by a well-educated gay man are more interesting to the British male than the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
"Male entertainment doesn't have to be lowbrow," channel head Chris North explains. "You have to treat your viewers with respect and realise that the audience is much smarter than most TV people give them credit for. We know our viewers love the banter between Paul Merton and Ian Hislop, or Stephen Fry and Alan Davies. They wish their pub banter was like that - smart, funny, knowledgeable - and they secretly wish they could have a drink with those guys, but they know they can't so Dave will do instead."
Impressive performance
Simon Bevan, head of TV for Coca-Cola's media planning and buying agency, agrees, although he seems slightly shell-shocked by the speed of Dave's ascent. "In Vizeum's [media agency] research on the 16-34-year-old male audience in the UK, Dave comes in at fifth place behind E4, ITV2, Sky Sports 1 and Sky One - a very impressive performance.
"Dave seems to be achieving something of a Sun-like phenomenon here. Something that just keeps coming back in any qualitative analysis made of core Sun readers and how they feel about their paper - calling it My Sun. On Dave I'm hearing very much the same: 'It's my channel - it feels like it was made for me.'"
Of course, there is a different, slightly more embarrassing, spin you can put on this if you really want to.
"From a qualitative perspective, in the scores of comments I have picked up from both professional commentators and ordinary blokes, they appear to have cleaned up because almost every 16-44 male I know keeps talking about it - 'three episodes of Top Gear back-to-back: genius!'" says Bevan.
"Most of them thought that it was a completely new format and new channel. Yet incredibly it is almost the same as it was when it had the deathly dull, built-for-the-past moniker of UKTV G2."
In other words, most of Dave's offerings have been available on rerun channels across the cableverse for years and bunched together in exactly the same place, but named UKTV G2.
Simply calling the channel Dave and running a few ads has meant the chaps came flocking around - with viewing in pay TV homes jumping 40% since the relaunch. Effectively, this means most men have said, "Ooh, it's called Dave and it's for men, I'm a man, I'll watch." In other words, if you build it, and make it very, very simple to understand, they will come.
"Yes, it's a very good name," North agrees. "We were looking for a genre name, like sci-fi or comedy, but we don't really have a genre. Then we were thinking for something that was classless, had universal appeal and wouldn't alienate women - because, although we're a male targeted channel, even Top Gear has an almost 40% female audience. Dave came up and I think it's just stood out in an immensely cluttered marketplace."
Lucy Pilkington is senior commissioning editor for Bravo, which also targets men, particularly young men. However, it festoons its output with reality shows about fighting, crime and action in a Nuts/Zoo-style proposition that only lacks the weekly mags' propensity to display topless models embracing each other.
"We're always revising stuff that works well for us, like police, crime, law and order, or anti-social behaviour," she told a recent issue of Broadcast magazine. "But what we need is a new way of looking at anti-social behaviour. Subjects like drinking in England or the asbo nation."
Bravo's highest-rating programmes this year include Brits Behind Bars: US Toughest Jails, Dog the Bounty Hunter and various real-life football hooligan shows. Its top-rated offering was Blade: the Series, which pulled in 443,000 viewers in January, but the drop off from No 1 to No 2 is sharp. Second-placed Brits Behind Bars took 288,000; Dog snatched 217,000, The Unit 199,000 and Football Factories 175,000.
All in all, a depressing view of the British bloke's peccadilloes. But the success of Dave must be a strong indication that street-fighting drunks may not be the way to a man's heart after all.
Dave's approach is one that might work in other fields of media and marketing. We all like a nice brew. Maybe, as Gordon Brown struggles to rescue the image of New Labour, he could call it cuppa tea Labour. And, as for the unpopularity of the euro, why not call it a "bargain". Everybody loves a bargain. Now that's the kind of practical thing a bloke called Dave might do.
Stephen Armstrong
The Guardian, Monday December 17 2007
Guardian Unlimited
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
