Most desperate thing a tv show has done for ratings?

[OneUmberJoker]

Having influencers on them

Two girls kissing. Brookside. It was a HUGE deal.

A friend of mine travelled from the US over here for a trip around the UK and on his first night he messaged me asking about how this show was able to be on TV. We still have a good laugh at the surprise he got when he turned on the TV that day. 🙈🤣

There was a show called The Swan early 2000's. Women underwear extensive plastic surgery and various other procedures and then competed in a series of beautiful pageants. It was brutal.

Oh I had completely forgotten about that. Crazy stuff.

Embarrassing Bodies - loved that show but they definitely made the most out of wonky todgers and noonies for the ratings.

It's available on Amazon Prime, don't watch it though, its utter shiteness will destroy your fond memories of youth 😆.

Americans aren't used to nudity on TV. It's always funny to see them freak out about a random cock and bollocks that unexpectedly appeared 😂

My least favourite bit is when the male contestants walk across after being eliminated. Their meat and two veg swinging about.

There's something genius about them all behaving as if this is a perfectly normal thing to be doing😂

Omg it’s gotta be Bobby’s ‘it was all a dream’ death!

That in turn reminds me of Balls of Steel, with Mark Dolan. Some of it was very funny, but mostly it was surreal and just left you open-mouthed at what people would do to get on telly.

I think the weirdest act was The Pain Men, who would just (as the name suggests) inflict quite serious pain on each other, and it was obviously real and not staged - you could tell from the looks on their faces.

Yes, that one was so appallingly misjudged. I think the makers of the programme extremely naively believed that the secret would be revealed at the end and then everybody involved would have a big lighthearted chuckle about it.

It ended horrendously for poor Miriam; and several of the men who were seeking to date somebody they'd been very firmly led to believe was female took the makers to court for deliberately deceiving them and humiliating them on TV.

There’s a documentary on Netflix or somewhere about this and the repercussions of the show which is an interesting watch

Stranger things have dine this twice.

I think it reeks of desperation when there's a Musical episode.

I remember one of the early ones where they revealed the contestants in their booths up to their waists, and they had one with very clear female genitals, but Anna 'clarified' that the contestant identified as a man... or it might have been the other way around.

That was truly surreal, without even any clothes or other stereotypical signs of the opposite sex to try to set the scene; literally just somebody saying they were the opposite of what all the evidence was screaming. It was especially weird on a dating show, where presumably most of the 'pickers' knew the basics of whom they were attracted to and thus would consider as a partner, regardless of what the person in the booth felt about it.

They also frequently had a token very overweight or otherwise less conventionally physically attractive person in one of the booths - then the picker would say really positive, kind things about them, but you could tell a mile off that they would never for a moment consider picking them. I'm sure that plenty of these people had a lot going for them personality-wise, but when they appeared as nothing more than a temporarily headless naked body to be seen by somebody who had to choose one of them to reject, it was extremely obvious what the result was going to be.

I was going to say that. Although I can’t imagine why they thought it would increase ratings!

Omg the greys musical episode was watched once and only once, despite my having done several rewatches of the series 😄

I posted up thread about this.
How did this get pitched ,right idea for a new gameshow....
And how did it get the green light!

I watched an episode in which it was obvious all along that the average-looking male contestant was going to pick the beautiful young French woman. He rejected one or two of the women supposedly because they had short hair and he really liked long hair. Finally, he rejected a long-haired woman in favour of the French woman, who had a short bob.

After their clothed date, he wanted to see the French woman again, but she wasn't really interested, presumably because she had a beautiful face, figure and accent, so didn't have to settle for an average-looking older bloke. I'm not sure that anyone learned anything from watching this.

Showing my age here, the plane crash in Emmerdale (Farm) when they killed off half the cast.

It worked. I started watching and never stopped.

Channel 5 have started to settle down and behave themselves a lot more now, but there was a long time when they would do absolutely anything for publicity and headlines.

Channel 4 did the same as well, notably under Michael Grade - especially when they had their grubby, gratuitous long 'Red Light Zone' season.

Yes, he agreed to do it (maybe he needed the money?); but I always felt so sorry for Cheggers when he died tragically early, having been responsible for a great deal of top quality popular TV and radio that brought lots of pleasure to the public for years... yet what single one-off programme did much of the media focus on in their 'tributes' to him?

yes I was going to say this. It really is the absolute pits.

It’s not the same as some of these but an Indian Tv channel created the world’s largest butter Krishna to promote a show.
I got to see it in person.

https://archive.adgully.com/sab-tv-unveils-the-world-s-tallest-krishna-sculpture-made-of-butter-61986.html

I watch a lot of tv hence the threads I do

I haven’t seen a lot of things mentioned here

quite relieved as well

I live a sheltered life it seems 😂😂

Ironically, the contestants tended to keep their arms close to their sides - it was all of the other 'less public-friendly' body parts that they showed off

Reading tge subject i had thought about programmes that did thing because the ratings had dropped, rather than programmes that were created based on the desperate thing from the start. On those i agree with those mentioned- especially Naked Attraction!!

with the desperate to bring back yo ratings, i think i might have stopped watching (or maybe never started) most programmes before they got to tge desperate stage! But I used to absolutely love a programme called My Kitchen Rules. It started to slowly decline as it focused more on the contestants personalities, seemily keeping in the unplesant ones regardlessof the food they produced.. Got to a season where they brought back the past contestants to compete again. Not past winners - just the most controversial ones. It was awful.