It was billed as the programme that would revive Simon Cowell’s fortunes – but his new primetime television format, Walk the Line, has instead been comprehensively beaten in the ratings by the high-brow quizshow Only Connect.
The new ITV show began its six-night run on Sunday night, in the hope that the format could bring back the success of his now defunct The X-Factor. Instead, Walk the Line’s ratings have fallen off a cliff as Cowell struggled to recapture the combination of emotional backstory, audience excitement and musical appeal that gave him two decades of television success.
Part of the problem might be that an increasingly media-savvy audience is aware of how backstories are used to manipulate audiences, according to the culture writer Scott Bryan.
He said: “Musicians can now just use the internet to get famous. We’re cynical of the sob stories and the whole thing whiffs of being done to artificially create emotions like X-Factor. We can now look through it.”
Walk the Line features five acts performing every night in front of judges, with Cowell deciding to stay off-screen and instead letting the likes of Craig David and Dawn French offer their verdicts on each performance. In each episode, the previous night’s winner has the choice of either going home with a modest sum of money – or risk “walking the line” and going head-to-head in a vote with the latest winner for the chance to secure a £500,000 prize.
The Guardian’s own review described the show as like “hooking up the corpse of The X-Factor to an electrical current and making it jerk about for kicks”.
Walk the Line attracted only 3 million viewers for its hyped launch episode on Sunday night, despite having a high-profile host in the form of Maya Jama and benefiting from people tuning in for the final of I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!.
By Monday, the audience for Cowell’s primetime singing show had fallen to 2.1 million, according to figures provided by Digital-i. By comparison, during the same timeslot 2.7 million viewers tuned in for the latest episode of BBC Two’s hieroglyph-fixated programme Only Connect, where teams attempted to work out the connection between George Orwell, the former health secretary Jeremy Hunt, the Wilkins family, and Paddington Bear.
The answer, incidentally, was that they all had a connection to marmalade, with Hunt having run a disastrous business venture exporting the breakfast spread to Japan, only to find out there was little appetite for it locally.
Cowell’s company – which has hopes of selling the Walk the Line format to other television channels around the world – may wish to take note.
