TV

ITV confirms THREE high-profile shows from last year have been dropped

Will you miss these three 'underperforming' shows?

ITV has swung the axe on late night slot flop The Nightly Show, as well as drama Fearless and gameshow Bigheads fronted by Jason Manford.

Bosses culled the shows after all three performed poorly during their debut series – with The Night Show losing half of its three million viewers in the first week of the series.

Despite being presented by a variety of celeb hosts including David Williams, Davina McCall, Gordon Ramsay and Dermot O’Leary, the rumoured £10million chat show was mauled by critics and continued to be ignored by audiences.

Read more: David Walliams and ITV savaged for “awful” The Nightly Show

Viewers didn’t like it once nightly, never mind… (Credit: ITV)

It is believed chiefs even pushed the News At Ten back half an hour in the schedules to give The Nightly Show every chance to succeed in the plum 10pm slot.

Fearless, a drama starring Harry Potter star Helen McCrory as a human rights lawyer, was also ditched.

The six-part crime thriller debuted to an audience of over seven million last June, but lost two million viewers for the second episode of the series and barely scraped much over five million viewers again.

Not so bigheaded now (Credit: ITV)

Bigheads, which saw contestants take part in challenges dressed as celebrities with oversized heads, was also pinpointed as a failure in an ITV report reviewing the broadcaster’s performance in 2017.

Attracting around two millions viewers per episode, it went up against and BBC One’s Antiques Roadshow in the same Sunday time slot but pulled in only a third of the audience.

The report confirmed: “Some of our schedule did not perform as well as we had hoped, for example The Nightly Show, Fearless and Bigheads, so will not return in 2018.”

News of the shows being binned was met with a mixed response from those viewers who could remember them.

One viewer was especially displeased, wondering whether Bigheads hadn’t been edgy or trendy enough for commissioners.

But another speculated there may be more to come in the programme cull.

Read more: Line Of Duty copper leaves fans gobsmacked on The Nightly Show

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Robert Leigh
Freelance writer