Thanks to Ian Hamilton for the following regarding the UK’s Celebrity Wrestling show on ITV. Featuring Roddy Piper as announcer, D’Lo Brown and Joe Legend as the main trainers.
ITV has removed Celebrity Wrestling from it’s Saturday night slot, after the show’s ratings fell to 2.6m viewers last Saturday. The show got off to a bad start when it debuted on April 23 with an audience of just 3.8m (around half of what the last show in that slot drew), and it lost viewers every week, with the BBC’s Doctor Who getting more than twice as many viewers in the same timeslot.
The show will air as usual this Saturday night @ 6.30pm, then it’ll be shunted to another timeslot. The options seems to be to put it on a late-night slot on ITV1, or move the program to a new slot on ITV2 (another channel owned by ITV, but only available to digital TV viewers).
A spokeswoman for ITV said: “Despite a strong start, bringing a large share of younger viewers to ITV1, we have seen that share fall in the last couple of weeks and have decided to take Celebrity Wrestling out of the schedule. Kate Thornton [the presenter] and the team did a great job in what turned out to be a very competitive slot in the Saturday night schedule.”
Celebrity Wrestling was due to run for eight weeks (and will be moved halfway through it’s run); the show was one in a line of celebrity-based shows that ITV was filling it’s Saturday night schedule with, although unsurprisingly, none of them have been a success.
ITV will be replacing the show with Star Wars movies, as an obvious way to get viewers amid the current hype for the Revenge of the Sith movie. As for the remaining episodes of CW, it’s being reported on some media websites that ITV will simply drop the series, and never air the remaining four shows.
