Entertainment is alive and kicking

People have been predicting the end of Saturday night television for almost as long as there have been Saturday nights.

Just a few days after this year’s Broadcast’s Indie Survey put so-called “entertainment woes” in the spotlight, The Guardian was warning that Saturday night television is “teetering on the edge of collapse. If the big new thing doesn’t happen soon, it’ll be over.”

Except, well, there’s no imminent prospect of anyone replacing their schedule with pages from Ceefax (one for older readers there) just yet.

Entertainment is the fault line that runs through the UK’s public service broadcasters. It is just as important a part of the BBC – where it has been responsible for launching and nurturing the careers of some of the nation’s great entertainers, not least the late Sir Bruce Forsyth – as its history of great investigative journalism or blue-chip natural history.

And at a time when the BBC’s audience is ageing pretty fast – something it has been very public about – new entertainment formats are critically important to its future.

In a recent Ofcom report, ITV’s brand recognition among young people was significantly higher than the BBC’s. One of the reasons for this is because the commercial broadcaster has the majority of the major entertainment brands – I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!, The Voice UK, Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway, The X Factor, Britain’s Got Talent – and executes them brilliantly.

Entertainment, and the particular form of entertainment that viewers enjoy on a Saturday night, is a key point of difference between linear television and subscription or OTT platforms. And everybody is on the hunt for their own entertainment hit.

So why are they so hard to find?

Well, there are some huge trees in this forest – The X Factor, Britain’s Got Talent, Strictly Come Dancing, not to mention the numerous extensions for kids and celebrities.

The picture is the same internationally. There hasn’t been a new entry into the global formats top 10 since Talpa Media came up with The Voice in 2010.

Alright, many of these shows are not the big beasts they once were, but it is still a considerable challenge to find a format that can cut through.

This is why it’s really rewarding to have successfully launched, and then to have had recommissioned, All Together Now from Remarkable Television for Saturday nights on BBC1. Ditto in Germany, with trampolining format Big Bounce Battle. It was originally developed by our Dutch colleagues two years ago and is a now a hit in Germany for RTL. A two-hour physical onslaught, all on trampolines, on a Friday night. That is stamina – for everyone involved.

And it’s not only blood, sweat and tears on screen. Getting these shows away takes discipline, persistence, collaboration and time.

In the blunt comparison between genres, drama is often credited with long gestation periods, but in our experience, getting a big entertainment show market-ready demands a similar timeframe.

As delegates run the gauntlet at Mip TV this week, they will face the traditional multi-genre assault on the senses: the established non-scripted superbrands and their spin-offs, alongside new challengers, such as our own All Together Now, Big Bounce Battle and, from the makers of MasterChef Australia, Family Food Fight.

The holy grail for those buyers with a broad audience to serve will be, as ever, a format that appeals to young and old, can define a channel, demands live viewing, raises the hairs on the back of your neck and can set social media on fire.

That’s entertainment.

• Peter Salmon is chief creative officer of Endemol Shine Group