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UKTV to rebrand channels
UKTV has revealed that Richard & Judy's new show will air on a channel called Watch, which will replace UKTV Gold+1, and has also confirmed the rebrand of UKTV Drama and UKTV Gold.
Watch will be a contemporary channel showing BBC programmes between six months and two years after their first run alongside original commissions.
UKTV Drama will focus exclusively on crime under the new name Alibi, while UKTV Gold will show older BBC comedy shows and lose the network's prefix from its name. Both channels will, in time, carry at least 20% original content.
All three channels will launch in October.
Watch's schedule will include high-profile shows such as Cranford, Mistresses, Doctor Who, Torchwood and Lark Rise To Candleford.
Richard & Judy's as-yet unnamed primetime 60-minute show will be similar in tone to their previous ITV and C4 shows and will feature the team's popular Book Club. However, UKTV chief executive David Abraham told a Broadcasting Press Guild lunch today that the later time slot would enable the show to be more "unplugged and grown up" with a mixture of interviews, features and live music acts. The couple's daughter Chloe will present some items.
Gold – which UKTV has decided now stands for 'Go On Laugh Daily' – will show classic comedies such as Only Fools and Horses and Fawlty Towers as well as original commissions such as the previously-announced look back at the making of Blackadder.
Alibi's output will include BBC shows such as Waking The Dead and Dalziel and Pascoe.
The new channels follow UKTV's successful rebrand of UKTV G2 as Dave last year, but Abraham said no further channels would follow Dave onto Freeview.
The moves are the latest stage of UKTV's phased rebranding of its ten channel portfolio, which will continue with its factual channels in the first quarter of 2009, followed by its lifestyle channels in the second quarter.
Abraham said the launch of Watch was borne out of a realisation that UKTV Gold and UKTV Drama had something of a split personality.
"The contemporary BBC content sat uncomfortably with the warm heritage programmes," he said.
He added that the rise of video-on-demand had changed viewing habits, creating a buzz around shows for longer, and viewers wanted to find much talked-about shows more easily.
However, he shot down suggestions that BBC initiatives such as iPlayer rendered a further catch-up service redundant, arguing that even with the wider distribution of BBC programmes around the time of their linear broadcast, the combined audience prior to a UKTV screening was typically lower than when UKTV launched 11 years ago.
"We have to think of repeats differently now," he said. "If we can bring viewers high quality material they would otherwise have missed in a fragmented world, we're doing our job.
"When you get this right, people thank you for the clarity it brings to this content that's otherwise dispersed to the four winds. Culturally, everyone's feeling slightly out of date."
