[zakman440]

Channel 5 boss Ben Frow has admitted that he wants to bump the ‘civilian’ version of Big Brother UK to an 11pm timeslot – but the show’s too expensive for him to do so.

Question marks were raised over Big Brother’s future in primetime in 2014, when a report claimed C5’s owner Viacom was considering pushing it to 11pm – a move first mooted a year before.

Almost two years later, Frow – C5’s director of programmes – reignited the rumours yesterday, when he explained that it had aired at 9pm this summer as a defence against recent sporting events.

Speaking at the Edinburgh Television Festival, he said: “This is an exceptional summer because you’ve had the Euros, then you’ve had the Olympics. We strategically played Big Brother at 9 o’clock in order to protect ourselves, and out of the three commercial channels, we were hit least by this juggernaut.”

Despite facing tough competition, from ITV2’s Love Island as well as the sport, the latest Big Brother is thought to be the most watched in three years.

However, although ratings are up and it’s an asset to C5 against competition from rival channels, Frow admitted he wants to “take a little bit of the spotlight” off Big Brother – and would move it to 11pm if he could.

“In future, Big Brother will play at 10… maybe Celebrity will be at 9,” he said. “Ideally I’d have it at 11, but it’s a bit expensive to play at 11 at the moment.”

The 17-year-old format reportedly costs £20million per series, while C5’s annual programming budget is understood to be just over £200million.

The broadcaster has already cut Big Brother’s length by two weeks, with this year’s run ranking as the joint second-shortest ‘civilian’ BB ever globally.

Despite his mixed signals towards Big Brother, Frow insisted it is a “very valuable” and “really good” show and suggested that he doesn’t want to be the person that “kills” it.

http://www.bbspy.co.uk/cbb18/news/08...#ixzz4ISHstIY8

Since this point was getting some traction in the thread on his full session I felt it would be better to make a separate thread for it. It's an illogical move for him to do this tbh - if anything moving it to 10/11 will make it rate much lower, plus the fact that CBB might stay at 9 just smacks of him wanting that extra excuse to finally bin the civilian show.