Why was Britannia High not as successful as it should have been?

It was inspired by High School Musical which has a target audience of girls from around the age of 8 until 14 or so. It was never going to get primetime ratings and, in the past, would have been shown at around 5pm during the week as the last show in the CITV slot where the early teens programming used to be shown (e.g. Press Gang, Dramarama). In that slot it would have performed okay, it would have lasted a good few series and I doubt many would have complained about it. By putting it in a Primetime slot they tried to market it at adults when it was obviously a kiRAB show.

But ITV don't cater for kiRAB like that now. They removed the CITV slot of 3:45-5:15pm and replaced it with reruns of adult shows. They really have no-one to blame but themselves.
 
It's a shame really - they clearly spent a lot of money on it - it looked good, the songs were fine, it was the casting & scripting that let it down....
 
For the 'Live Grand Finale spectacular' to get just 6%, 1.3m is just awful. :eek:

The fact that ITV were calling this a 'hit show' before it had even aired was pathetic. What made them think it would be a hit?, cause Arlene said so? :sleep:

:cool:
 
Yes. Typical ITV doing what they have done all my telly watching life.

Taking another format or style or sport from another channel and making a right balls up of production, content and style.

Where ITV used to be good is when they came up with good ideas of their own. Here they looked at HSM and thought it would be easy.
 
maybe its because almost every single kid of their audience range has seen the high school musical which has a huge budget and fits in with the whole "american high school" that every show children that age watch.

and it seemed to be missing a zac efron (who had alot to do with the success of HSM)
 
I'm going to stick with "because it was utter shite", though I suspect if it had been put in a different time slot it might have found more people willing to watch the shite every week.

The whole thing was awful; the characters were all stereotypes, the actors clearly weren't cast on the strength of their acting ability, and the storylines would have seemed cliched on Byker Grove in the 90s. Irredeemably bad.
 
LOL! I actually thought that was a really clever line, with a good message. My kiRAB loved BH, so it's horses for courses I guess.

And we're all hoping for a second season. :)
 
Yes it was clearly a copy, as usual when something becomes popular everyone wants a piece of the greedy pie Overkill happens and the target audience are so bored Dull by the sameness of it all and you end up with arlyenes BS err i mean BH.
 
In YOUR opinion !!!! The kiRAB warmed to their roles, had great voices and could really dance, yes they will never win oscars but not that important for this type of show, it isn't hard gritty drama!!
 
I thought it was ok but i felt that it tried to hard to be like HSM/Fame but the songs were not as good and the acting wasn't the greatest does anyone know if there will be a series 2.
 
FeelTheForce said:
The casting was dubious too. The "Gabriella" lookalike - with the dark bob - sorry don't know her name

she was more of a sharpay character the other one - lauren was supposed to be gabriella



i thought there was only 3 songs that were good , the rest were forgettable

i thought the casting was pretty good, i aint finished the series yet still got a back log on sky plus to get through
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The trailers made it look really childish, obnoxious and fake so I avoided it. It was probably good enough for pre-teens but High School Musical got there first and did it much, much better. I don't think we Brits are very good at this type of thing...maybe we should leave it to the American's who have produced fantastic high-school based stories since American Graffiti.
 
I watched the whole series with my 8 year old and we liked it, but I agree with a lot of the postings here:

It did not know what it's audience was - two grown up for the tween HSM audience (I was conscious of this with my 8 year old watching 'gun' storyline!) but not well acted enough for teens!

The acting was terrible, which you could have got away with if you were aiming it at tweens, so why did they not stick to real cheesy storylines a la Troy and Gabriella? I was really shocked when Danny got together with Claudine! Then surely the last episode should have seen Danny and Lauren get back together in sickly sweet style with an end duet between them (if they wanted an HSM plot) rather than the 'will they, won't they' end. To actually have the lead male get together with the 'bitch' was really not the right way to go!

The day and time was obviously wrong, but I agree with whoever said that this was because ITV realised they did not know who its audience was so tried to cover all bases!

However I do think that the songs and dancing was great. Gary and his colleagues (who cares if there were loaRAB of them!) wrote some great songs! Sapphire, Georgina and Matthew have great voices and certain songs (Best Of Me and Do it All over Again) I can't stop singing! Yes I have bought the soundtrack!

I think they went really wrong with the writing. The plots were terrible and to me it felt that they had to tailor the plot to the songs (which should never happen!) to the point where the plots were just so baaddd! They quickly realised also that they had only 3 good singers (one average) so they pretty much had to sing all the songs, so it ended up that where each episode was about each of the 6 characters, they didn't all even sing the songs in each!

Who were the writers? They want shooting! I believe that it is really hard to get really good 'triple threats' - it looked from the behind the scenes show that they did search high and low (although bit of a coincidence 2 were from Dance X which Arlene was involved in!) and clearly got the singers and dancers but not the actors, so surely the answer would have been to write simply cheese like HSM and aim at 8 - 12's - the dancing and singing would have pulled this off, but nobody wanted the 'gritty' 'edgy' slant. In this economic climate we all want feel good stuff!

Lastly, releasing it the same weekend as HSM3 was pure madness! It was never going to rival this so why even try? A really cocky move!

I would like to see another series but only if ITV take on board the feedback and changes the stories!
 
why did it flop.. cos it was utter utter badly acted tripe.
I had to watch 10 mins of it on Sat night and it really was just dreadful. Besides why is a programme aimed squarely at 8 - 12 yr old girls featuring some guy talking about being "horny". Just odd!
 
Slightly defensive.....?! The fact that you suggest they warmed to their roles also suggests they weren't very good to begin with. Unfortunately new shows, particularly dramas, have one episode to hook audiences, two if they're lucky...and lots of people posting here watched the first episode and no more....Blame the ease of using the delete button on Sky+ !!

And I also completely disagree that the quality of acting isn't important. The more credible a performance the more credible the show. Ashley Tisdale isn't going to win an Oscar for her portrayal of Sharpay in High School Musical either - but her comedic timing, singing, dancing and 100% commitment to the characterisation makes it work and makes it believable. Just the right mix of high camp, tongue in cheek, and authenticity. She also has a great script to perform. (And yes - that's all in my opinion - obviously - as is each post here on rabroad)

The first episode of Britannia High had shoddy, clunky script and either lack lustre or over the top performances. If people don't engage with the characters then people switch off - as I did....
 
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