FLAGSHIP FEATURE: RICHARD & JUDY
Last hurrah or new beginning?
Will the ‘Richard & Judy’ Book Clubs keep up the momentum when the
show switches to digital television? Tom Tivnan takes a look
Fact: no two people in television have
had a greater impact on the book
trade in the past few years than Richard
Madeley and Judy Finnegan.
Since launching in January 2004, the
82 titles featured on the 10 “Richard
& Judy” Book Clubs and Summer
Reads have had sales of more than
£158 million through Nielsen Book-
Scan, 2.1% of the total UK book market.
Some of the trade’s biggest titles
of the past few years have become
bestsellers largely because they
have been “R&J” selections, including
Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones
(Picador), Audrey Niffenegger’s The
Time Traveler’s Wife (Vintage) and
Kim Edwards’ The Memory Keeper’s
Daughter (Penguin).
The popularity of the clubs has
been achieved not just by pushing
the titles on TV, but by astute
selections by “Richard & Judy” producer
Amanda Ross. “People have
responded to Richard and Judy
because there has been no agenda,”
says Nikki Crowther, W H Smith’s
trading controller for fiction. “There
have been such a wide range of recommendations,
and our customers
really have come to trust the books
they choose.”
Yet as the Summer Reads finish this
week with James Bradley’s The Resurrectionist,
the future of the “R&J”
clubs hangs in the balance. The show
will move from Channel 4 to digital
multi-channel broadcaster UKTV,
and audiences are predicted to plummet.
Retailers and publishers must
be asking themselves what effect this
will have on the promotion.
A digital divide
The “Richard & Judy Show” will be
the flagship programme on UKTV’s
new entertainment channel Watch,
a rebranding of its UKTV Gold +1,
and will run weekdays from Tuesday
to Friday, with a highlights show on
Mondays. The channel will launch
on 7th October, backed by a massive
print and TV campaign. “It’s a fresh,
modern and exciting channel with
books at its centre,” says Amanda
Ross.
Yet no matter how fresh and exciting
the channel is, will many people
see it? Viewer numbers will be limited
as the channel will initially only be
available for Sky and Virgin subscribers.
However, UKTV is positioning
“Richard & Judy” as its main asset,
hoping that TV’s first couple will be
able to boost its profile.
UKTV currently attracts about 27
million viewers a month in terms
of “audience reach”—the percentage
of the population who
view a channel for more than
three minutes in a given day or
week—yet that figure is spread
over 19 multi-channels. The
broadcaster’s highest ranking
station is Dave, its “TV for
blokes” channel. The British
Audience Research Board
(BARB), the organisation that
tracks TV viewership, puts
Dave’s reach for the week ending
20th July (the most recent
figures available), at 11,854,000,
with an audience share of 1.1%.
Its highest-ranking programme for
that week was a repeat of the BBC
series “QI”, which attracted 469,000
viewers. The rest of UKTV’s stable of
channels for that week had audience
shares between 0.1% and 0.6%.
Contrast those numbers with
Channel 4, which for the same
week had a reach of 30,323,000 and
an audience share of 7.2%. “Richard
& Judy” regularly pulls in about 1.5
million viewers in its current midafternoon
slot on Channel 4.
Television insiders are unconvinced
whether Richard and Judy’s
pulling power will be able to break
the broadcaster into the mainstream.
“Time will tell whether
the new show will be successful,”
says Rob Shepherd, multi-channel
reporter at TV and radio trade
magazine Broadcast. “UKTV right
now doesn’t have a broad audience
base, and the ‘Richard & Judy’ show
itself had been losing some viewers
on Channel 4. That said, I think it
is quite a coup for UKTV in getting
them to move to what is essentially
a niche broadcaster.”
UKTV had success when it rebranded
UKTV G2 as Dave, boosting its
share from about 0.1% to its current
levels. Dave, however, is on Freeview;
with Watch currently only slated to be
shown on Sky and Virgin, most TV
analysts say that R&J may struggle to
hit those “QI” figures of 469,000.
22 The Bookseller | 15 August 2008 www.thebookseller.com
“Richard and
Judy have to
shout louder
if they want to
be more than
just a niche
programme”
Marcel Knobil,
brand consultant
So will declining viewers tear the
guts out of the “R&J“ book clubs?
Most in the trade, for the moment,
are optimistic. “The move to UKTV
may actually help because I think they
may put more energy behind books,”
says Tesco’s category manager David
Cooke. “But the power is in the stickers
on the books. When we put the
books into our range, they sell before,
and after, the programmes air.”
The figures back Cooke up. For
the 2008 Summer Reads, for exam-
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