Replacing News At Ten with this tripe gives yet more power to the BBC and damages democracy

VIEWERS of ITV may have noticed that News At Ten has been replaced by a puerile attempt at comedy introduced by David Walliams. He is reported to be paid an incredible £50,000 a show.

News At Ten, already a mere shadow of its former self, has this week been shunted half an hour later, where it is being watched by even fewer people than before. Last week, before the change, it averaged 1.5 million viewers. On Tuesday evening, it managed to garner an estimated 700,000.

Meanwhile, Walliams’ The Nightly Show — a lumbering rip- off of the American late-night talk show format — was watched by 2.2 million people on Monday and less than half that number on Tuesday. So pathetic is the programme that I’d be surprised if its audience doesn’t continue to dwindle further.

This baleful scheduling is supposed to last eight weeks, whereupon ITV executives will consider whether to continue with The Nightly Show. As things stand, it is an expensive turkey (its cost could be as much as £ 10 million), while the once distinguished late evening bulletin may have been damaged irreversibly.

We should weep for ITV, which through ITN once offered a news service comparable to the BBC’s, and arguably superior. But even more than that, we should weep for the demise of choice and the death of pluralism in television news.

Consider the probable consequence of ITV airing its main evening bulletin at 10.30pm. It is that more people will watch BBC 1’s News At Ten, which, with an average nightly audience of 4.1 million, easily surpasses its ITV rival.

Why stay up until 10.30pm to begin watching the television news when you can see it at 10pm on BBC 1? Some will remain with ITV out of loyalty, but the BBC is likely to become even more dominant than it already is.

It is by a huge margin this country’s leading supplier of news, dwarfing ITV, Sky and all newspapers put together. In one survey, 50 per cent of respondents listed the BBC as their single most important source of news.

WITH BBC 1 and BBC 2, its extensive website and its near monopoly of national and local radio, it is hardly surprising that Auntie should have achieved the kind of supremacy more familiar in one-party states.

Of course, there is no disputing that, with its thousands of journalists and unparalleled resources guaranteed by the compulsory licence fee (which, incidentally, increases to £147 next month), the Beeb offers a highly competent news service. But it also has its own world view. Suffocatingly politically correct, it speaks with a single voice that does not represent the values of society as a whole.

I can do no better than quote what one of its presenters, Andrew Marr, said rather incautiously back in 2006: ‘The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It’s a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias, not so much a party political bias. It’s better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.’

Even if I shared the BBC’s historic prejudices ( wildly pro-EU, pro-mass immigration, suspicious of the family and Christian belief), I wouldn’t think it healthy that one organisation should wield so much cultural power.

And that is where ITV News once came in. During its heyday in the Seventies and Eighties, it commanded an audience of many millions, often greater than BBC 1’s. It had first- class reporters, presenters and editors.

It’s not that these people deliberately set out to be less ‘Left-wing’ than their BBC counterparts. It is just that they looked at the world through a different lens, which wasn’t that of the BBC. That was refreshing — part of living in an open society.

I’d say it was little short of a national disaster that the blinkered bean counters at ITV should have, over the years, squeezed news budgets so that the channel could no longer match Auntie with her untold billions. ITV also virtually stopped making grown- up news documentaries.

Even before the latest abomination, ITV News At Ten had been shorn of much of its impact, with Tom Bradby playing the part of an over-casual anchorman trying to introduce the news in as chatty and laid back a way as possible.

And now we have David Walliams. Perhaps we should be grateful that his stint will end on Friday. On the other hand, next week we’ll have in his place the comedian John Bishop, followed by such cultural titans as the chef Gordon Ramsay and ‘funny woman’ Sue Perkins.

Don’t such people already have more than their fair share of airtime? News is an important business — particularly in the age of so- called ‘fake news’. And yet in the slot where we once had Alastair Burnet, Trevor McDonald and Selina Scott, there are lightweights failing to be funny.

On Tuesday, David Walliams pretended to ask Donald Trump questions in a spoof Press conference, followed by an interview with Sex And The City actress Kim Cattrall, who looked about as bored as many of us viewers were. I almost felt sorry for Walliams, though if he really is picking up £50,000 a shot, I shouldn’t.

THE man behind this nonsense is ITV’s new director of television, Kevin Lygo. It’s interesting that when he was at Channel 4 in the late Nineties, he introduced the same American- style format. But at least it was shown at 11pm and did not supplant the news.

It looks as though he may have a commercial disaster on his hands because the audience of The Nightly Show is plummeting and that of News At Ten has halved. The upshot will be less advertising revenue for ITV, which yesterday reported slightly lower profits. But even if News At Ten is restored to its proper time and The Nightly Show is killed off, ITV’s reputation as a provider of serious news will have been further damaged. For that, Lygo and a succession of senior executives over recent years should hang their heads in shame.

ITV is a monolith that swallowed up sometimes creative regional companies in the cause of greater profit. In the process it has increasingly relegated news. The people who now run the company behave as though it is there to do with as they wish.

But it isn’t. ITV has a licence to broadcast, granted by government. This carries with it moral and social responsibilities. One of them, perhaps the most important, is to provide a decent news service.

It’s time ITV was reminded of its obligation to fulfil this remit. I don’t expect it is infringing the letter of its agreement by showing the news when most people are getting ready for bed. But it is undoubtedly in danger of forgetting its duties.

Most newspapers in print form are in decline. The internet is the new Wild West — unregulated and unreliable. Sky News, though excellent, is a minority channel.

That is why the monotone voice of Auntie grows ever more ubiquitous. For those who cherish pluralism, this is a tragedy. More than ever before, we need ITV News to help counter the growing cultural hegemony of the BBC.