Viewers fail to turn on The Box

HOST Keith Duffy’s magnetic charm and rugged good looks aren’t enough to save TV3’s reality show The Box, which is attracting just 160,000 viewers a night.

Pulling even fewer viewers than last summer’s roundly panned Love Island, the reality TV quiz show is getting 4.3% of the audience share.

On its opening night, on Monday, 156,000 viewers tuned in to watch two contestants locked in a glass box answering quiz questions and tackling challenges for a prize fund of e1 million.

The following night, the show’s audience rose to 167,000 — compared to 378,000 watching Primetime on RTÉ One and the 265,000 tuning in for police soap CSI on RTÉ Two. Nobody from TV3 was available to give Wednesday night’s figures.

In The Box, two contestants pit their wits against one another over 24 hours with the loser getting kicked out, and replaced with a new hopeful.

The half-hour show — filmed live from a see-through studio in Dublin’s Wolfe Tone Square — will run nightly until a grand finale on Saturday, October 28.

Media lecturer Dr Roddy Flynn, from Dublin City University, attributed the poor audience figures to its flawed replication of the Big Brother format.

“The contestants on The Box are constantly changing, so it will be hard to establish viewer identification with the characters or to get viewers emotionally committed.

“The success of Big Brother is that the contestants are there every day and viewers get to know them.”

The show has also failed to capture the imagination of the general public, who were invited to gather outside the studio.

Despite offering free tickets, TV3 has struggled to get more than a handful to the 1,000-capacity arena.

Dr Flynn said the viewing figures were disappointing.

“TV3 gets between 10% and 13% of the market share on any given day, but its success is exaggerated by Coronation Street and Emmerdale.

“If you take away two shows they would have far less market share so 4.3% is not so bad. But with them, market share for The Box is not totally healthy.”

Compared to the TV3’s top 20 shows for last week, the Box would come 17th, putting the programme behind Trading Spouses, a copycat of BBC’s Wife Swap.

TV3 publicity manager Deirdre Walsh said the station was delighted with The Box’s audience figures to date.

“These figures are up on last week’s Law and Order SVU, which had 143,000 viewers, and the middle of movie Childhood Sweetheart with 148,000.”