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The Neighbourhood Bumped From Its Primetime Slot After Falling Viewing Figures

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Graham Norton’s reality show The Neighbourhood has been pulled from its primetime TV slot just weeks after its big launch.

According to this week’s ITV schedule, The Neighbourhood has been bumped from its regular 9pm slot on Thursdays and Fridays back to 10.45 pm, in a huge blow for the struggling series.

The competition show sees real-life friends and families move into a community to compete against each other for a life-changing amount of money.

In Thursday’s schedule, it’s been replaced by an old episode of Davina McCall‘s Long Lost Family, which originally aired two years ago.

On Friday, meanwhile, the 9pm slot is now occupied by an episode of Beat The Chasers, which was first shown in 2021.

An ITV rep told The Sun: “The full box set of The Neighbourhood is now available to stream on ITVX. Additionally, the show will continue to air in an evening slot on ITV.”

Graham Norton cosies up to a gnome on the set of his new series The Neighbourhood
Graham Norton cosies up to a gnome on the set of his new series The Neighbourhood

Despite its starry presenter, a huge promotional push by ITV and prime-time slot, The Neighbour was met with poor reviews when it premiered towards the end of April, and had reportedly only pulled in 500k viewers by its third episode.

This follows a trend of poor ratings for recent ITV shows they hoped would rival the success of The Traitors, with Genius Game and The Fortune Hotel also suffering from disappointing viewing figures, and both having since been cancelled by the channel.

Despite its poor performance, Graham had previously spoken enthusiastically about The Neighbourhood, insisting: “It leans into our curiosity about what’s behind closed doors and there’s something really compelling and addictive about seeing the way the existing households interact with each other.

“I thought, ‘I’d watch that’ – and I’d never want to work on something I wouldn’t watch. I thought, ‘this show would hook me!’.”

The Neighbourhood continues at 10.45pm on Thursday and Friday on ITV1, with the full series available to stream on ITVX now.

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Graham Norton Recalls This Epic TV Blunder Kicked Off His First Ever Live Broadcast

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Graham Norton has admitted that his early forays into live presenting didn’t get off to the strongest of starts.

While the Irish presenter has now fronted everything from the Eurovision Song Contest and the Children In Need telethon to the BBC’s musical theatre talent searches like Over The Rainbow and Any Dream Will Do, his first live broadcast was on the oft-forgotten, short-lived Strictly Dance Fever, which served as a halfway point between The X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing.

The show was Graham’s first project with the BBC after they poached him from Channel 4, where he’d had big success with his talk shows V Graham Norton and So Graham Norton.

And episode one… well, let’s just say it had a bumpy start.

Graham recalled to Late Night With Seth Meyers: “It was my very first live show and I was hosting a dancing competition – don’t ask.

“So we’re standing in the studio, waiting to go live, the audience are there, the dancers are primed, and suddenly there’s a newsflash – the Pope had died.”

He continued: “I’m on stage, and they’re in my ear, and the newsflash is going on, there’s a guy live from Rome… and they’re going, ‘OK, when we come out of the opening titles sequence, there’ll be no applause’, and I’m going ‘OK’.

“And then, they go, ‘no, there will be applause, but no cheering’. ‘OK’. ‘When you read the opening thing, emphasise the tension of the competition, but not the excitement’… anyway, what they forgot was that when the newsflash ended, it goes to a black screen… and then that merged into our opening credits.”

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However, Graham noted that what the team had forgotten was that the show’s opening sequence also began with a black screen “onto which walked me, in a white suit, approaching a big switch”, which he then pushed “signalling bumping dance music and neon signs exploding”.

“It was like I just said to the nation, ‘yeah, the Pope’s dead… who cares! Let’s dance!’,” he quipped.

Graham, of course, is now best known as the host of his own Friday night talk show, which has now been running on the BBC for almost 20 years.

Elsewhere during his Seth Meyers interview, the star opened up about the one A-lister whose anecdote on the Graham Norton Show had to be cut, and the unexpected origins of his iconic “big red chair”.

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