Bad news for Toñi Moreno: his program on RTVE, Plan de tarde, closes, four months after its premiere. This has been decided by the public entity after failing to overcome audience data that has been falling since its premiere and that for the Public Corporation made it impossible to continue maintaining it. As this newspaper has been able to confirm, RTVE communicated it to the producer, Tesseo, this Monday at noon.
Although RTVE’s contract with Tesseo (Lazos de sangre), the producer in charge of Plan de tarde, was for 13 programs for a total amount of 1,957,711 euros, the interim president, Elena Sánchez, insisted that the program go ahead. Thus, of 13 installments that were agreed, RTVE has broadcast 15. However, the poor audience data that on average have not exceeded 7%, well below the channel’s screen share, have led RTVE to have Definitely made the decision to cancel it.
A hard blow for Toñi Moreno after having left Mediaset and having opted for his return to the public entity after several years trying his luck at Telecinco. “It’s a gift,” said the presenter at the presentation of the new program last January.
Toñi Moreno thus returned to RTVE with Plan de tarde, a live magazine on Sunday afternoons on La 1 with the aim of entertaining and accompanying and, at the same time, confronting the leading weekend magazine, Emma’s program Garcia on Telecinco, Fiesta. The intention of Plan de tarde was to create a space to approach the social chronicle and comment on the latest news about our celebrities, with specialized journalists and interviews with the protagonists.
It got off to a good start, with a 9.4% audience share, but as the programs went on, the audience rate fell to the point of making the program unsustainable.
The decision, although from one day to the next, has not caught the producer of Plan de tarde very much by surprise. As this newspaper has been able to learn, the poor audience data and the inability to overcome them suggested that the cancellation could come at any time, although there were hopes that the program would last until the beginning of the summer season.
However, the low audience figure marked this Sunday that did not even reach 6% has precipitated the cancellation, although the complaint on the part of the program team is that, for example, this Sunday the program was shortened due to the Conde Godó Trophy and a movie is also scheduled.
In addition, it is even more surprising when a few weeks ago Elena Sánchez, after being asked in the Mixed Commission of Congress about the future of Toñi Moreno’s program, asked for “patience” to try to overcome the low audience ratings that were not even achieved despite the news of recent weeks, such as the surrogacy of Ana Obregón, among others.
“The change in programming, offering a new magazine instead of a film, entails the need for time to become known, establish itself and retain viewers, even more so when it is weekly,” said the interim president of RTVE, who confirmed that the Public Corporation was working “to improve the performance of the program by adjusting the rhythm, the story, the staging, the type of interviewees and socialites, the production, the transitions… All with the aim of improving the data of hearing”.
In this way Plan de tarde joins a long list of programs that have been canceled by RTVE this season. From the Todos contra 1 contest, through Vamos a llevarnos bien, the Ana Morgade program that was canceled after a single broadcast, having had “less audience than teletext” in the words of the presenter herself.
The programs of this season -started in January- have not given much less the joys or the audiences that were signed. Also in Congress, a PP deputy was the one who reproached Elena Sánchez for the expense that had been made on programs that were not giving the expected results or commensurate with their cost. At that time, Plan de tarde was already noted, which had then lost 400,000 viewers; Days of TV, Julia Otero’s program, 540,000; All against 1, canceled a week before, 440,000.
Elena Sánchez then recognized these “failures”, described them as “failed bets” and included among them programs that have cost the public corporation a lot of money. Probably the most notorious is Vamos a llevarnos bien, the program presented by Ana Morgade for which RTVE paid more than 3.5 million for 10 installments of the show, produced by The Pool, the producer of Andrés Varela Entrecanales, director of the group editor of El País, in charge, along with Secuoya, of the docuseries on Pedro Sánchez and Moncloa. It only had one broadcast. The program was canceled a few hours after its debut due to its catastrophic audience data.
“I wish we had a crystal ball that would allow us to know how content is going to work and always hit what the public wants,” Elena Sánchez assured then.
As indicated by the ‘popular’ deputy, “RTVE has a budget of 1,193.9 million euros”, of which, “in just one year it has spent 200 on the purchase of external programs that have obtained a ridiculous share of 7.8 %”.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
