Truth behind Comedy Central and CliffCentral break-up
The Gareth Cliff show was cancelled on Comedy Central because the viewership figures for the show were too low. This is according to Alison Reid, director of communications at VIMN Africa.
Comedy Central and Cliffcentral confirmed this week that the Gareth Cliff Show will no longer be broadcast on the channel. The last show will be aired on Monday 30 June 2014.
Cliffcentral said that it terminated their agreement with Comedy Central this week because “Comedy Central wasn’t working for either of us, so we made the mutual decision to move on”.
“We felt initially that an additional television audience would expand our reach, in reality, it was holding us back from doing the crazy, fun, provocative stuff we needed to be doing with our new platform,” said Gareth Cliff.
“This is not a failure for CliffCentral and, in fact, has the team really excited about refocusing on delivering streamed, interactive content between 6am and 6pm every week day,” CliffCentral said.
Comedy Central in turn said that the Gareth Cliff show was cancelled because the viewership figures for the show were too low.
Comedy Central would not release official figures, but said that “the ratings were less than we hoped”.
“We mutually agreed to stop after 42 episodes and two months. This was an experiment for both parties and creatively we felt that we hit the right notes but unfortunately the ratings did not live up to the expectation,” said Reid.
“Live TV on this scale is a big investment and it made total sense for Gareth to focus on the online and WeChat aspect of his operations at this point.”
Reid also dismissed Gareth Cliff’s comment that he initially decided to “do Comedy Central because they’ve got such a low audience at the moment anyway”.
“On the contrary, Comedy Central is one of the highest rated general entertainment channels on the DStv Premium bouquet,” said Reid.
Gareth Cliff’s full discussion is available here (from around 02:12)
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