The I: TalkTV turmoil as insiders fear it will close after Piers Morgan quits nightly show

Story from The I:

TalkTV insiders fear the station could be axed after Piers Morgan moved his show from the struggling Murdoch-owned channel to YouTube, i can reveal.

The presenter said he was leaving the “straitjacket” of television and moving Piers Morgan Uncensored online after two years of largely lacklustre TV ratings.

The loss of its biggest star could signal the end for the opinion-led channel which racked up £34m in start-up costs but has failed to match even the modest audience figures of rival GB News, industry figures said.

Talk’s owners News UK have made an audacious approach to buy the more nakedly right-leaning GB News, which reported losses of £30m last year and is also struggling to attract advertisers, i understands.

A joint venture would allow GB News to tap into the resources of a global media empire, which publishes The Sun and The Times and prevent the two businesses competing for talent such as Nigel Farage, GB News’s biggest ratings-winner.

However GB News, owned by Brexiteer hedge fund tycoon Paul Marshall and Dubai-based investment firm Legatum, has rejected approaches from Rebekah Brooks, News UK CEO, i understands.

“The GB News owners are interested in influencing the political debate. They don’t have the same commercial interests as News UK,” said an insider. “But there is now a channel of communication so the two don’t attack each other leading up to the election.”

News UK declined to comment. Sources suggested “conversations” had taken place between the two broadcasters which had not led to any formal bid.

A move to rebrand TalkTV as The Sun TV, in a bid to tap into the tabloid paper’s wider audience, has also been considered.

Morgan’s claim that he was leaving the “unnecessary straitjacket” of a scheduled television show added to the uncertainty at TalkTV’s London Bridge headquarters.

“The owners want to see a path towards profitability but the viewing figures are stuck in the low thousands,” said one insider.

“Piers was always bigger than the channel and losing him from the schedule has raised fears that the plug is going to be pulled.”

Tom Harrington, head of television for media research firm Enders Analysis, told i: “This will be a big step back for the channel.”

“If you take out Uncensored, there is no indication that many more than around 10,000 people would tune into its linear feed at any time.”

He added: “This obviously calls for a reassessment as to what TalkTV is supposed to achieve and how it should be distributed: maybe it makes more sense wholly online where there is no broadcast code and fewer constraints around the schedule.”

The Guido Fawkes website claimed that Rupert Murdoch had personally “pulled the trigger” on Morgan’s TV show because the star was the “single biggest budget line item” but his “audience wasn’t matching his ego.”

Morgan signed a £50m deal to work across the Murdoch family’s broadcast and print operations, with the three-year deal soon to come up for review.

His production company shares ownership of Uncensored with News UK. Fawkes predicted that TalkTV would be “pared back” and rebranded following Morgan’s departure.

News UK declined to guarantee TalkTV’s future as a live TV channel.

Scott Taunton, executive vice-president of broadcasting for News UK, said: “Creating professional quality, TV-like video that does well digitally – via streaming services and social media – will be the focus of future investment for all our brands, including Talk.”

He added: “It is the right decision for Piers Morgan Uncensored to go digital-first, freeing him from a scheduled show so he can create the right content to grow his already huge global online audience.”

Morgan said the case for moving online was “not just compelling but imperative. The vast majority of our audience is on our YouTube channel which has seen explosive growth in the past year with 2.3 million subscribers and many millions of views for our big interviews and debates. This, in turn, has generated increasingly strong revenue.”

He pointed to his interview with Rishi Sunak, in which the prime minister appeared to accept a £1,000 bet that his flights to Rwanda would take off before the next general election.

Posted on YouTube on Monday afternoon it quickly gained 400,000 views. Delayed due to the King’s cancer diagnosis, the interview was seen by almost 50,000 viewers when it eventually aired on TalkTV.

When the Israel/Hamas conflict began, Uncensored averaged 81,000 viewers and a 0.47 per cent share of TV viewing. But Morgan’s YouTube channel recorded 97.2m views in the same October period, benefiting from his combative interviews with figures from both sides.

One quarter of Morgan’s YouTube views are from the United States.

The YouTube version of Uncensored will drop the hour-long TV format and may not appear daily. It will air when Morgan has an exclusive interview and feature debates on major stories. He may still “pop up” live on TalkTV when he covers a significant event and segments from Uncensored will air on the TV channel.

Uncensored, which aired at 8pm, launched in 2022 with an “explosive” interview with its first guest, former American president Donald Trump.

Other headline-making interviews from Morgan include the November 2022 sit-down with Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo, the full version of which has had nearly six million YouTube views. But nightly TV ratings for the show fell below 30,000 viewers when there was no big name guest.

Meanwhile GB News is preparing for what will be seen as an audition to hold a leaders’ debate at the general election, when it hosts a People’s Forum with the Prime Minister on Monday night.

Mr Sunak has accepted a high-risk invitation to face a live Q&A session with voters on Monday night, staged in the Red Wall swing seat of Darlington.

The event will be moderated by GB News presenter Stephen Dixon, who said: “This is exactly what GB News was invented for. Rishi Sunak can’t shy away from any of this. He’s going to have to deal with real people, the ones he wants to vote for him, saying ‘this is what I want you to do and why aren’t you doing it?’”

Mr Sunak is likely to face questions on topics including immigration and the NHS from a “representative” audience of GB News viewers, whose applications were filtered by polling group Survation to ensure political balance.

GB News said Sir Keir Starmer had been invited to take part in a similar event.

The channel will stage more People’s Forum public debates, with Boris Johnson, set to join GB News in the Spring, tipped to play a presenting role.