The Neighbourhood

An ITV press release said,

"The Neighbourhood will see real-life households from all walks of life move in side by side, finding themselves not only neighbours but also fierce competitors in the ultimate reality showdown.

"This is a game the households will live as well as play. They'll be with each other 24/7, sleeping and eating in their houses, socialising between them - and then voting each other out. The challenges they face in public will change the dynamics behind closed doors. And to win, they'll need to defeat their neighbours, while still staying popular on the street.

"In The Neighbourhood, it’s not about keeping up with the Joneses - it’s about beating them! Bring on the ding-dong!"

Filmed in a real street, in a real holiday village in the Peak District, six households move into the wittily-renamed "Keepyourenemies Close", with a potential prize of £250,000. We were promised "a street-sized popularity contest" between the groups of families and friends.

Before transmission, other websites compared The Neighbourhood to The Traitors; this site got a faint whiff of Channel 4's one-series obscurity Home for the Holidays.

This programme has not yet aired. A full review will appear here after broadcast.

The Campbell Grahams

ITV put a lot of effort into advertising The Neighbourhood, taking out space on billboards a month before the show started, and airing the premiere episode both on the main ITV network and on youth-skewing ITV2.

ITV's publicity blitz was rewarded with a show absolutely nobody watched. The opening episode was sandwiched between two halves of the I'm a Celebrity South Africa final, and lost half of Ant and Dec's audience. Episodes followed on the next two nights, the last of which had a live audience of less than 300,000 - amongst the lowest primetime audiences ever seen in ITV's long history. When it became clear the catch-up numbers were also no good, ITV flung the rest of the series on its website, and gave the last six eps their contractually-obliged airing on consecutive nights after News at Ten.

Two of the Scouse Haus had previously appeared in a S20E3 Taskmaster group task in which contestants tried to identify a person in a lab. Why were two of them there? Because contestants had to run to the hallway and swap with another contestant between guesses, with Lyndsey and Louise switching places every time they did that. You had to be there really. More were than were here...

Weaver's Week review