[Neil Jones]

You never see a wide range of genres anymore. E.g. You never see any gameshows in the guise of 50/50 get your own back or fun house (CITV also had Pump It Up and Twister, Scratch and Sniffs Den of Doom) these days, participations physically against peers. Drama is a rarity but that might have evolved over time into family shows. It's a shame they didn't link with Nintendo and have a gameshow based around Splatoon. They had a show sponsored by Robinsons fruit shoot at one time, seems a shame they didn't do this with other companies.. Factual shows are narrower in focus usually science based, before you have shows about video games and Money management, sports shows tend to focus of elite groups, live action comedy and drama are seemingly too expensive.

The problem here is, YouTube has largely taken over as a source for that sort of factual content (or relatively factual with a pinch of salt it probably should be added), and for YouTube purposes can be done pretty much as a one man operation. Even something like How 2 requires a production team who have this strange concept of wanting to be paid for making the show. Yes you'll probably get a better show, but it will cost more money to make.

Physical gameshows aren't cheap either. Somebody has to design and build a set, somebody has to play test the entire format and somebody has to find the contestants. Even if you just built a game format around dodgem cars on a fairground somewhere, you'll still have to pay to rent that attraction, after all they are private companies at the end of the day...

And let's be honest, Pump It Up (and to an extent Twister) were just reincarnations of old formats. Twister was made by STV who made Funhouse for years and it was pretty much Fun House in new packaging (and not as good either). Pump It Up was just the end game of Run The Risk stretched out to 25 minutes or so in chunks, and very reminiscent of those big inflatable balls you can get into.

Like pretty much all commercial operators, everybody goes for the lowest common denominator programming - maximum profit for minimum outlet. If an episode of a programme can be slapped together for a five digit sum (which is relatively cheap in TV terms) and you can make that back in ad revenue, so much the better.