About TV Quick

TV Quick

TV Quick was a British weekly television listings magazine published by H Bauer Publishing, the United Kingdom subsidiary of the family-run German Bauer Media Group. It began publication on 30 March 1991, in the first wave of titles created by the deregulation of the British television listings market, and it published weekly listings running from Saturday to Friday, together with television features and its own reader-voted awards, the TV Quick Awards. It ceased publication in 2010, after its circulation had fallen sharply, with a final Audit Bureau of Circulations figure of 113,936 for January to June 2010. The magazine is written about in the past tense throughout this profile: on 12 May 2010 Bauer announced a thirty-day consultation with its staff about the title's future, and the magazine closed shortly afterwards.

TV Quick's nineteen years map the rise and fall of the British listings magazine as a mass-market product: born of a legal change in 1991, selling more than eight hundred thousand copies a week by the middle of the 1990s, and squeezed out by 2010 between the premium titles above it and the budget titles, including one from its own publisher, below it.

Deregulation and the launch in 1991

Before March 1991, British television listings were a legal duopoly. BBC listings could by law be published only in Radio Times, and ITV and Channel 4 listings only in TV Times, and rival magazines were restricted to publishing listings in limited forms. Deregulation of the listings market in 1991 destroyed that duopoly at a stroke: from February and March of that year, any publisher could print full advance listings for all channels.

The result was a rush of launches. IPC slashed the price of TV Times, moved it downmarket and launched What's on TV; newspaper groups produced their own weekly guides; and Bauer launched TV Quick, its first venture into British television listings publishing, on 30 March 1991. Magazine histories of the period place TV Quick among the defining launches of 1991, the year the listings market was remade. H Bauer had entered British publishing with the women's weekly Bella in 1987 and Take a Break in 1990; TV Quick extended the house into the listings field it would eventually dominate.

What the magazine contained

TV Quick's core product was its weekly television listings, running from Saturday to Friday, covering the terrestrial channels and the growing satellite and cable provision of the 1990s and 2000s. Around the listings it built the features expected of a listings weekly of its period: programme highlights and previews, television news, and coverage of the soaps and serials that drove weekly viewing.

The magazine understood its readership early. Readership research for 1993 gave TV Quick a female profile of fifty-eight per cent, and in March 1994 Bauer announced a revamp to target women readers, making the magazine more like a women's weekly, with more beauty and fashion articles, pull-out recipes and real-life stories alongside the listings. That blend, listings plus general women's weekly material, was the title's settled formula for most of its life.

Circulation in the 1990s

The deregulated market rewarded the new titles quickly. In the listings figures for 1992 to 1993, TV Quick recorded a circulation of about 709,000, priced at 46 pence, behind Radio Times at about 1,589,000, What's on TV at about 1,431,000 and TV Times at about 1,114,000, but established within three years of launch as one of the four big listings weeklies.

Bauer's own circulation release for January to June 1996 showed TV Quick rising eight point three per cent year on year to 819,056 copies, at a time when the publisher's other titles were mostly falling. That mid-1990s figure was the magazine's high-water mark, evidence of how completely the deregulated market had transferred readers from the old duopoly titles to the newcomers within five years.

The TV Quick Awards

The magazine had its own annual awards ceremony, the TV Quick Awards, decided by a public vote of readers of TV Quick and its sister publication TV Choice. The first TV Quick Awards took place in 1997, with eighteen categories voted for. The winners of that first year show the awards' character: EastEnders took Best Soap, with Martine McCutcheon and Ross Kemp as Best Soap Actress and Actor; Amanda Burton was Best Actress and Robson Green Best Actor; Harry Enfield was Funniest Person; and Only Fools and Horses, Casualty and The X Files won in comedy, medical drama and imported programme categories respectively.

The awards ran annually through the magazine's peak years. In 1998 the winners included EastEnders as Best Soap again, Ross Kemp and Martine McCutcheon repeating their acting wins, Lily Savage as Funniest Person and Friends as Best Comedy Show. In 1999 EastEnders won Best Soap for a third consecutive year, with Amanda Burton again Best Actress and John Thaw Best Actor. In 2000 Coronation Street took the leading soap honours, David Jason won Best Actor, and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? was Best Entertainment Show; in 2001 EastEnders returned as Best Soap, with David Jason again Best Actor and So Graham Norton the entertainment winner. The awards were renamed the TV Choice Awards following the title's closure, and continue under the sister magazine's name.

Competition within its own house

The central irony of TV Quick's later history is that its most damaging competitor was published by Bauer itself. In 1999 H Bauer launched TV Choice at a much lower price point than other titles on the market. TV Choice overtook its main competitor in the audited figures of February 2008 and became the number one weekly newsstand magazine in the United Kingdom. In September 2003 Bauer had also launched Total TV Guide, to cover the growing number of programmes on Freeview and satellite or cable services.

Bauer's listings portfolio therefore had three titles by the mid-2000s, and TV Quick was the one in the middle: neither the premium product nor the cheapest. That positioning, comfortable while the market grew, became fatal when the market turned, because readers trading down had a Bauer title waiting for them, and readers trading up had Radio Times and TV Times.

Decline in the late 2000s

The audited figures tell the decline plainly. For July to December 2007 TV Quick sold 211,608 copies; for July to December 2008 it sold 167,507, a fall of 44,101 copies or twenty point eight per cent in a single year, the steepest percentage fall among the major listings titles in that period. The following year brought a further fall of twenty-seven per cent year on year between 2008 and 2009, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

Contemporary analysis suggested the fall was due to the magazine being caught in a no-man's-land between premium titles such as Radio Times and TV Times and budget titles such as TV Choice and What's on TV. The whole listings sector was contracting at the same time, as electronic programme guides and the internet took over the practical function of a listings magazine, but TV Quick, squeezed from both directions, contracted faster than the sector.

Closure in 2010

On 12 May 2010 Bauer announced that it had commenced a thirty-day consultation period with staff about the magazine's future, and the magazine ceased publication shortly after. Its audited circulation for January to June 2010, its final published figure, was 113,936, roughly a seventh of the sale it had achieved in 1996. Some accounts date the end of publication to July 2010, following the consultation.

The closure was noted in the trade as likely to give a small boost to the remaining listings titles, including Bauer's own TV Choice and Total TV Guide, which absorbed what was left of the audience. The awards outlived the magazine, continuing as the TV Choice Awards, voted for by readers of the sister title that had done more than any other to displace TV Quick.

The listings market it leaves behind

TV Quick's career is a compact history of the British listings weekly. The market it entered in 1991 had been created by law in a single month; within five years the newcomers had taken most of it; within twenty years the printed listings magazine was in structural decline as television itself multiplied its channels and moved its guides on screen.

Within that story TV Quick played a specific part. It was Bauer's founding listings title, the platform from which the publisher built the portfolio that included TV Choice, by 2008 the country's best-selling weekly newsstand magazine, and Total TV Guide. TV Quick itself won its readers' loyalty strongly enough to sustain reader-voted national television awards for well over a decade. It was, in the end, a victim of its publisher's own success at the budget end of its market as much as of any rival's.

Bibliographic record and legacy

For the directory record: TV Quick was a British weekly television magazine, published by H Bauer Publishing of London, in English, founded on 30 March 1991 following the deregulation of the United Kingdom listings market, carrying listings from Saturday to Friday, with a final audited circulation of 113,936 for January to June 2010, and closed in 2010 after Bauer began a consultation on its future on 12 May that year.

Its legacy survives in two places: in the TV Choice Awards, which began as the TV Quick Awards in 1997 and still carry its reader-vote format, and in the shape of the listings market itself, where the deregulation generation of 1991, TV Quick among them, permanently ended the era in which two magazines divided British television between them by law.