The cancellation of BBC Scotland soap River City needed a little more transparency from the start. The BBC release said simply viewing figures had drifted down. A narrative emerged that it was reaching 500k viewers a week. That probably wasn't true since 2002. The launch episode was around 750k, but within three weeks average weekly viewing was down to 450k.
Clearly the cancellation strategy - to promise to spend the annual cost of River City, at £9m, on new drama, had been planned for the best part of a year. But if they'd also been frank, that weekly reach for the two transmissions is running at c200k, the case would have been cast-iron.
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