Michael Winner's Dining Stars is likely to be axed by ITV1 after just one series, a report has claimed.

The show, which saw Winner visiting people's houses to judge their home cooking, failed to become a hit during its recent run in a primetime Friday night slot.

According to The Sun, ITV bosses had told the food critic that his programme would only be recommissioned if it pulled in an average audience of 4.5m or more. However, when the final episode aired last week, a mere 1.92m were tuning in.

It is thought that network chiefs now believe Dining Stars would have been better suited to a daytime slot like similar show Come Dine With Me.

A source said: "ITV executives really believed in the show, but it just didn't work out. Programmes just can't survive with ratings that low in a 9pm slot. There is a chance it could come back as a daytime show, but it is unlikely."

An ITV spokesman insisted that it is too early to say whether Dining Stars has a future.


www.digitalspy.co.uk/tv/news/a210364/win...-tipped-for-axe.html

More proof that ITV has really gone ga-ga. A daytime format is re-edited for prime time, and then, after it fails miserably, someone wonders if it might suit a daytime slot. Brilliant!

I've never seen it. Anything involving Winner I tend to avoid. I made the huge mistake of going to see Deathwish II in 1982 at the Leicester Square Odeon with a friend. Having not seen Deathwish 1 I wasn't sure what to expect. It is (still is) the worst film I believe I have ever seen in my entire life. A horribly shallow, titillating and obscene film. Obscene as in the nature of the message the film put across, as opposed to the graphic gang rape scenes of which there are two.

It sickened me.

I caught, late one night on TV, a bizarre 'comedy' he made called Bullseye. Michael Caine and Roger Moore were in it, but most scenes appeared to have been shot with the camera either up on top of a wardrobe or down in a ditch. Utterly strange, incredibly cheap-looking and amazingly amateurish.