Someone at the BBC either had a spasm of brutal honesty this weekend or simply forgot one of the cardinal rules of social media: Always, always, always read the full post before reposting.
The national broadcaster was embarrassingly caught out after one viewer / listener, Kerry Locke, took to Twitter to inform her followers that she as giving Gary Barlow’s new reality talent show Let It Shine a miss in favour of an evening accompanied by the dulcet strains of BBC Radio 2.
For the unaccustomed, Let It Shine revolves around the former X Factor judges’s completely non-egotistical national search for someone to star in the Take That musical, The Band.
The show’s premier last weekend clearly didn’t do anywhere near enough to convince Kerry to tune in again this weekend as she tweeted:
https://twitter.com/kezzy999/status/820352428163862530
Someone at BBC Radio 2 picked up on the fulsome praise of their DJ Liza Tarbuck in the tweet but crucially missed the hashtag #Letitshit.
The retweet was swiftly deleted once the error was pointed out, but as is always the way with this sort of thing, it only takes a minute. A few screen-grabs were soon circulating on Twitter, and it was now too late to take the mistake back for good.
https://twitter.com/Cat1977/status/820360384821547009
In fairness, Kerry Locke was far from the only one switching off. The show shed more than a million viewers this weekend, attracting only 5.7 million after its premier peaked at 6.8 million.
BBC bosses will have to think of something very fast to relight this fire.
