Telly for the masses? How the BBC still caters to the elite

I had quite a surreal experience last night. I decided to stay up to watch This Week on BBC1, so I still had the telly on at about half past midnight when on came... a report on ski conditions at resorts across the world. Eh? I thought. How many people can this possibly be relevant to? So I thought I would do that management-consultancy-milk-round thing and see if I could have a wild stab at it. The only number I can find on the web about how many people from this country go ski-ing is that in 2007, the number was 1.3m. I can't imagine it has become a lot more popular since then, and arguably the GFC (which has to be said with an Australian accent to give it its full effect) means that the number who go is now lower. But let's take the 1.3m, as it's the only one I could find and it isn't all that out-of-date. Weeks in a ski-ing season? I've never heard of anyone who isn't training for the Olympics going ski-ing outside the months of January to April, and rarely past the first week of the latter. It makes the maths easier to say 13 weeks, anyway - an average of 100,000 people a week. Only, it won't be an average, of course. This is bang in the middle of the school term, and what would a conservative estimate be of what percentage of people who ski doing so in the holidays? 75% perhaps? That would leave maybe 300,000 who go in the ten weeks of the school term, which it seems fair enough to distribute evenly. That means 30,000 this week. They covered about 30 resorts, all over the place. Not just France and Switzerland, but Norway and Sweden. I'm probably quite ingrained in the world of ski-ing types, and I have never met anyone who is not partly of Norwegian or Swedish descent who has opted to go there to ski. Or maybe one person. Ten years ago. But no matter... 30 resorts, evenly distributed to be charitable. They did, after all, spend even time on each, with a graphic of conditions, when it last snowed there, and the weather report. So, 1,000 people per resort. Strikes me still as an improbably high number to be going this week, but let's run with it. Percentage of people in the whole population who watch BBC1 at 12.30am? Sadly, I can't find anything that will tell me, but if you consider that Newsnight has an audience of 200,000 on BBC2 starting two hours earlier, then it is fair to assume that fewer than that will still be watching at the end of This Week . Half as many? A third? Out of a total population of 65million people in the country, it's about 0.1% that is still tuned. So, 0.1% of a potentially-interested-in-the-first-place audience still watching at that hour would mean that... there was 1 relevant person watching for each resort that they covered. That's proper niche broadcasting. Never let it be said that the BBC has gone down-market.