Upmarket dramas were intended to woo middle-class audiences as part of Michael Grade’s reinvention of ITV. Yet, so far the new shows have flopped, leaving ITV’s soaps to prop up the broadcaster’s viewing figures.

ITV1’s audience share so far this year has tumbled to 16.9 per cent in the key 9pm slot, with royal drama The Palace struggling to hold viewers on Mondays and Moving Wallpaper and Echo Beach, the paired soap-cum-drama, delivering audiences as low as 3 million on Fridays.

The figure is down sharply from last year’s 20.3 per cent – and is below the broadcasters’ overall average. Meanwhile the decision to move Dancing on Ice to Sunday has left ITV without a popular hit on Saturday.

News at Ten, reinstated with the bongs and Sir Trevor MacDonald, is achieving just over half the audience of BBC’s Ten O’Clock News, at 2.8 million nightly – a share of 13.8 per cent. Simon Shaps, ITV’s director of televi-sion, said that he would have liked “the volumes on some of the new shows to be higher”. But he added: “Given the scale of the changes we’ve made, we’ve done well – we’re the best performing free-to-air channel and the consensus out there is that we have innovated.”

This year’s schedule is regarded as the first test of the impact being made on programming by Mr Grade, ITV’s executive chairman, since his move to the company just over a year ago.

With ITV’s share price falling last week to 68.2p, Mr Grade will be under pressure to prove that his “content-led” strategy is working when he reports his first set of full-year results on March 5.

ITV1’s overall audience share in 2008 is 19.1 per cent, down slightly from 19.3 per cent a year ago. But Channel 4, its principal rival for advertising, has seen its share plunge from 10.3 per cent to 8 per cent in the absence of Celebrity Big Brother.

Mr Shaps said that ITV would continue its strategy. “It takes a long time for people to change their viewing habits,” he said.

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