You Are What You Repeat - Sunday 7 December 2008

In many ways last night was the real first Sunday of Summer with several series staying an extra week last week, this week we get a look at life with all new 6.30 shows and there’s good news for Seven, bad news for Jamie Durie!

Turns out Jamie was holding them back in the early evening with viewers much preferring to see some animal action, this in turn unlocked a much larger audience for Hot Property at 7pm. Nine had a brief surge of interest for it’s perennial once a year Women’s Weekly promo but I don’t know what they were thinking segueing from Christmas entertaining to a horrid British series (You are what you eat) which upon last inspection had it’s host/protagonist sifting through the faeces of a family of fast food addicts. Not exactly the kind of thing you want to see after planning your Christmas lunch.

Luckily Charlie Sheen resuscitated Nine’s audience at 7.30 with it and lead out Big Bang winning the hour, their 8.30 movie Heist, did alright though not as good as the Drew Barrymore comedy Never Been Kissed which was promoted with the line “Ten Premiere” which I guess means it’s been seen on another network previously. It didn’t stop it recording a timeslot winning audience against rather drab competition.

Seven had a meltdown post 7.30. Everyone must have figured out they’d already seen that Seven Wonders show on ABC resulting in 317,000 less viewers week on week, at least 132,000 of them went to the ABC to watch a documentary on something or other (like I care!), this in turn made things worse for already cancelled British drama Holby Blue. Not even the magical David Leckie could get this turkey to fly, given this is a spin off from a spin off of Casualty, the long running Brit Hospital Soap, surely he would’ve had somebody in the organisation look at the ratings that Casualty received back when Ten trialled it in 93 or 94? From memory it wasn’t spectacular.

A worry for Ten is that the jig is up with America’s Next Top Model, this show has a weekly reach on cable of around 750,000 viewers – that’s pretty big and those people are watching a cycle several seasons in advance over what is currently airing on Ten. It’s a good bet that a lot of people who picked up this show back when it was pulling 1 million per ep migrated to Fox 8 when they realised how far behind the US Ten was running.

Australian TV is very slowly turning into the UK model where a lot of imports go straight to cable with the ‘terrestrial broadcaster’ effectively rerunning the show months later if at all, this places a whole lot more pressure on the FTA nets to find local content as the value of the imports diminishes greatly when you can get it first elsewhere (same goes for BT I guess!)