Ten Learns the Secret to Success - Friday 17 October 2008

Well blow me down - that's 6 shows over one million this week thanks to 'Nanny McPhee'

Ten has demonstrated for the first time this year that it understands how to get an audience on Fridays - program for the people who are home!

All this year Ten's Friday night shows have been aimed at teens or young adults, action movies, teen comedys, Top Model, nothing has worked until tonight.

So why has the premiere of British Kids Flick Nanny McPhee done the business for ten, especially coming off an incredibly low base of a lead in?

Simple - there are two types of audiences home on a Friday (& Saturday) night, Families with Children, and old people.

The old people last night were well catered to with Taggart (has that show been around for decades or what?) on ABC1 as well as Better Homes & Gardens, which I guess alleviates the lonelyness, I have no other explaination for it's extreme popularity.

So that leaves families - looks like they split up between Download & Wipeout/Hole in the Wall for the first hour but then all flocked to channel ten after 8.30

Whatever adults remained (about 1 million) split up between two violent movies on 7 and 9.

So next week Nine will be playing Harry Potter (welcome to high rotation) expect a boost for them, probably at ten's expense.

Nobody's Watching - Friday 10 October 2008

Well nobody except those rusted ons who like their gardening and family movies. Frankly Seven is playing the other networks like fools.

Nine somehow condensed Wipeout to half an hour and followed it up with the insipid Hole in the Wall - this was a disaster - a disaster one can only chalk up to either zero promotion for this lineup or a lack of viewers on a Friday.

Ten's Next Top Model was even worse, surely any future cycles of this show will be off to TenHD, although one wonders why Ten keeps persisting with this show - it had a season in the sun last year but ever since it has struggled to keep it's head above 900,000.

The movie issue is a big one and demonstrates what is going wrong with Friday nights. Here we have 3 movies against each other, Seven goes the PG Family Comedy route and scores, Nine choses a thriller (in Melbourne at least) and bombs, Ten goes for an action flick (a predominantly male genre) and also bombs. Both Nine and Ten were trying to cater to an audience which just isn't there on Friday Nights.

The chart I've put up is for Melbourne Viewer numbers only because I have no idea what Nine showed post 8.30 in other cities and whatever it is it's impossible to find the numbers on it, but here you can see that as with most nights - Nine News and Two and a Half Men are all that's keeping the network afloat.