Flavour of the Month - Friday 28 November 2008

Just a quick one for last night's ratings - I've only included the southern cities because Brisbane and Sydney dropped out of a few channel ten figures for some unknown reason so here's the damage south of the Murray



Better Homes and Gardens was again top for the night - but the real action on Friday night was the tie-in Movie bonanza on all three commercial nets, Seven used the hoopla over James Bond to sneak in a rerun of 'Die Another Day' whilst Ten tried the old commercial net trick of taking a previous film of a hot star and seeing if it floats - this time the Hugh Jackman vampire romp 'Van Helsing' clearly it sunk - although why Ten should be surprised after the performance of X-Men 3 a few weeks back is beyond me.

Nine was smarter than the rest of the pack and decided to tie-in in 'spirit' taking the jingoistic flavour from Jackman's movie ('Australia' in case you've been living under a rock) with their annual rerun of the Crocidile Dundee films (No III was mercifully excluded)

This little black duck headed off to Fox Classics to see a Widescreen presentation (uninterrupted by breaks) of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a film that stands as one of my all time favourites, and probably (IMO) Spielberg's all-time best.

Praying for Summer - Thursday 20 November 2008

Nine had another great trip down memory lane back to the 90s with This is Your Life their top show for the night, all prime time shows* fell under the early evening strips as is increasingly the trend with Seven news again pulling in the most people at 6pm.

The finale of Make Me a Supermodel did the business at 7.30, personally 7.30 has become a TV dead zone where you start praying for the onset of summer programming for some sweet relief – luckily for me relief came with Comedy (113) screening two episodes of Scrubs against all this dross. I did manage to see the tail end of Oprah’s schmooze-fest where she was talking to Baz Luhrmann via Skype (hey at least it wasn’t via hologram) only two minutes of this and I felt physically ill. Ten has only been the latest to get on board a week long news and current affairs bandwagon hyping the f*ck out of this film.

Back on Tuesday Nine jettisoned any semblance of news content on A Current Affair for a half hour tie in for this movie, on Wednesday night I caught the tail end of ABC News and noticed it had morphed into Entertainment Tonight whilst I wasn’t looking, canvassing audiences at the film’s Darwin premiere, this in a week where Australia’s third largest city is being torn apart by the weather, car companies start heading for the exit door and yet another child care monolith goes down and yet the most important thing on any television news agenda is Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman – give me a break!

The 10.30 contenders (Heroes and The Strip) both got a boost with Ten News making way for Out of the Blue, which got it’s regular audience, but the surplus people up at 10.30 split between Seven and Nine (mostly to Nine).

Also that’s seven shows over the million mark for Ten, not too shabby this week, Tonight is a contest between movies Ten has You, Me and Dupree which is first run, Seven has I, Robot which is a rerun but has the stronger lead in, Nine will probably beat them all with Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

*Although official Prime Time is 6pm - 12.30, I consider it to be 7.30 - 10.30 on weeknights and 6.30 - 10.30 on Saturdays and Sundays