The day Miss Marple kicked Laurence Fishburne's arse!

Sundays are becoming like a see-saw with Seven on one end, Nine on the other and Ten in the middle, at least that's the case with the 6.30 timeslot where Random Acts of Kindness and Sunday Night swapped places for 1st and 3rd in the slot with Merlin happily in the middle.

At 7.30 there's no contest, Masterchef is again posting such a gargantuan audience that it alone lifted Ten to a first place win for the night!

Bones at 8.30 shows no sign of slowing down but CSI, a show that one-time commanded two million plus audiences and was used by Nine to pulverise Ten's sunday night crime double of Criminal Intent and NCIS, was severly embarrased by the ancient Miss Marple on the ABC.

I personally haven't seen Miss Marple on TV since the early 90's but seemingly it keeps plugging on presumably only stopping every so often to change the lead actress (given the character is quite old) Miss Marple took CSI (the Baywatch of crime shows) to the cleaners with her old school sleuthing and made a meal out of all the 9.30 contenders also!

Nine was slightly redeemed in the 10.30 timeslot posting a magnificent 746,000 for a CSI Miami rerun!

A Double-Barrell shot of WTF

That’s right not one but two shocks as the cold weather sets in and the nation gathers around the electronic fireplace.

The first surprise is the behometh average for Ten’s Masterchef pulling an outrageous figure representing a massive 37.56% increase in audience week on week, that huge figure pretty much gave ten the night, with them recording their biggest audience for Rove in quite a while with 1,271,000 tuning in, Ten was only let down by the dissappointing US Biggest Loser which only managed an average of 443,000 viewers for the night.

Seven can be happy with their timeslot winning Bones/Castle duo with Bones recording one of it’s biggest audiences ever (1,349,000) this one time also-ran is now one of Seven’s star performers while former hits either struggle (Grey’s Anatomy) or have dissappeared without a trace (Lost, Prison Break, Heroes).

But the real story of Sunday Night was channel Nine, while CSI is still in the doldrums, a pitiful 771,000 tuned in to a new ep of CSI Miami, the scheduling here is completely baffling – in the past three weeks all three CSI’s have been in this 9.30 slot and none have performed well.

But I digress, the real story was Nine’s strategy to move the anaemic HomeMADE away from their premier night, they replaced it with a new reality skein – Random Act of Kindness. First of all I did not see it – but the haphazard scheduling combined with the cookie cutter concept and Seven & Ten’s dominance of 6.30 in the past few months made me think that we could expect another dissappointing failure.

Not so, Nine’s Random Acts randomly boosted their performance in the slot by a staggering 45.87%, that will probably hold up as the biggest increase of the week. What’s good about it is while Sunday Night dropped in total audience, it’s other competitors Merlin and ABC News both grew week on week meaning Nine’s show succeeded in (as Joe Hockey likes to say) Growing the Pie!

Sunday 14 June 2009
Scoreboard

Going Up
Random Acts of Kindness up 45.87% over HomeMADE
Masterchef up 37.56% week on week
Nine’s Sunday Rugby League up 29.98% week on week
60 Minutes up 27.52%
Nature’s Great Events up 22.53% over Bear Man of Kamchatka
The Simpsons (6pm rebroadcast) up 21.78%
Bones up 20.12%
Rove up 19.45%
3 Act of Murder up 18.59% over Ballet Shoes
Ten News at Five up 18.41%
CSI up 17.65%
Castle up 16.3%
Nine News Sunday up 15.78%
Merlin up 13.32%
CSI: Miami (10.30 episode) up 12.66% over CSI:NY
ABC News up 10.72%
Compass up 10.12%

Going Down
Today on Sunday down 57.79%
Serious Crash Unit down 11.16%
The Biggest Loser (USA) down 10.32%
Weekend Sunrise down 9.64%
Sunday Night down 9.25%