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Cooking pips cars on Tuesday

Nine might have to rethink its advertisements for Top Gear touting it as Australia's new #1 show after last night it was pipped by My Kitchen Rules.

Nine might have to rethink its advertisements for Top Gear touting it as Australia’s new #1 show after last night it was pipped by My Kitchen Rules.

It was a line ball tussle but Seven’s cook-off pulled 1.4m viewers ahead of Nine’s first-run roadtest on 1.38m -well down on its season premiere. Both left Bondi Rescue / The Biggest Loser in their wake (934,000 / 774,000).

Nine’s second episode of Top Gear, which had already aired on SBS, slipped to 1.15m behind NCIS on 1.36m but bettered Grey’s Anatomy on 1.04m.

Other networks battles continue to be neck and neck. Hot Seat‘s 568,000 was just 1,000 ahead of Deal or No Deal‘s 567,000.

Today -now without any Olympics– still beat Sunrise, 357,000 to 335,000 while Nine News won in Sydney but Seven News was tops everywhere else.

Kerri-Anne returned to 125,000 viewers, which didn’t seem to dent either audience for The Morning Show winning on 180,000 or The Circle on 74,000.

Both the ABC and SBS had a tough time competing, with SBS ONE pulling a lowly 3.3% share when it has quality content including Insight and Big Love.

Seven just won the night.

Week 10.

25 Responses

  1. Seven Putting on Greys on what has been traditionally for many years a Home Grown Entertainment Night will cost them and get this A US big gun at the expense of local home grown dramas and actors.

  2. I absolutely concur with David that Insight is quality content. Whether it is radio with pictures has nothing to do with its content value. It is a studiously researched and considered treatment of a single issue each week. I don’t always check in with it, unless the subject is of interest – but once there, it is intelligent and compelling viewing, in my opinion.

  3. Why did Nine advertise show Top Gear as a new when the second episode clearly was not? Isn’t this blatant lying/misrepresentation to viewers?

    There was no reason not to show this as two seperate episodes inthe tv guide with the relevant accurate info. Will the relevant TV authority bother to do anything of their own accord to keep them honest – not likely…

  4. TopGear’s ratings will bounce back up once word gets around that Nine are now treating it with a little more respect.

    As for the international version, I’ll explain for Melb what I have explained hudreds of times before on various blogs, comments pages and fora all over the net-

    Only BBC2 in the UK get the full, unedited version. Even sister channels like BBC Prime, BBC Knowledge and BBC America don’t get to show it unedited. This is because of the unusual laws in the UK regarding the BBC and music royalties. After each episode, an “international” version is created. That version is the one that is sold to overseas networks. It is the version that Nine buys and it is the version that SBS bought. Over the past 14 series, the BBC has changed what and how much is removed. In the first few series, only about 5 minutes was taken out.. It was usually a small segment and SBS showed these over 1 hour and 5 minutes. The BBC then started removing the Star In A Reasonably-Priced Car segment. This was around series 6. The international version eventually worked its way down to around 50 minutes and usually lacks the news and either a short review or sections of larger segments.

    Hope that helps.

  5. We’re Top Gear fans but have totally gotten hooked on MKR so watched that, then switched over to the rest of the Top Gear special…which whilst brilliant Was a repeat, after all!

  6. Interesting that Top Gear epsiodes went for 70 minutes for each episode so channel 9 did listen to the people and not cut down the whole episode

  7. I think My Kitchen Rules is rubbish, it is so over dramatisised (is that word).

    Top Gear is better but people like watching stuff about food .

  8. Not happy with the first few minutes of the Top Gear I watched last night. Clarkson was explaining about the LCD display on the dash, and then a banner ad popped up on screen which totally blocked what Clarkson was explaining about. Why would channel 9 purposely censor the this way? They could at least wait for a better opportunity to show banner ads, but no, they do it to maximally ruin the show.

    And then several minutes later, when Top Gear guys were explaining about what is installed in the boot of the Range Rover (fancy cabinets etc), banner ad pops up again and blocks what they were explaining.

    The fact that this happened twice within several minutes shows that channel 9 are doing this on purpose to block what the show was trying to point out. It can’t possibly be an accident that they blocked the critical parts of the particular shots with ads.

    Is there a complaint section on the Nine website so that I can lodge one?

  9. David,

    I don’t regard ‘Insight’ as quality content. It’s talk back radio with pictures.

    As for ‘Big Love’ – it might be quality (and I’m already on the record that artistic merit rarely intersects with popular appeal) – however it’s irrelevant quality. Meaning, Australia doesn’t have a State “full” of Mormons, let alone fundamentalist Mormons who practise polygamy – there’s no resonance here.

    If SBS buy the rights to the 5th series, they should go back to the start to give people a chance to get their head around who’s who.

  10. How are “Seven News” and “Nine News” national shows when the presenter and content are different in each city? Shouldn’t they be separately listed in the ratings? How can Seven advertise in Sydney that Chris Bath presents the nation’s number one news program when she usually doesn’t win in Sydney?!

    1. Smoke and mirrors, smoke and mirrors, Brian.

      Technically MKR is actually an original format by industry definition, but I think we all recognise there are elements of other shows in the genre. It’s not the first to be accused of such and it won’t be the last. You can’t copyright an idea only its execution. If Seven was smart enough to package it this way and find an audience then good luck to them. All’s fair in love, war and formats.

  11. Yeh hardly original and very lowest common denominator. It’s a dumbed down MC for the Seven audience.

    TG will improve to around 1.5m perhaps with consolidated ratings and may have won in the under 50 demos. It was bound to drop off and Nine would be happy if it stayed around that mark.

  12. I’d wait for the PVR numbers but it looks like Nine might have not done the right thing by cutting the first new TG down to 42min and then having a 2 week wait for the 2nd, time will tell how much more TG will slip before the season is out.

    Next week they are not showing a 2nd ep right?

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