0/5

ABC1 the sweet spot on Wednesday

Wednesday was a low-scoring night but ABC1's comedy line-up once again kept us smiling.

Wednesday was a low-scoring night with just six shows ranking above the magic million: two each for Seven, Nine and ABC1.

Seven led from 6-7, before Nine took the lead until 8:30pm. ABC’s shows then ranked first until 10pm.

The top show for the night was Seven News on 1.2m viewers, ahead of Nine News on 1.02m.

Seven’s other shows were Today Tonight (1.03m), Home and Away (950,000) and The One (687,000). But it bottomed out with just 493,000 for Criminal Minds, which is a terrible number for Seven at 8:30pm, before climbing back to 561,000 for its second episode. Above Suspicion was just 229,000.

Celebrity Apprentice, again cleverly divided into two shows, was Challenge: 1.12m / Wednesday: 888,000. Young Doctors pulled 798,000 but still won it slot. Frozen Planet lifted to 906,000 which was second in its slot, but dropped to 404,000 for Prime Suspect. Earlier, ACA was 881,000.

ABC1 won with Spicks and Specks (1.02m), Gruen Planet (1.05m) and The Hamster Wheel (766,000). Elsewhere ABC News was 900,000, 7:30 (667,000), Poh’s Kitchen (628,000), and At The Movies (432,000).

TEN’s best was a rather muddled episode of Glee (724,000), then The Project and Hawaii Five-0 (both 555,000). An NCIS repeat was 431,000.

Amazon with Bruce Parry was 313,000 for SBS ONE followed by One Born Every Minute on 282,000.

Neighbours topped multichannels on 396,000, a new Simpsons was 265,000 and The Killing premiered to 106,000.

Despite Nine winning on primary channels, Seven won with a network share of 28.2% over Nine’s 26.9%, ABC’s 20.3%, TEN’s 19.2% and SBS 5.5%.

19 Responses

  1. All these complaints about Frozen Planet being butchered and stuffed with way too much advertising just confirms my decision to give it a miss on Nine.

  2. I did watch Frozen Planet last night and I’d agree the flow was off, from north to south and from one story to the next and back again. That aside the description did match what we got, I recorded it so can go back and check. I’ll be able to tell for sure later today or tomorrow, I’ll keep you posted.

  3. @Michelle, no you definitely weren’t imagining it, they literally did one scene – four minute ad break – one scene – four minute ad break – once scene – four minute etc, etc. It was disgraceful.

    @Steve, now you mention it, the flow to the episode was odd. It also alternated confusingly between the two Poles. I am a total penguin freak, I adore them and too many penguins are never enough as far as I’m concerned, so I was quite happy with the penguin footage, but yeah, it did have a cut-and-paste vibe about it. I must say, though, the photography and direction are just breathtaking, non stop gasp in awe stuff.

  4. @David Knox, yes, last night’s episode (or what I saw of it between uber-long commercial breaks) was called Spring. Glorious footage destroyed by way too many ad breaks.

  5. I didn’t watch Frozen Planet. Was the episode about Spring? “Spring arrives in the polar regions, and the sun appears after an absence of five months; warmth and life return to these magical ice worlds – the greatest seasonal transformation on our planet is underway. Male Adelie penguins arrive in Antarctica to build their nests – it takes a good property to attract the best mates and the males will stop at nothing to better their rivals! But these early birds face the fiercest storms on the planet.” etc.

  6. I don’t like the switching of the teams in CA… for some reason swapping some team members made the cast seems so much smaller.

    Agreed on Frozen Planet… every 5 mins were another 4 mins of commercials. The episode also seemed to be cut and pasted. There wasn’t any flow to it that Attenborough’s work usually has. No arc to the episode at all with a few minutes of the caterpillar, then a few on the wolves, same with the elephant seal and also the albatross.

  7. @Allie I thought it was just me about all the adds during Frozen Planet, sometime it felt like they had only just come back from a break and there we were again.

  8. The three week break caused by Major League Baseball playoffs hurt ratings of Glee both here and in the US, where the show had a 2.9 rating in the 18-49 demo, down 18% from the previous episode four weeks ago and had its second lowest rating ever.

  9. Would it be forbidden to report the individual channel percentages too eg. ABC1; Eleven, etc.? At least in future as I’ll admit I miss those numbers. Especially Eleven on some days as well as the main channels. Mainly to see if they are doing well at least compared to the rest. If not I’ll understand.

  10. I watched The Apprentice last night, but it definitely lacked something without Deni. As clliched as it sounds, all reality shows need a bitch otherwise it is dullsville. The challenge was fairly bizarre, I must say. Odds on that Dell will get the punt tonight, he was a hopeless project manager, was in way over his head and simply couldn’t do it.

    I’d also like to shout out a big thank you to Channel Nine, I really enjoyed that one hour block of ads, with the occasional break for a small bit of Frozen Planet. Fair dinkum, I swear a new record was set last night for cramming the most number of ads between scenes.

  11. Ten’s 6.30 ratings are probably not much higher than before. by averaging the hour out their figures do look better, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there are more viewers tuning in from 6.30-7. If there are roughly 300k at 6.30 and 700k at 7pm, an average of that number would be 500k, which is (roughly) the figures of the project. Same goes for the news at five.

    although obviously it will take some time to build viewer numbers.

Leave a Reply