Old tricks beaten by New Tricks
- Published by David Knox
- on
- Filed under News
Commercial network programmers should take another look at Saturday nights.
Last week the ABC was booming with an audience for New Tricks and several of its other offerings. It indicates an older and somewhat frustrated audience at home on Saturdays.
New Tricks was the top show of the night with 1.36m viewers -the #11th biggest show on television all week. ABC News, Gardening Australia and The Bill also made it into the evening’s Top Ten (ABC News is on a roll at the moment, sometimes winning bigger audiences than commercial networks in some markets -although it has to be said they don’t go head to head).
Saturday was the ABC’s best night of the week with a huge 24% share, well ahead of TEN’s 18.3% and almost toppling Seven’s 24.2%. Nine won the night with 26.7% thanks to its News and ever-reliable Funniest Home Videos.
A further indicator that the audience is bored with commercial offerings is the 6.8% share for SBS, its best night of the week.
Nine, Seven and TEN all ran movies for some of their prime-time scheduling including the films Are We There Yet, Brother Bear and Back to the Future 3.
Seven managed to get 789,000 for Judge John Deed but some Programmers would argue that as the ABC has the older audience tied up, they are more strategic to target alternative audiences.
2 Responses
Yes they have had some Top Gear repeats on Saturdays for a while.
I see SBS are moving Top Gear to Saturday nights as well. If only we got the full 59 minute episodes instead of the cut down ‘international’ version. Barry.