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5:30pm: It’s Eddie-TV

Eddie McGuire & Livinia Nixon will host Nine's new 5:30 show for Melbourne, while Sydney faces a much bigger uphill battle.

Eddie McGuire and Livinia Nixon will co-host the new 5:30pm “magazine-style show” for Nine in Melbourne.

Nine is preparing new lead-ins to its 6pm News in Sydney and Melbourne to again tackle Seven’s Deal or No Deal.

McGuire, who is regularly reported as being on a multi-million dollar salary with Nine, is without a regular show, while Nixon, who presents the weather in the 6pm News, saw her other regular show, Temptation, air its final show yesterday.

Nine’s director of news and current affairs, John Westacott said, “I’m a great subscriber to the American experience that the best lead-in to news is news.”

Sydney hosts are yet to be announced, although Leila McKinnon’s name is expected to be attached for its local version. Brisbane will keep its Extra programme.

The Sydney 5:30 show will be crucial to address the dwindling 6pm News where the change from Mark Ferguson to Peter Overton has backfired.

Although complicated by tennis and cricket programming, ratings for Nine News in Sydney have disappointed.

A story today suggests the latest Q Scores survey – used by network executives to tell what shows and personalities are hot or not – shows Ferguson was twice as popular than Overton with Sydney audiences before his demotion from the prime news spot.

But John Westacott, who has backed the switch to Overton said, “When we give them a reason to be there, like after the cricket or a professional job all day with the Obama inauguration, we’re not being dumped or rejected, which says to me the lead-in is even more critical.”

Nine News‘ strongest market is in Melbourne where newsreader Peter Hitchener either beats Seven’s Peter Mitchell or remains locked in a city often divided. On nights when big news breaks, Nine regularly wins.

Seven’s news chief Peter Meakin is sceptical of the importance of lead-in programs to 6pm News saying, “I’m not going to understate the importance of a lead-in but when you’re producing a news service you can’t go believing it will deliver you the audience regardless of what you do on your news,” he said.

“It has something to do with the product and much as you’d like to blame the guy reading the autocue, some of the people behind the camera have to cop some of the blame.”

Source: The Australian, Daily Telegraph

44 Responses

  1. every year the Q Scores are touted by newspapers as Secret and the figures that network heads didnt want ‘us’ to see, yet every year they are released!

  2. when this is axed Nine should try reinvigorate some classic gameshow with a bit more care (unlike million dollar wheel). I miss burgos catch phrase and the price is right

  3. Nine’s still got to be annoyed at paying Eddie millions of dollars when he’ll only be anchoring a late afternoon, one-market show. When is his contract up for renewal?

  4. Please, no more Eddie.

    Perhaps they could have tried Ed Phillips in the role, no doubt he’ll be looking for work now, and he and Livinia have great on screen chemistry.

  5. Since the news is meant to lead people to watch other entertainment later in the evening, why don’t 9 start worry about what comes after the news, ACA, because for me as soon as that comes on the channel is off. Maybe one long news hour would be better. It would be hard to do worse.

  6. well i love my DOND so it’s good to know that this show has its death certificate signed with awful eddie.

    didn’t they promise to audition new roles. that was a very respectable move on 9’s behalf, i wonder why they changed their minds. the industry needs new faces.

  7. I think that this show sounds promissing, and apparantly there have been lots of people trying out for the Sydney show incl. Ed Phillips, Andrew Daddo and one of the guys off ACA, but i think that Mark Furgusson would be a great choice.

  8. Nooooo!! not eddie, he is horrible. but livinia is lovely. good to see they kept their promise of auditioning newbies lol. i was looking foreward to seeing what the auditions would produce

    everyone is always saying eddie is only good in a “good vehichle” of which i don’t think this will be. he needs places to wave is arms around and shout “look at me”.
    my predictions: it will beat DOND for about 2 weeks out of peoples curiosity. then will never see a sucess again. the show will last about the length that temptation did but eddie will not make the first year.

    DOND is pretty unstoppable there are different versions in about 80 countries and not one of them is underperforming. i doubt austrlia will be the first

  9. Oh thank god I don’t live in Melbourne. Won’t be inundated with Eddie no where to every where.

    I think i’ll give this the same life time as Million Dollar Wheel.

  10. This does not really sound very appealing. Who needs an hour and a half of news/current affairs? I give it 3 days of good ratings because of the curiousity factor then a slow and steady decline a la Wheel of Fortune.

  11. I like it! Good idea to target each state with specific hosts. I guess that’s what worked with Extra all that time ago.

    It’ll be good to see Eddie back on the screen also. As much as people seem to give him a bad wrap he can host a show for sure.

  12. I vote for Mark Ferguson to join Leila for the Sydney version! – Give viewers their daily dose of Mark, even though he mightn’t be reading the news!

  13. Eddie failed once before and i believe he will fail again. As for Leila in Sydney i wouldnt watch it if they were giving me free stuff. Dont like her and wont tune in.

  14. “On nights when big news breaks, Nine regularly wins.”

    I’ve noticed that too – which suggests that casual viewers (or people with long commutes) still would watch Nine news, but Seven has more of the crowd that still watch every night – the older crowd!

  15. I actually thought Mark Ferguson was the best newscaster since Brian Henderson. I cant help thinking that they let the best one go, and then addressed that seven quite simply has the better lead up programmes. If Ferguson was on seven, he would have done extremely well. I have always been a huge Nine supporter, as i know how cut throat its become at seven…. but im afraid they are making stupid decisions, rather than actually addressing the major problems. Put bigger, brighter shows on, and we will watch. I think Extra is a great alternative, but if you have talent like Ed Phillips, Bert Newton etc. on your books, get a great variety style program out there, and it would be a great alternative to watching the camp drone of Andrew O’Keefe…

  16. Yay we get to keep Extra so not Edie here, I couldn’t be happier 😀

    OT – I missed most of the Temptation final but caught the last few minutes. The guy left with just 15k of prizes, IMO they shot 2 endings depending on events because who leaves with just a small amount?

  17. I hope it’s more of a local news format, and less of a local lifestyle format (Brisbane’s “Extra”, which has stories on arts and crafts etc)

    Any ideas what the shows will be called?

    I’m guessing WIN, NBN, STW and NWS won’t take or do local versions of the show?

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