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Idol dumps Monday verdict show

TEN wises up and decides this year to eliminate Idol contestants in its Sunday night show.

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idoljChannel TEN has dropped its Monday night “verdict” edition of Australian Idol.

Instead audition and eliminations will now take place on Sundays in a two hour format.

The move should help drive viewers to the one product, and avoid TEN under-performing in the Monday timeslot when many fans became frustrated with a 60 (and sometimes 70) minute show essentially built around five minutes of relevant drama.

“I think all of us realised that it was a bit of a struggle for an hour. All you can do is try to improve,” Dicko told the Sunday Herald Sun.

Last year he conceded, “Idol’s Monday night was always a bit of a naff for the audience because it was really just 15 minutes of content rolled out over an hour, but we’ve recognised that and strengthened it.”

Guess they didn’t strengthen it enough….

The change could also see Idol pull in more phone-line revenue, if lines stay open longer. But it will be tough on contestants if they are left  to rehearse a number only to be booted at the top of a show.

Still, Dancing with the Stars does the same trick but booting at the end of the show.

Meanwhile former host James Mathison today said he quit the show to try new challenges, adding that he never expected the gig to last so long.

“I just felt like I needed a break from it. It’s not that I don’t like TV, but if you do anything for six years you’re, like, what other challenges are there?”

As for the audition tour currently underway, while Dicko told one newspaper numbers were down, Brissy’s Sunday Mail reckons they are up.

Source: Herald Sun, Sunday Telegraph, Sunday Mail

31 Responses

  1. This is something i came accross and wondered if you had heard anything about it. It was stated on wikipedia and being discussed on a forum.

    Has Dannii Minogue signed on to be a fourth judge on Idol? I have done some searching and only found that WP to be the only site to mention this. I know its Wikipedia but even her profile on there states she has signed to Idol.

  2. They could have just taken a leaf out of American Idol and pad it out with a couple of performances from ex-Idols, popular Australian stars etc, but (a) the success story of more recent idols is abysmal (Natalie Gauci, anyone?) and (b) this is cost cutting if I’ve ever seen it because the ratings were usually fine for the elimination shows, and a way to make even more money from phone calls by getting people to call at the start of the show to try and save their favourite – I can just see all the contestants having to perform after announcing the bottom three from the previous week, and one is given the boot at the end of the show, based on the results of the previous week’s performance…is that sort of what Dancing with the Stars does? (I don’t watch it…)

  3. Hmmmm, with all of these changes I get the feeling that this year may be Idol’s last.

    The format is getting old and the constant changes aren’t helping. And all of this year’s cost cutting measures mean that the production quality may be worse. And of course the fact that the “talent” gets worse and worse every year.

    When they tried changing Big Brother it died, I smell similar fate for Idol – not that I’m complaining in either case.

  4. I went to the auditions on Saturday – well sort of went. I was meant to audition but stupid me arrived late, I read somewhere ( can’t remember) that since numbers were down, u didn’t have to go early – I ended up being a tiny bit late and wow, it was huge! Sooooooooooooo many people – its kinda what u see on tv, but I saw alot of really naff things as well that really seemed over produced but that’s reality tv. In the end after reading the Rego form that says if you make through the 2 pre-auditions you have to be prepared to go on another day/time to see the real judges I realised I couldn’t risk having to miss out due to work so it was a bit of abummer… so I really think the Sunday Mail was right about the crowd.

  5. Good idea, never see the point of lenghty, highly padded elimination shows. With American Idol, I sometimes watch the performances but look up the results rather than watching the elimination show.

    They have noticed that elimination shows perform poorly compared to the performance shows.

  6. Congratulations Ten.

    Thanks for not consulting Brisbane viewers, and announcing ahead of schedule that a Queenslander won’t win Idol in 2009.

    A one hour vote is useless, once DST takes effect down south.

    Remember last years Bottom 3 debacle? Now it is going to be rushed even more.

  7. Anyone worried about states such as SA,WA, Qld not being inlcuded in votes need not worry. From what I understand voting will be open for a week and contestants will be voted off during the next episode most likely at the beginning. Ten will also be hoping they generate more revenue with the lines open longer. I would expect to see ads like the Big Brother ones all week long asking people to vote.

  8. Hmm, dunno what to think about this…. Cos whilst I admit the Monday night shows dragged on ridiculously – I did enjoy the guest performances. I wish they had trialed a 1/2 hour on Monday’s first, before actually axing it completely….

    Re the contestants having to prepare a song all week and then not get to perform it… well, I dunno how they’re going to do it… they could do it DWTS style, but then again it makes more sense to have the person eliminated at the start of the Sunday night show…

    Guess all we can do now is wait and see… God I hope 10 don’t stuff this up though!

  11. @JB

    That’s actually a pretty fair comment to make. TEN this have have been overall much stronger than previous years and they’re not messing around with shows too much (with the exception of Life on Mars and Medium being swapped around).

    Australian Idol last year got pretty stale for me and it just felt cheap. Hopefully this year there will be more changes made (and hopefully a much better studio for the top 12).

    Also continuing on from my last comment, I wonder if there will still be the entire week of audition shows on? That quickly grew very old and boring, and hopefully this year they will be shorter episodes.

  12. Ten seem to be making all the right decisions so far this year. It’s like they’ve started listening to the viewers and understanding what we want from them

  13. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again : Can’t they take a tip out of Australia’s Naughtiest Home Videos book and simply be ripped off the air mid-episode indefinitely?

  15. About bloody time. Well done Network Ten. No more padding our Monday nights for a hour plus for something that can easily be done in a few minutes. I may give this years series a crack now.

  16. Another suggestion for ten would be to make some archive shows of the crazy auditions from the past five years. You could make a couple of one offs or make a filler show for after/ before Letterman. Increases exposure. Or a where are they now show. I think it needs to expand into lateral areas to get a wider audience again. the footage is already shot so its just editing thats needed to budget for a really cheap show.

  17. The dumping of Monday’s elimination show could be bad for the lost practise for an entire week, unless the song that is rehearsed over the week is used as their exit song of sorts.
    I would have been happy with a 30 minute show on Monday which had the bottom 3 revealed, then the judges gave their spill, a musical item and then they gave one contestent the boot.

    Hopefully TEN have a good plan for their underperforming Monday nights.

  19. hmm this will be interesting. good move nonetheless.

    i’d like to see how they handle the week-of performance. DWTS has judges scores to make sure that the person that was eliminated did not waste a week of their life practicing. could idol move towards judges actually meaning something, i think it could help, it would stop the ricki-lee’s coming 6th.

  20. As an indication for numbers, I arrived at 1:30am and was number 47 to audition. One of my friends arrived at the same time last year and was number 350.

    So not as many people were dedicated enough to camp out, but the numbers quickly increased as the sun came up to what looked like a few thousand in Brisbane.

  21. Wow – I didn’t expect them to be this bold, this seems to indicate two things, a) they feel confident in whatever Monday programming they have lined up (in spite of the poor ratings for Idol Results it was often their best performer on a Monday). b) They’re actually learning from their mistakes and their tendancy to over-saturate the airwaves with this stuff.

  23. So how will the voting system work? Will it be like Dancing with the Stars when the viewers have to vote for their favourite contestant this week so that he or she won’t be eliminated next week?

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