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Airdate: Man Vs Wild. Bumped: High Altitude, South Park

More change at SBS? High Altitude and South Park make way for a doco in the Alaskan wilderness.

bgFor the second time in seven days, SBS programming makes a surprising move.

After deciding not to premiere the new season of East West 101 against tough competition (Packed to the Rafters, new NCIS and original plans for Hey Hey the Reunion), now it is dropping adventure documentary High Altitude and South Park.

On Monday October 5th it will air Man Vs Wild: Alaskan Mountain Range, hosted by Bear Grylls (pictured), at 8:30pm.

SBS lost a lot of audience from last week’s Top Gear (944,000) to High Altitude (226,000). Maybe it’s hoping this can stem the tide.

Adventurer Bear Grylls comes to SBS, stranding himself in popular wilderness destinations where tourists often find themselves lost or in danger. Once there he finds his way back to civilization, demonstrating local survival techniques and biting into gut-wrenching eats along the way. Tonight he is in the Alaskan Mountain Range, home to many a skiing accident and where many lives are lost each year. With the elements and the environment against him, this will be one tough challenge!

At this stage South Park looks to be in place for October 12th, but this needs confirming.

15 Responses

  1. @ Someone BBB..

    There is already commercial broadcasters doing that. I think there needs to be at leats a few choices which do things for different reasons, merit and boundaries of content pushing. Not The Squiz. There needs to be a place for alternative TV. Isnt the point of SBS to try to cater for people who dont want to watch commercial TV? I think it is important to have a clear distinction so we have genuine variety and not just a place for SBS to buy US cable shows that are a few years old.

  2. They shouldn’t have dropped in such a dunger of a show between TG and SP, simple really, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

    It doesn’t matter whether you like the shows or not, the point is that flakey programming drives audiences away (9 proved this, yo have to wonder why none of the others learnt from it). It’s a shame, SBS used to be one of the ‘reliable’ ones, screening shows on their merits as much as anything else and doing so in a responsible way.

    Mind you, isn’t South Park moving to another network anyway? Is that anything to do with all this?

  3. WTF are SBS thinking? It was dumb enough to that stupid High Altitude show at 8L30 prior to South Park, but replacing South Park with a frigging documentary? The 8:30 to 9:30 Monday night slot has been reserved for comedy for as long as I can remember. Why muck up a successful programming move now?

    And Mike Retter, of course the public broadcasters should chase ratings. If the public don’t watch them, they’re hardly achieving much in the way of serving the community, are they? Airing one of their major shows in one of the most competitive timeslots of the week would have been stupid, so moving East West was a sensible decision.

  4. Franz these *were* new South Parks. If they only make around 13 eps a year, there’s bound to be repeats. So, Ten can repeat Simpsons ad nauseum but not OK for SBS to do the same with South Park?

  5. Thank God for no South Park.

    How do they get people to watch that rubbish?For Most of the time these were old episodes dating back to 2005 or 2006 up against Whatever Nine and Ten were offering as well as Sevens largely female based offerings for a Monday

  6. I’ll be watching this. The combination of the dangerous wilderness, some crazyman willing to torture himself there and the controversy around the alleged authenticity around the show makes for some somewhat hilarious viewing.

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