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New Inventors axed?

A New Inventors panelist tweets: "It has been seven wonderful years. Hundreds of shows. Great working with the ABC."

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There is speculation that The New Inventors may have been axed by the ABC after panelist Mark Pesce tweeted the following last night:

“It has been seven wonderful years. Hundreds of shows. Great working with the ABC and with all the fantastic #newinventors inventors.”

He later added:

“Eight years is a fantastic run for a TV series. I was on for seven of them. I seriously never thought I’d have a TV career.”

“How many TV shows run 8 series? Only a handful. We had a great ride.”

Last night an ABC source told TV Tonight the current series would have its Grand Final in mid-August but there was no decision on the show’s future.

But there have been question marks over the future of the show, hosted by James O’Loghlin (pictured) and whether it would go the way of other ABC productions including The Einstein Factor, Talking Heads, Sunday Arts.

Any axing of the show, following the end of Spicks and Specks, would certainly shake up ABC’s Wednesday nights in 2012.

Last week the show rated 459,000 viewers.

20 Responses

  1. Why whine about the format, yes it changed, and like most changes to anything some people won’t be impressed with them. Personally I watched the show for all the new innovations and brilliant new ideas and inventions. The real issue is that this brilliant show that provided the only opportunity for us to see all these incredible ideas has been axed! I, for one, am extremely dissappointed that we have lost this show.

  2. @Peter, Albury says:
    July 28, 2011 at 12:48 pm

    Why stop there? Maybe Towards 2000 and Weekend Magazine could be coming back too. ::sarcasm::

    New Inventors had a great run but it is time for a new idea actually !!!!

    I look forward to what the ABC programmers come up with….. ::sarcasm::

    (cough cough, sorry my sarcasm mode is playing up 🙂 )

  5. Agree with you Bruce – when I saw the new format it is just terrible, I want credibility on a show like new inventors, not a ‘celebrity’ guest from ABC – what is this channel seven?

  6. So ABC has cut shows like Can We Help and Talking Heads. It looks like New Inventors will be next… These are all good shows and I dare say didn’t cost a fortune to produce, but maybe they’re not sexy enough so they get ditched… But then what are they replacing these shows with? Glossy stuff like Crownies and Angry Boys that really nobody has cared much for.

  7. Should of kept the old panel format and been a bit harder with the selection process for the actual inventions,even if that meant a shorter series run.

  10. This has been bandied around for weeks now. At least we officially know. This show like its predesesor was a important vehicle in getting new and exciting inventions of the ground and commercialised. Now where will the future invents get their exposure, tv was the main vehicle because everyone has a tv. Maybe their could be a stripped down internet version of it inthe future especially with the NBN coming.

  11. This happens so often that you would think that it would be in The Idiot’s Guide to Producing Television Programs or whatever. A show has a good run for 5 or 6 years, building a loyal audience, and then some bright spark comes along and decides to make their mark by “refreshing” it. The end result is almost always a loss of viewers.

    I don’t watch it any more and neither do about a quarter of a million others. Last year it was getting over 700k, now it’s regularly in the 400k range.

  12. If indeed The New Inventors is getting the chop, why not a decent investigative consumer affairs program to take its place? New Zealand TV has two consumer affairs shows airing in prime time. Surely the Australian community deserves at least one? It must be more than two decades since the ABC last aired the consumer TV show The Investigators, with Helen Wellings, the late Sonia Humphrey, Eric Campbell and others. And while on the subject of late-lamented shows, wouldn’t it be great if the ABC delivered a straight-down-the-line holiday series like Holiday with Bill Peach, a terrific series from the late 1970s (if my memory serves me correctly) where Bill and his reporters described locations and accommodation exactly as the were – good and bad – (laced with the tradmark Bill Peach sense of humour) but without the gushing superlatives displayed on commercial TV shows like Getaway.

  14. @ Bruce S ….They did the same thing with Can You Help….changed the format…and then shoved it in at 6PM Saturday….totally killed the show.
    If it aint broke…dont fix it!…..Lesson for all channels.

  19. Whilst it may very well be true, I must say having followed his tweets for some time, he simply *loves* attention. So of course Mark would tweet such a thing.

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