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Ajay & Matthew win Excess Baggage

Will the last celebrity out, please turn off the lights?

Ajay Rochester and her teammate Matthew Palmer won Nine’s forgotten Reality series Excess Baggage last night.

The series, moved after just a handful of nights on Nine prior to the start of ratings, has been quietly playing out on GO!

The pair won $100,000, half of which goes to Rochester’s chosen charity, No Hate Campaign. With just 44,000 viewers watching on Wednesday night, that’s a cost of more than $2 per viewer (not including production costs).

Calculating their combined Weight Loss, Body Fat Loss, Waist Loss and Fitness, they scored 102.8 points over Darryn Lyons (99.0), Robert Dipierdomenico (98.6), Kevin Federline (93.1) and their respective partners.

On Twitter last night, Rochester said, “@mattpalmerEB we did it matty….all those extra workouts…no one will ever know how hard we worked! Oh wait! We won! yes they will!!!!”

It was a bit ironic, or perhaps sweet justice, that a former weight loss host won the show.

The drawn-out finale consisted of a final challenge at Bear Island before they joined former teammates, trainers and families in an air hangar with host Kate Ceberano.

While everybody looked much healthier than when they started the show, some looked like they had only lost minimal weight.

But at least Nine stuck with the show, for the viewers who were enjoying it. Other networks have abandoned Reality shows mid-season when they weren’t working (we’re lookin’ at you Yasmin’s Getting Married and The Resort). But however you cut it up, this was an enormously expensive flop, shedding viewers not kilos.

3 Responses

  1. I was thinking the same as ‘steve sydney’. We are lucky that we have a multichannel environment now, even if they are prodominantly full of repeats and rubbish, because the primary channels can shift shows like this accross and still get some return on their investment, albeit a lot less than planned I’d expect.
    I would have thought this would have been suited better to GEM than GO!, but not everyone has HD, so the numbers would have been smaller.

    Had Nine launched this later in the year and brought foward another reality show, I wonder if EB would have had the same fate as it wouldn’t have been competing against Loser. I didn’t watch either shows, and really dont watch any reality since the around Idol 4, Big Brother 4, and My Restaurant Rules – the days when reality was actually somewhat interesting.

  2. To be fair..

    The whole ‘Yasmin getting married’ thing was long before multi channels were around. If Nine didn’t have Go! or GEM as a dumping ground then I’m sure this rubbish would have been yanked off as well. Or relocated to some graveyard timeslot like 11.30pm at least.

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