Wake-Up not before November

TEN’s new breakfast show Wake-Up had its press conference announcing its cast in July, but the show won’t air before November according to a media report yesterday.

The Age reports transmission will not begin until November, because TEN needs to dig a trench from its Pyrmont headquarters to Manly, to bring out eight cameras on separate lines.

The “trench-digging,” which was flagged at the July conference, is being conducted by third parties and the network is effectively at their scheduling mercy. And their potential delays. The show will be doing well if it can actually get on air this year.

“There is a bit of chaos in breakfast TV right now,” Executive Producer Adam Boland tells The Age.

“Now, I’ve just poached quite a few people out of Sunrise – which hasn’t helped my relationship with Michael, by the way – but the reason I was able to get them so easily is these are talented people with creative ideas and they’re not getting them up.”

Michael is of course, Michael Pell, Boland’s former partner and current exec producer on Sunrise.

“He takes his show very seriously – which is a great thing, and he’s a very good producer – but he’s taken the fact that I am now setting up a show essentially to compete against him, and my own show, very seriously. But I take the view I’ve got the chance to do something new,” he says.

Much has been written about their former relationship, which frankly is one of hundreds that have developed amongst colleagues in the industry. Not a great deal of detail has been put on the record by either party. But with both set to compete at opposite networks it’s one that is fascinating the industry.

And by that I mean the industry more than the audience.

The audience really just wants to see less hype and more content.

Amongst the other observations are:

• Seven could have handled Doyle’s transition better
• He was bored during his final 2 years at Seven
• He doesn’t want to eat his cat

But scan The Age article and you will find no trace of the three people who are fronting Wake Up: Natarsha Belling, Natasha Exelby and James Mathison.

Its focus is on Boland and his history with an ex-partner. By any measure that’s a publicity failure.

I understood the idea of announcing the hosts of Wake Up was to excite us about their chemistry. But I’ve seen very little of it, I heard very little of it at the Press Conference and now it seems I won’t see it until November at the earliest. At this rate I may well have viewer fatigue before the thing has even started.

Yesterday on Twitter Boland made an apology, “I hereby apologise to anyone who has ever been in a relationship with me. I suspect I’ve offended them all during an interview with The Age.”

That Boland and Pell are both accomplished at their roles is evident from something called OzTAM ratings. But while articles run way past a line in the sand called “too much information” the only winner here is a bloke called Neil Breen at Today.

Digging a trench, indeed…