0/5

“Next on ABC”: a bit of a spoiler

ABC voice-over for Our Girl gave away too much storyline.

2015-04-17_1259

“Next on ABC. A young medic fights to save a life to prove her worth when first stationed in Afghanistan.”

That’s what the voice over at the end of The Checkout said of UK drama Our Girl which premiered at 8:30pm last night.

Having watched the preview for Our Girl I was a tad confused.

Much of the telemovie was about young Molly (Lacey Turner) signing up for the armed forces. As a bit of a rebel, the story focussed heavily on whether she would actually rise to the challenge of training or drop-out altogether.

So it was a bit of a spoiler for ABC to promote the show as her being active on the ground in Afghanistan.

Even more surprising given she doesn’t actually head to Afghanistan until 1:24 hrs into the 1:28 hr telemovie.

An inaccurate voice-over at the end of a show which is slapping false advertising is not really a good look.

5 Responses

  1. It is school holidays in Sydney and half the ABC’s staff are on leave looking after kids, so the intern was probably having to do a lot. It looks like they took the BBC’s synopsis for episode 1 instead of the TVM: This Thursday’s BBC synopsis is “Molly is over the moon to be sent to Afghanistan as a medic on one of the army’s final deployments. But when she arrives she knows she needs to prove herself to her new platoon.”

    Still at least they are using the official synopses. In the past they employed someone to write their own and they often bore very little resemblance to the actual episode at all making it difficult to find out where they were up to, and what happened if you missed an ep. Now if only they will use season and episode numbers.

    It wasn’t in doubt that Molly would make it, the script foreshadowed it clearly and, episode 1 was list for this Thursday. It…

  2. I agree David, bad promos which spoil or give a false impression of the show is so much worse here in Australia if you’ve checked out promos for the same episode on YouTube.

  3. “So it was a bit of a spoiler for ABC to promote the show as her being active on the ground in Afghanistan.”

    David, for what it’s worth, the advert on the ABC the previous Sunday made her active service pretty obvious; and in fact, gave a fair overview of the program – enough for me to avoid it – as I commented.

    Ditto, your item quoting the press release earlier this week made the program’s progress pretty plain.
    http://tvtonight.com.au/2015/04/airdate-our-girl.html

    I doubt that any ABC viewer (and there weren’t that many of them) felt the show had been ‘spoiled’, or that they had been misled.

    1. At the time I ran the press release in the Programming story, I had not seen the telemovie. But I agree having seen it that ABC Publicity divulged too much. These things should really be about set up and conflict, not resolution.

    2. Our Girl viewers. How do you know “there weren’t that many of them”? Sounds like a unsupported, disparaging remark to reinforce your own opinion to me. The pilot was highly acclaimed in the UK. And the series attracted viewing figures of 5 to 6 million despite being up against Downton Abbey.

Leave a Reply