Nine to stick with A Current Affair on Saturdays

After trialling this year, Nine will keep its Saturday edition of A Current Affair into 2021.

Executive Producer Fiona Dear tells TV Tonight, “It’s staying. It’s been really good for the ACA brand, because it shows we are committed.

“It developed because of COVID and the thirst for news and content in that period, but it did really well in that spot, so we’re keeping it going.

“I think I could do more with the show on a Saturday night. It’s just I purely haven’t had time, doing six days a week. So I’m getting a new supervising producer who’s going to look after the Saturday show and the sky’s the limit.

“I want to try new things. It could be anything. It could be a forum, or an extended interview for Deb (Knight).

“I think maybe an audience on a Saturday at 7:00 wants to be entertained a little bit more”

“I think maybe an audience on a Saturday at 7:00 wants to be entertained a little bit more with a softer rather than a hard-sell slammed down their throats. But we have reporters rostered on Saturday and camera crews, so that if it was a big bushfire day or the President of the United States got COVID, we could do something.”

Dear has been executive producer for 2 years, having spent almost 15 years in the Nine newsroom, including as deputy news director.

While Deb Knight hosts Saturdays, Leila McKinnon fronts summer edition, it is Tracy Grimshaw who remains the face of the show -at 14 years its longest-serving anchor.

2020 was also the biggest news year in living memory and viewers were drawn to daily updates.

“For ACA all the rules changed this year”

“For ACA all the rules changed this year,” Dear agrees.

“I had Tracy at home with the dogs running around her feet, which the viewers seemed to love. Everyone knows she’s an animal lover, so it felt almost like they were getting a bit more of an insight into Tracy Grimshaw, and they loved it.

“But she’s the best interviewer in Australia -hands down- and that’s one thing I’ve really focused on this year: trying to showcase her more. In that COVID period, where people had this thirst for information, whether it was about their jobs, or general health stuff, I think they feel like they can trust her.

“Her big thing in an interview is to be respectful”

“Tracy is very natural. She doesn’t try and be aggressive. Her big thing in an interview is to be respectful, and it doesn’t mean she goes soft, but she’s respectful.

“She puts an enormous amount of effort into interviews. There were a couple of hairy moments where I would call her in the morning and say ‘Trace you’ve got the PM tonight,’ and she instantly wants to stop what she’s doing, like a student cramming for an exam. When she goes into an interview, she wants to be totally prepared.

“There were some weeks where she did an interview most nights. I liked it, she liked it and I think the viewers liked it.

“So I’d be crazy not to get her to do more interviews.”