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Seven confident in Big Brother, SAS after COVID-impacted schedule fix

"When you lose shows, you have to run shows in places that you weren't expecting," says Seven's Angus Ross.

The Voice: Generations will film this month in Sydney for Seven’s 2022 schedule, followed by the main event itself, The Voice 2022.

Seven is also moving forward on plans for Australian Idol and Australia’s Got Talent to return after production had to be shelved this year due to the pandemic.

Seven’s Director of Programming Angus Ross tells TV Tonight, the 2022 schedule will look to put some space between talent shows.

“There’s got to be a bit of distance, particularly between The Voice and Idol. The market has comfortably sustained two shows in the past when The Voice and X Factor were on,” he says.

“With AGT we thought we had a really great judging panel. We had a lot of great acts. For them to have done their quarantine and then us have to cancel the show was absolutely heartbreaking.

“We’d love to get those people back and that’s what we’re working on now. But both shows are moving with the view to them running next year.”

When AGT was pulled from 2021 Seven pivoted to Big Brother: VIP which Ross says could be confidently filmed during precarious pandemic conditions.

“We had a mechanism where we could get a series of Big Brother and that we could produce under COVID conditions and choices were limited. We’re disappointed in the numbers, but you still go into it thinking you can get the show to resonate and and for whatever reason it hasn’t,” he continues.

“I’m still very confident about our series next year with the ‘All Stars’ angle we’ve got. I think when it returns it’s going to do very well. But yeah, this one didn’t resonate as we’d hoped.”

SAS: Hell Week also under-performed but Ross is confident a return to celebrities in Q1 next year will deliver.

“When you lose shows, you have to run shows in places that you weren’t expecting. Those four episodes of SAS were actually intended to run next year. But if I hadn’t run that, we would have been putting black to air,” he adds.

SAS will be back in the celebrity version that has worked each time we’ve rolled it out. We’ve got a great new bunch of recruits. I don’t think there are any issues with with the regular versions of those shows.”

7 Responses

  1. It’s interesting that they’re trying to downplay the failure that was Big Brother VIP as something that was ordered after AGT was delayed until 2022 as a last minute schedule gap filler. But they announced it way back in March, three months before the AGT was delayed…

  2. surely they really are not going through with a second VIP season when the shows on now are rating better than VIP did? I suspect the 2022 will start off rating well due to the all stars factor. Sara-Marie, Reggie and Tim allegedly being on it are fascinating to both super fans and casuals.

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