Television

Seven Dances to Ratings Victory   Author: eNews staff and agencies | Feb 22, 2006, 13:01

Keeping Nine on its toes

It was the sort of night that the Nine Network used to deliver quite regularly under the old management.

Seven won hugely last night, thanks to the old Nine hands who were punted from the network by the John Alexander led team(and okayed by the late Kerry Packer).

The result, that saw Seven win by 16 ratings points last night, is a forerunner of what will be a regular occurrence in the next few months: Big beatings from Seven to Nine and Ten (excepting the Commonwealth Games)

Nine can still manage a flogging of that size, but it's more likely to be based on something life one-off special event programming, say the NRL grand Final or the State Of Origin Rugby league matches.

Beating the opposition by daylight and more like Seven did last night is in fact something rare for Seven as well.

But the 40.3% share for Seven, to 24.0% for Nine and 18.9% for Ten was reminiscent of the days in the late 90s when Nine used to whack the opposition by big margins based on regular programming.

Last night it was a clean sweep: from 5.30 pm to midnight Seven won every half hour and in some cases Nine finished third.

Leading the way Dancing With The Stars with 2.18 million and the Winter Olympics at 9.30 pm to midnight with more than 1.5 million people.

Deal or No deal at 5.30 pm, Seven News at 6 pm (even though it lost to Nine in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, the appalling performance in Perth of Nine handed Seven the national win. The Nine affiliate in Perth, STW are hicks from the sticks). Then Today Tonight at 6.30 beat ACA, Home and Away at 7 pm, then into Dancing at 7.30 pm for two hours.

And Dancing With The Stars had its best return audience last night: the audience was up 14% from series 1 and 11% from Series 3 last year. The audience peaked at 2.5 million people: all very impressive and more than enough to bash the opposition.

Just from the way the audience levels changed from Monday to Tuesday nights, it would seem the majority of viewers moved from the ABC, then SBS and then Nine to Seven. Ten's share didn't change at 18.9% and that performance last night was a better result than the same figure on Monday night when The Biggest Loser did good numbers but everything else failed.

But Seven's ability to handle this sort of popularity has always been suspect: the legendary ability to snatch defeat from dem jaws of victory was well and truly buried last night (but being Seven, you have to ask for how long?).

And why? Well look at the influence of CEO, David Leckie, who used to delight in belting Seven when at Nine.

Leckie has made it very clear to Seven programmers, led by Tim Worner, recently that he's in charge and will program the network and put shows where he thinks they should go. The message has been backed up by news and Current Affairs chief, Peter Meakin.

Another, behind the scenes player is John Stephens, formerly the head programmer at Nine but now the bloke who makes Seven's programming decisions tick.

As a result of last night Seven is in a good position to win this week.

It should win either tonight or tomorrow night, or both and stands a good chance of snaffling Friday and Saturday.

If that happens it could given Seven a large winning margin, perhaps one of the largest for some years.

And a strong sign that Nine doesn't have the regular programming power for the immediate future to best Seven over a full week.

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