Television

Nine's fresh afternoon lineup   Author: eNews staff and agencies | Jun 4, 2007, 21:29

The Nine Network is continuing to fiddle with the positioning of the live daily chat show, The Catch-Up, which has so far failed to have any impact on viewers.

From today the program has been swapped from 1 pm to Midday with the repeats of McLeod's Daughters.

McLeod's was put into the Midday slot several weeks ago to give The Catch-Up a decent lead-in after the previous idea, an hour version of the cooking show, Fresh, failed badly.

These changes happened at the start of May when Dr Phil moved to Ten.

Fresh was returned to a half hour and the 11.30 am timeslot where its ratings have jumped sharply, topping the 160,000 mark on a couple of occasions and having a strong week last week.

Except on Friday where the audience returned to more normal levels, averaging 108,000.

But then the Friday audiences for McLeod's also fell under 100,000 to 90,000 and The Catch-Up's also fell to a new low of 86,000.

Now Nine hopes to get a lift for The Catch-Up from the improving audiences for Fresh.

But that begs the question, why did Nine fiddle with Fresh in the first place and push it to an hour at Midday and endanger the program's obvious popularity with viewers?

To save several million dollars a year Nine didn't renew the CBS News contract, which lost Nine Dr Phil, which aired at Midday and dominated day time TV.

That is now on Ten and doing the same. Nine also didn’t renew the soap The Young and The Restless, which is now on Foxtel but which was popular in it’s FTA timeslot, sharing viewers with Nine’s other veteran soap, Days of Our Lives.

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Victory to the Seven Network in the national TV ratings battle last week as it easily reversed the previous week's win by the Nine Network.

Seven won the week with a share of 29.2% (28,2%) from Nine with 28.1% (28.3%), ten with 21.0% (21.2%), the ABC with 16.2% (16.4%) and SBS with 5.5% (5.9%).

Nine actually had one of its better weeks without a one off- ratings 'stunt' (such as the State of Origin) as Seven's ratings attack was somewhat blunted by the rugby union test on Saturday (for the second week in a row) and the success of The Chaser and Spicks and Specks ion the ABC on Wednesday nights.

Nine won Sydney and Brisbane while Seven won Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth.

A solid performance on Sunday night plus big wins on Monday, Tuesday and Friday drove Seven's win. It lost Wednesday narrowly by 0.1% and drew Thursday with Nine.

Seven won Friday thanks to the Collingwood AFL game and despite Nine's NRL games doing well in Sydney and Brisbane.

Nine repeated the movie, Shrek 1 on Saturday and scored a big win around the country. Ten's screening of the Sydney-Essendon game on Saturday night had no impact in Sydney where the network averaged a 12.2% share but helped the network to draw the night with GTV 9 in Melbourne. Ten won Perth on Saturday night.

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