In this week’s issue of Woman’s Day there is a 6-page special celebrating Better Homes and Gardens’ three decades on air. Gardening expert Graham Ross mentioned the ratings battle between BH&G and Friends.
“It’s such a privilege to work not only on Australia’s foremost lifestyle television program but one of the longest-running in TV history. It’s an epic show, always has been – even when it started on a Tuesday evening all those years ago, going up against that huge blockbuster show Friends,” he chuckles.
Unknown to a lot of fans, Graham says the show was the reason Friends never recovered in the ratings. “We knocked it off its pedestal and history shows that. Not all critics accept the truth, but that night spelled the end of Friends.”
Was Graham correct? I can’t remember Friends screening on Tuesday nights on Nine.
I knew he was involved around that time but I had to google, it appears that despite his association with Packer and being a board member at Nine, he was consulting to Westpac on its Ten dealings. He had to resign from the Nine board:
Obviously because there are almost no staff so overnight they just let in run “as it is” - I mean, overnight with commercials and presentation from somewhere else, I know that problem.
But, is there any case where this happen in the metropolitan areas (*), or on interstate level (**)?
(*) i.e. Perth/Adelaide/Brisbane TV take dirty feed from Sydney/Melbourne TV
(**) i.e. Regional Victoria take dirty feed from Sydney.
Since when they started to carry own presentation (but with programming still piped in from feeds elsewhere)?
I came across this video a few years back. As the description says, it was recorded in 1993 when Southern Cross Vic started broadcasting 24/7. At the 25:30 mark you see the Southern Cross prg appear followed by the Ten prg. The next few segments only have the Ten prg. The local ads seen to continue until the Thought of the Day segment at 30:55 after which they switch to the full dirty relay.
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In the UK, the ITV network got round such problems by branding the overnight service something generic (eg. Night Time/Night Shift) and whichever station was being fed to the others networked a holding caption (eg. Back Soon) during ad breaks whilst playing out their own ads only to the local market. Other regions could take this sustaining feed during breaks or insert their own ads manually (if staffed) or using automation. Even the trailers overnight were genetically branded as ITV (although this was quite commonplace anyway). So someone in North Scotland wouldn’t suddenly see ads for businesses in Manchester or London and wouldn’t see the local branding of the origin station.
I’m not sure why Australian channels didn’t do something similar- particularly with the ads.
