Thank god there’s new theme music.
Not sure that “product vs packshot” qualifies as a popular segment either.
My wife’s favourite actually!
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I find it really repetitive. Especially those few episodes where they’ve run three or four in a row.
Looks like they’re going for a bit more of a newsy, authoritative appearance.
Fingers crossed. The show’s “comedy” is a massive cringefest and often unnecessary.
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New logo
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The Checkout is the newest victim of ABC budget cuts:
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The Federal Government’s funding cuts claimed a major scalp, and the general public will be worse off.
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I wonder if checkout style reports could be incorporated into 7:30 or another current affairs programme. We can’t rely on commercials to present that kind of of information for consumers.
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The ABC have issued a (confusing) statement.
https://twitter.com/ABCMediaComms/status/1015080553375154176
First line in:
The ABC has decided not to commission a seventh series of The Checkout for 2018-19 at this time.
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If there is a change to funding or an election…it’s baaack!
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Kirsten Drysdale had a stint at 7:30, annoyed conservatives by poking fun at the Abbott Shirtfront comment.
This is the kind of program that would not only be expensive to research but also to legally fact-check.
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I wonder if “The Checkout” as a brand would be attractive to a commercial network. Even Netflix?
I don’t think it’s commercially viable as a program on it’s own but a commercial network could still buy the format and incorporate it into one of the Sunday programs (Sunday Night, 60 minutes, etc.) or The Project.
A commercial network would take away any of its credibility, and I’d imagine there would be external pressure if an advertiser (for example, A2 Milk) decided to drop advertising because of criticism aired on the show.
SBS probably would be the closest thing that I’d imagine could possibly pick it up as they are more of a public service broadcaster with ads, rather than a fully commercial broadcaster.
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The content could surely be integrated into another program at minimal cost (minus the awful cringe humour that The Checkout added to it).
Rod Sims should lobby the government to specifically fund The Checkout.
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I would like to see a new consumer affairs program without so much forced comedy. I mean, quite a lot of the stuff in The Checkout was cringey, unnecessary and probably alienated potential audiences who could genuinely use the information provided. I would imagine it would also cost considerably less to film/produce than something that has the dual comedy/current affairs label.
The BBC and CBC do consumer affairs programming quite well with Watchdog and Marketplace. They are NOT comedy shows in the slightest. A light bit of humour interspersed within a quite serious program would not go astray, but I think the attempt to actually blend sketch comedy with journalism…just doesn’t work.
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Exactly this. The show had a ton of interesting and useful information, but presenting every single segment as a sketch with so much forced comedy got really tiresome and became a huge turn off. I’d love to see another attempt at a consumer affairs show, just with a more natural presenting style.
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