Television

The Channel 9 Today show's "March with Magda" is coming to Brisbane on Monday, March 15. If you want to follow Magda Szubanski around New Farm Park for an early morning constitutional, be at the Rotunda at 6.45am on the day. It's part of the Jenny Craig/Women's Weekly "Australia's Greatest Weight Loss Challenge", with the aim of getting Australians to lose one million kilograms. In a Nine media release, Today co-host Lisa Wilkinson says: "Every time Magda is on the show, we get huge feedback from viewers who are inspired by her story, and want to take action themselves."

Don't say you haven't been warned: The Footy Show is returning to Channel 9 next Thursday night at 9.30. This year it will face competition from a new show on Seven fronted by former Footy Show star Matthew Johns and featuring Shane Webke. It will premiere sometime this month. To misquote Roy and HG, sometimes too much sport is more than enough.

Channel Seven Brisbane is declaring victory in the battle for Ipswich. A day after both Seven's Sunrise and Nine's Today broadcast from the southeast Queensland city, Seven has issued a media release declaring it had an average of 76,000 viewers on the day. The release continued: "For 6 consecutive years Sunrise, hosted by Melissa Doyle and David Koch has remained south east Queensland’s number one breakfast program and in that time has not lost one week of ratings. " The folks at Nine know they have a way to go and, according to information relayed at a briefing (i.e. long lunch) for journalists (me included) and other media folk at the Normanby Hotel on Tuesday, they are pumping more money into the Queensland market with a view to making Today No. 1. The good news for viewers should be that intense competition makes for better TV. Or, it should ...

A sneak preview of Jerry Seinfeld's new show, The Marriage Ref, has received scathing reviews in the US. Here's a few lines from the critics:
"Jerry Seinfeld''s new show almost cancels out Seinfeld." (Gawker)
"The most God-awful mishmash of a comedy-variety show." (Time)
"Who knew Seinfeld could be this unfunny?" (Baltimore Sun)
"Painful, pointless, obnoxious..." (New Jersey Star-Ledger)
"How could a man as funny as Seinfeld produce such a remarkably unfunny show?" (Huffington Post)
Mind you, TV.com says: "My recommendation is to take a look at the show for what it is, and not for what so many are pissed off that it isn't."

No need for Australian free-to-air viewers to wait until nighttime this year; Channel 9 has announced it will screen the Academy Awards live on Monday, March 8, from 11am. According to a Nine media release, the coverage will start with the Today Show’s Karl Stefanovic and Lisa Wilkinson hosting a red-carpet special, crossing to Richard Wilkins at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles at 11am. The award ceremony proper, hosted by Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin, will start at 11.30am.
Update: I spoke to Richard Wilkins today and, ironically, he says, as a viewer, he'd much prefer to wait until the nighttime broadcast, like a footy fan who turns away when the scores are on the news. However, he says, the internet and other news sources has created a demand for a live broadcast. And, of course, he'll be in LA, so there'll be no escaping it. (Still, it's hard to feel sorry for him.)

Coincidence or not? According to information from the two networks, both Channel 7's Sunrise and Channel 9's Today show will be broadcasting live from Ipswich, near Brisbane, on Wednesday. Well, presumably, they'll actually be broadcasting live to Sydney and Melbourne but on a one-hour delay to Brisbane. But they will be here.
Update: Spencer Howson tells me it's Ipswich's 150th aniversary on Wednesday, and 612ABC will have reporter Anne O'Keeffe on the scene, too. Time for your close-up, Cr Pisasale?

One of my pet hates has resurfaced -- the way films and television programs depict newspapers. Here's a still from a promo for the pay-TV channel 13th Street. No professional newspaper journalist I know would repeat the word "husband" from the main headline in the subhead, and none of them, I hope, would forget to put an apostrophe on the possessive form of the word.

The media release proclaiming a ratings victory in Queensland says "Nine wins gold" -- an allusion, of course, to the Winter Olympics. But it was the British program Top Gear and the American sitcom Two and a Half Men that helped Channel 9 snatch victory overall and among its preferred People 25-54 demographic last week. The Games didn't make the top 10 -- and neither, surely worryingly for the former undisputed king of the Bribane 6pm slot, did the Channel 9 News. Seven's Sunday News was No. 3 among all viewers, however Nine notes that its News had its best result so far this year, winning on Tuesday and Wednesday nights. Presumably, the return of Melissa Downes after maternity leave will be credited, but it might also have to do with a big local story that happened early last week. Maybe viewers still "come home to Nine" when a Brisbane significant news story breaks.

Some sharp media satire for the weekend, from British comedy duo David Mitchell and Robert Webb:

Foxtel today issued a media release blasting Nine's coverage of the Winter Olympics and accussing the free-to-air network of missing Torah Bright's gold-medal ceremony. Here's Nine's response.

A press release issued by Foxtel's public relations department this afternoon criticising the Nine Network's coverage of today's Winter Olympics action is both erroneous and inflammatory.
Foxtel CEO Kim Williams has subsequently apologised to Nine CEO David Gyngell regarding the contents of the release, which Mr Williams described as "disgusting", along with an undertaking that such behaviour will not be repeated.
In its release a Foxtel spokesperson asserted that Nine had been in a commercial break during the "history making award ceremony" for gold medalist Torah Bright, and that Nine presenter Ken Sutcliffe had minutes later presented that ceremony as "live".
The later assertion is totally false, as the record shows. And the event referred to was in fact a flower presentation ceremony - not the medal presentation which Nine will cover live tomorrow.
The Nine Network covered Torah Bright's winning gold medal run LIVE, as it did her first interview, and the first interview with her family. It did take a commercial break after that extended live sequence, but returned with the flower presentation ceremony in full, clearly indicating it had just taken place.
CEO David Gyngell pointed out that Nine was a commercial television station which provides free coverage, but must necessarily schedule ad breaks through extended live coverage.
"Our telecast of the Games has been first class, and the coverage of Torah Bright's fantastic win was entirely appropriate in every respect. Nor do I make any apology for Nine running a Woolworths commercial after her event was completed, and post all the relevant interviews and replays of the event. That is a commercial reality. And Woolworths are a great sponsor of the Games." he said.

Like millions of kids of my generation, the one before it, and the one now, I've watched thousands of hours of cartoons and live-action television shows and films in which the characters have died in the most awful ways. It has not inspired me, or the vast majority of others who consumed this material, to take a weapon to another person. Yet, in the wake of the tragic schoolyard stabbing at Shorncliff this week, Queensland Opposition politician Vaughan Johnson reckons we need censorship to "shield" children from the "filth" on television. Johnson should study his history. The fact is that we had lived in less violent times since the introduction of film, television and video games. If he doubts it, he should read up on the ways people died in ancient and medieval times, and even in 19th century Australia. Humans had at their disposal an ugly array of weapons and torture techniques that could inflict slow, painful death -- and all of them devised by people who had never seen a crime drama on TV or played Grand Theft Auto. To think censoring film and television beyond the restrictions already in place will magically solve schoolyard violence overnight is, at best, naive and at worst dangerously misguided. Good parenting and good schooling will make a difference, though.

Further to my previous post about time zones, maybe Australian TV and radio stations could use their websites or some of their digital spectrum to provide a genuinely live feed, especially for programs that are likely to generate real-time feedback in social media.
Update: The more I think about this, the more annoyed I get. The networks (especially TV but now radio, too) are the ones who took away our local viewing options and forced us into having a national water-cooler conversation with the same programs on at the same time across Australia. But when the time zones change, and with social media allowin real-time conversations, it's just tough luck for us. If I was a TV executive, I'd be addressing this as a serious issue.

Twitter is a great tool for other media - as demonstrated yesterday in Brsbane where local media were able to provide flooding and transport-delay updates. But, as I've said here before (and on 612ABC last week), it presents a problem for national media trying to promote their shows when daylight saving means "live" is not "live". Some advice for tweeters from national TV and radio programs that are shown on delay interstate: how about adding to the tweet the time the segments you're promoting will be seen/heard elsewhere? People who don't live in the southern vortex get mighty upset when it's assumed that they do.

Channel Seven is claiming a win in south-east Queensland the first official week of ratings for 2010. Despite crowd-pullers like the Inifgenous All Stars v NRL All Stars rugby league game (on Nine, 359,00 viewers and second overall) and Two and a Half Men (also Nine, 293,000 viewers and third most popular program) , the biggest show of the week was Seven's Sunday News with Sharon Ghidella, which scored 417,000 viewers. Seven claims a 29.9% share, including 7Two, and 26.8% for the main station on its own. Seven claimed half the Top 10, Nine had three programs and Ten had two (although not the much-touted Biggest Loser). In a small victory for local programming, Seven's Queensland Weekender with Dean Miller beat Nine's Funniest Home Vidoes (aka the show where children and animals hurt themselves for our benefit).

Julie Goodwin, who won Channel Ten's MasterChef last year, has just been named as part of the Today show team on Channel Nine. With Poh Ling Yeow now ensconsed on the ABC, it's odd that Ten hasn't picked up either the winner or runner-up of its ratings blockbuster.