Tench axed? So what’s new?

It’s a little surprising to read news items this week that David Tench has been axed. Surely this is old news.

After all at last November’s launch for TEN in 2007 it was never mentioned: “RETURNING AUSTRALIAN SERIES include: the break-out new hit of 2007, Thank God You’re Here, Rove Live, Bondi Rescue, The Wedge and Neighbours.”

It was effectively the axe there and then.

In this day and age when a network decides a show is underperforming they either axe it outright and say so, or they just withdraw it and spin some line about it returning to schedule at a later date. The same fate has befallen Celebrity Dog School. The axe never really falls, it’s future is just TBA. Big deal, it’s the same thing as it was last November.

You don’t see a withdrawn Australian show continue production to be returned to a prime time slot. The only reason worth airing anything that’s in the can is for drama quota points. In the case of pulled American shows (Smallville, The 4400, Veronica Mars?), they have already been acquired and returning them at a later date is to dump them before DVD sales kick in, as schedule fillers or as a PR exercise.

Similarly, Nine will find it difficult to return The Code back with all guns blazing. Pulling it was a loss-of-faith statement. How on earth do you convince the public that it’s now a better product than it was before?

Tench was a bold experiment between TEN, Andrew Denton and Animal Logic, the animators of Happy Feet. It wasn’t quite right when it launched and the timeslot was too ambitious. A late night parody should have been aired in a late night slot and allowed time to develop.

But if we are to believe that making an announcement some five months later about the axe for Tench is news, then I look forward to eventual clarity on all future shows that are pulled.

Most of the time they are just quietly dropped in the hope nobody will actually ask, “so is this the axe or not?”