All Stories FeedNews Archive:
April 09: SuBo, Deal v Hot Seat, IceTV victory, Talia wins Dance
April:
Naylor will cuts son from family estate
Andrew G to front Idol solo
‘Fugly’ creator calls it quits
Minister Conroy for sale on eBay
Guiding Light switching off
Profits tumble at TEN
Dateline scoops coup
Gavin & Stacey star collapses from exhaustion
Girls turn it on for Ladettes auditions
Andre Rieu in Ramsay Street
The very scholarly Kerry O’Brien
Leckie sells network shares
Game on. It’s Eddie v Andrew
Star Trek premieres at Opera House
Fennessy brothers to Shine for Murdoch
TEN backtracks on House promise
Neighbours producer: Lack …
Random acts of oversights
An episode of Nine’s Random Acts of Kindness has created headaches for the owner of a Woodend animal rescue shelter, after a renovation made on the show failed to comply with Victoria’s animal practices code.
“As soon as I walked in and saw what the program had done, I knew we were in trouble in terms of failing to meet Department of Primary Industry guidelines governing the running of an animal shelter,” said proprietor Trish Burke.
Burke had been sent on a surprise trip while the work was carried out in secret in …
Meanwhile, over in the factual genre….
We’ve all seen them do it. You’re following an interesting story in your favourite factual / observational series and suddenly you are whisked away to a completely new story. Just as that starts to look interesting you’re shunted off to another one, meanwhile there’s something about to occur back in the first story. Since the success of Border Security they’re practically all doing it now.
‘Meanwhile TV’ has infiltrated so many titles in the genre, especially in commercial television. Have television producers lost faith in their ability to sustain an audience?
“It isn’t …
TEN leaves Nine the biggest loser
It will probably go down as the tightest ratings week of the year. Just 1.5% divided the three commercial networks in Week 18 of the year.
It was still Seven that again took glory with 26.7%, however the real story was the upset for second place. TEN snatched that with 25.5% over Nine’s 25.2%.
The ABC had 17.1% and SBS 5.5%.
Most significantly, TEN won the three key demographics 16-39, 18-49 and 25-54. Seven was second in each.
There was also a shake-up in “city wins”. TEN won Adelaide this week plus second place in …
Gone: Guerrilla Gardeners
TEN has dropped its renegade landscaping series Guerrilla Gardeners from current schedules, effective immediately.
The show was airing on Sundays at 6pm after struggling on Wednesday nights. Last night it took just 436,000 viewers, thumped by Seven News (1.79m) and Nine News (1.54m). Its lead in, Out of the Blue, was no help with 221,000.
But viewers flocked to The Biggest Loser at 6:30pm with 1.48m winning its slot.
Guerrilla Gardeners is part of a renewed push by TEN into factual television with Recruits to premiere next week. TEN will still have a number …
Bumped: Guerrilla Gardeners, The Simpsons
TEN is tweaking its post-Easter schedule.
It will move Guerrilla Gardeners from Wednesday nights to Sundays at 6pm instead of Simpsons repeats.
In its place new episodes of The Simpsons move from Friday nights to 8pm Wednesdays, where they will no doubt pull a bigger audience than they were on Fridays. But it will have to compete with Thank God You’re Here, the network’s former comedy, when it debuts on Seven a week later.
Repeats of Simpsons will simply replace the new eps on Fridays -and probably garner a similar number anyway.
Guerrillas renovates Sundays …
Guerrilla courtcase
A garden makeover at the centre of a dispute between Sutherland Shire Council and Guerrilla Gardeners could wind up in court.
The producers of TEN’s show say a fine from the Council will be challenged in court. It follows the removal of a garden at a Jannali roundabout.
Executive producer Nick Murray said: “Sutherland Council is the only council in Australia to have ripped out a garden that we planted.”
His crew had transformed the roundabout with an old boat, a tall tree, flagpole and plants. But in the style of the show’s clandestine …
TEN’s Easter programming
TEN’s programming for the first week on non-ratings (April 5th) includes several big name shows that will continue with new episodes.
Continuing: The Biggest Loser, So You Think You Can Dance Australia, Rove, Dexter (1 ep), Neighbours, Bondi Rescue, Guerrilla Gardeners, House, Life, Bondi Vet, Life on Mars, Before the Game, AFL.
Repeats: NCIS, Law & Order: SVU, The Simpsons, Medium, Law and Order,
Special: Good News Week “Best of 2008″.
Guerrilla e-War
Britain’s Richard Reynolds, author of On Guerilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gardening Without Boundaries and founder of the GuerrillaGardening.org has blasted TEN’s Guerrilla Gardeners.
In a fiery email last week, Mr Reynolds alleged producer Nick Murray had stolen his concept then trashed the ideals of the movement.
“What sounded promising has turned out to be a tragic barrage of misinformation about the movement and I’m livid,” Mr Reynolds wrote.
“Your show really lacks the soul of guerilla gardening . . . It’s a green-washed makeover show, not the courageous gardening show it …
Statues disappear in Gardeners hit
Another round of news for TEN’s Guerrilla Gardeners this week saw the theft of statues that were installed at New Farm in Queensland.
The TEN crew had recently posed as United Nations workers to install two statues of backpackers and a garden at the corner of Malt St and Bowen Terrace in a major seven-hour operation.
“The suburb has a big transient population, which is where the idea came from for the backpackers statues,” Guerrilla Gardeners producer Damian Davis told The Courier-Mail.
But it seems the two statues were stolen over two nights during …
Guerrilla’s site: accusations, confusion and publicity
EXCLUSIVE: On Wednesday this week Channel TEN sent out an alert to media claiming Canterbury Council in Sydney was “in the process of destroying a site” that the Guerrilla Gardeners had madeover in its first episode.
It did so on the same day the show goes to air.
But TEN jumped the gun, not just on who was supposedly making changes to the site, but on whether any changes were actually happening at all.
A spokesperson for Canterbury Council told TV Tonight the property belongs to Rail Corp, adding: “We are obviously wanting …
Guerrilla publicity
While Guerrilla Gardeners is trying to build on its modest audience numbers, TEN is spinning as much as it can on the show flouting municipal law.
Yesterday it claimed Canterbury Council in Sydney was in the process of “destroying a site that the Guerrilla Gardeners transformed.”
The site was featured in the first episode of the show, located outside the Canterbury train station in Sydney. TEN claims prior to being made over by the Guerrillas it was “a desolate, ugly, dead stretch of land.”
And it probably was.
But to claim a council is ‘destroying’ …