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Ratings Hit for Nine Television Network
Thursday, October 1, 2009, 05:15 PM
Daryl Somers has once again pulled off a huge personal coup and frightened the daylights out of TV executives both on Nine and the opposing channels.
A man who is more popular with television audiences than television management has confounded his critics with the come back of the year. Ten years after Hey Hey Its Saturday was surprisingly dropped by Nine after a 28 year winning history the Hey Hey Reunion dominated the ratings for the night with a massive 45% per cent share of FTA ratings giving Nine a 40% share for the night from 6.00pm to midnight.
Hey Hey had an average capital city audience of 2.2 million people over nearly three hours. The audience held up well over such a long period starting at about 1.4 million building to a peak of over 2.4 million with 1.2 million staying til the end.
And Nine management threw the show in at the deep end scheduling on a Wednesday night rather than its traditional Saturday night slot and putting it up against the premiere of the Celebrity version of the highly successful MasterChef show at 7.30 pm and very popular World’s Strictest Parents. Hey Hey averaged nearly two million for the 7.30-8.30 hour burning Celebrity MasterChef which came second for the night with an audience 1.3 million and smacked the Worlds Strictest Parents with 912,000 viewers.
In the second hour at 8.30pm Hey Hey averaged over 2.3 million viewers beating the launch of Ten’s new NCIS: Los Angeles with 940,000, Spicks and Specks on the ABC with 840,000 and Seven’s popular drama City Homicide with nearly 800,000. That is the most competitive night of television in a very long time and some may have been wondering if Nine were really prepared to burn the program. However Nine supported the program with huge promotion and the two most popular acts in Australia with Jimmy Barnes and John Farnham fresh from their AFL Grand Final appearance last week. Barnesy who seems to be on every program these days from singing in a concert in a Synagogue to television shows to promote his new album sang a great duet with his son David Campbell and really entered the spirit of the show hamming up an act on Red Faces. Farnham, a long time supporter of the show sang live from his concert in Brisbane.
Hey Hey was popular right around Australia peaking in his home town Melbourne with a 50% share to Sydney with 42% and the only relatively low share was Adelaide with 34%.
Somers has a strong ego and personality, not unusual in television, and was very hurt when Hey Hey was originally dropped ten years ago and went out of the limelight for a few years. He then returned in 2004 on the Seven Network to host Dancing with The Stars which became a huge hit and a major driver in the turnaround of the Seven Network for David Leckie and Kerry Stokes. From 2004 to 2007 Dancing averaged an audience of about 1.8 million until Somers quit at the end of 2007. It is believed that the ambitions of Somers and the Seven management did not always coincide but the program has lost nearly 400,000 viewers since his departure.
Nine finally has a hit on its hands again and has to decide if and where to schedule Hey Hey in the longer term. Numbers will obviously come back down from the excitement of the opening reunion and it needs to work out how best to utilize its appeal and manage Somers. Daryl is an enigma and his appeal baffling to many including television management but he has demonstrated the old adage that you change a winning program at your own peril, just ask Nine and Seven. Somers is King again.
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