Sydney overload on Melbourne TV and radio is a real turn-off
Sydney presenters can’t pronounce our suburbs and towns, we’re last in the weather roundup and Melbourne talent and shows are getting axed. And there’s no faster way to lose audience than to shred your local identity, says Colin Vickery.
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And the winner is … Sydney! Juan Antonio Samaranch’s announcement of the host city for the 2000 Olympic Games could just as easily be applied to recent decisions across radio and television — and the loser is Melbourne.
On October 30, AFL fans were outraged when The Marngrook Footy Show was axed by SBS bosses up north.
The panel show hosted by Grant Hansen with Gilbert McAdam was the most popular sports program on the indigenous NITV channel, but that counted for nothing.
After 12 years, the program was unceremoniously dumped. SBS said, “We have to make tough choices about how we spend our limited budgets” but that NITV “remains committed to delivering quality AFL coverage”.
Hansen didn’t see it that way. He told the Herald Sun that the he didn’t understand the reasoning for the decision which he described as “really crazy” and “made without any foresight”.
One of the early decisions at Channel 7 under new CEO James Warburton was to retrench the entire Melbourne publicity department.
The move, part of a major internal restructure, caught the industry by surprise.
Adelaide and Brisbane were hit but Melbourne bore the brunt, despite its links to AFL.
Seven’s reported plan is to centralise all of its publicity out of Sydney under new chief marketing officer Charlotte Valente.
Another slap in the face came recently from ABC management in Sydney.
The national broadcaster has opted not to provide live radio coverage of next year’s Tokyo Olympics due to “budget pressures”.
The Australian Olympic Committee has already described the decision as “monumentally shortsighted”.
Everyone is affected but sport-loving Melburnians will be particularly outraged.
Speaking of radio, what the heck is going on at 3AW? In September the Melbourne-based Nightline program with Philip Brady and Simon Owens was axed after 50 years.
Sydney-based Macquarie Media decided to replace the show with another hosted by 2GB’s John Stanley.
Next came the departure of 3AW boss Stephen Beers and the shock announcement that station stalwart Alan Pearsall had been sacked after 29 years at the station.
For months, rumours have swirled that afternoons presenter Denis Walter’s days are numbered.
There is continuing speculation that Steve Price’s 2GB show will end up being networked into Melbourne to cut costs.
Macquarie Media also pulled the plug on its sports network and Melbourne didn’t escape the carnage.
Former Demons’ champion David Schwarz and co-host Mark Allen were suddenly out of a job. A day after the news, Allen revealed he was confronting a second battle with lung cancer.
Is anyone else seeing a pattern here — of decisions being made in Sydney that often barely impact content and personnel in that city but wreak havoc elsewhere, particularly in Melbourne?
If the trend continues I wonder how long it will be before there is a backlash from the Melbourne public.
Let’s remember what happened when the Fairfax group briefly owned Channel 7 in the late 1980s.
On March 27, 1987, popular Melbourne newsreader Mal Walden was sacked by Sydney bosses minutes before he was due to read the nightly bulletin.
The blowback was immediate.
Local viewers rebelled, even picketing the HSV-7 studios. Seven Melbourne’s news ratings plummeted to an asterisk — so bad they were too low to measure.
It took years to recover from the debacle.
Right now I feel that there are some Sydney-based television and radio bosses who are in danger of falling into the same trap.
They need to realise that treating the Melbourne public as second-class citizens is dangerous.
The people of Melbourne don’t want Sydney content shoved down their throats.
The two cities are very different. The two markets are very different.
There is no quicker way to lose audience than to shred your local identity. We get glimpses of it in those late-night television news bulletins networked out of Sydney where NRL gets pride of place over AFL in the sport report.
You can hear it when Sydney presenters mispronounce Melbourne suburbs and Victorian country towns or take forever to get to our city on a national weather roundup.
If the Sydney television and radio bosses don’t treat the Melbourne public with respect, they will be the losers.
Colin Vickery is a Melbourne writer and TV critic.