My Kitchen Rules: Colin Fassnidge gives his opinion on why the show isn’t rating well

My Kitchen Rules: The Rivals has been struggling in the ratings all season, and now judge Colin Fassnidge has revealed the reason why.

My Kitchen Rules judge Colin Fassnidge has revealed why he thinks the Channel 7 show is rating so poorly this year.

The cooking show has been comprehensively beaten by Australian Survivor and Married At First Sight this year with an average of 456,000 viewers (five city metro) each night. That’s down 46 per cent on the show’s average at the same time last year.

Speaking to KIIS FM’s Kyle and Jackie O this morning, Fassnidge said viewers have never forgiven the show for becoming too drama-filled in 2018.

“I think we’re getting crucified for a little incident a couple of years ago with Sonya and Hadil – remember they got kicked out of the show?” he said. “And the drama went through the roof and a lot of people got turned off.”

Manu Feildel, Pete Evans and Colin Fassnidge from MKR.

But Fassnidge told Kyle and Jackie O that this current season is different, and pleaded with viewers to give the show a second chance.

“I know we’ve made some corkers in the past,” he said. “About two years ago I really did not like what we were doing. But this one, I stand behind.”

The Irish chef and TV personality admitted it annoys him when viewers assume MKR focuses too heavily on drama, saying: “People say there’s too much drama but they’ll go and watch Botoxed At First Sight or whatever it’s called.

“I’m a very passionate guy and I spent five months of my life making this show … I really believe it’s a great show.”

Fassnidge made headlines earlier this week when he blamed Channel 7 for the show’s poor ratings.

In an interview on 2GB, he slammed the network for airing this year’s launch episode of MKR on the same night as the Australian Open Men’s Final which was shown on Channel 9.

“This year was the best one we’ve done but not everyone’s watching it, at the moment, cause we’ve got some people in Channel 7 who don’t know how to program a show,” he said on 2GB.

“A lot of work went into this and then some stupid decisions were made to go up against the tennis and Married, we should have started a week early.”

Colin Fassnidge’s team on MKR. Picture: Channel 7

My Kitchen Rules continues tonight on Channel 7 at 7.30pm