Sharp Shooting: Popular Seven show facing the axe
Even with a Gold Logie winner as host, the death knell is sounding for a popular Seven show as bosses jockey behind the scenes.
The drums are beating at Seven for afternoon game show The Chase which is consistently being thrashed in its timeslot by Nine’s surprise hit Tipping Point.
The decline of Seven’s once unassailable 5pm game show, the critical lead-in to its 6pm evening news bulletin, has eroded confidence at the broadcaster where tensions and rivalries among the company’s newly minted executive class have been exposed.
Despite throwing a bucket on industry talk, published here last month, the position of The Chase host Larry Emdur was under review, a search is said to be underway to find a replacement program for the slot in the hope of arresting the slide of audiences to main competitor Nine.
In the week to May 7, including May 5 and 6, Tipping Point was in the top 10 programs on national TV each day with a substantial 159,000 audience lead (five city total people, average over three days) over The Chase.
The Chase failed to make the top 10 programs on any of those three days.
It was a similar story the previous week with Tipping Point beating The Chase convincingly every day, both in the five city metro demographic and the national total average which includes regional markets.
The collapse of the program’s figures is creating panic at Seven and has pitched a group of recently appointed network executives into an open battle for the support – and ear – of Seven’s chairman, Kerry Stokes, and his son and heir, Ryan, as the executives manoeuvre to shore up their positions.
While CEO Jeff Howard, who has been in the job 55 weeks, has the backing of Stokes the Younger, he is under immense pressure to galvanise his newly assembled management team and prove his leadership credentials.
Under him, his new captains have been busy establishing their own power bases.
Insiders are of the view it will fall to Seven’s recently minted group MD of television, Angus Ross, the network’s former head of programming, to make the call regarding The Chase, which is already warming up the 3pm weekday slot on Seven. This, is addition to airing two ours later at 5pm weekdays.
Seven’s one-year-in-the-gig news boss Anthony De Ceglie, who enjoys the favour of Seven’s chairman (and his ear most days or so we hear) leads a news team pitching a new afternoon show, an advertorial show in the style of the previously dumped Daily Edition. Sydney news director Sean Power has been linked to the show.
Departed Nine presenter Alex Cullen or maybe the under-utilised Natarsha Belling are favoured to front it.
De Ceglie appears on board with the idea of turning Seven into a news channel in daylight hours.
Currently Seven runs news programming from 5.30am, when its breakfast show Sunrise kicks off, through to 1pm via the recently expanded advertorial program The Morning Show and a sponsored one-hour news bulletin at noon.
Could another late afternoon news program, as unoriginal and cheap as that may be, be the solution to Seven’s issues? It seems unlikely but may be a commercial necessity.
Any change to afternoon scheduling will turn up the heat on Seven’s chief commercial director-of-15-weeks Henry Tajer, who must sell the airtime to advertisers.
Tajer has wasted little time aligning himself with Ryan Stokes following his appointment in January.
His appointment (following a decade-long campaign to get into the local TV industry say insiders) saw the reversal of the CEO’s decision to dispense with Seven’s well-regarded chief revenue officer Kurt Burnette last year, a decision that stunned the industry.
Tajer arrived at Seven with some baggage Seven staff have been working diligently to unpack.
Having relocated his family from Australia to New York in 2015 to take up the role as Global CEO of IPG Mediabrands, Tajer’s return to Australia two years later in 2017 for “personal reasons” created some buzz. IPG’s announcement they would not be replacing Tajer (whose style was defined in ad-land periodicals as “aggressive”) only served to heighten it.
A stint at marking company Dentsu Aegis in 2019 would last just 11 months and ruffle feathers.
The unconventional adman is thought to now have designs on Howard’s job at Seven, as too, or so it’s been suggested, may De Ceglie.
Where Stoke Sr and Jr sit on these internal tensions is hard to know however all seem to agree on one thing – that if Emdur’s game show is moved to a secondary Seven station the host will remain a valued member of the Seven family.
‘Not for everyone’
The radio boss who signed off on Kyle Sandilands and Jackie “O” Henderson’s $200 million 10-year KIIS FM contract and to-date unsuccessful Melbourne launch addressed shareholders at ARN’s annual general meeting on Thursday.
ARN CEO Ciaran Davis touched on the breakfast duo’s failure to penetrate the Melbourne market admitting “(Kyle & Jackie O’s) content is not for everyone,” but adding the program was a “multi-year commitment”.
Comparing the duo to the company’s other hot property, Christian O’Connell, who bolted to the top of the FM ratings on ARN’s second mainstream radio station GoldFM in Melbourne, Davis’s statements implied Sandilands and Henderson could be given a time frame similar to O’Connell – two years – to crack Melbourne.
“Shifting market behaviour takes time. We’re realistic,” he said comparing the duo to O’Connell.
Davis largely bypassed the myriad issues that have plagued The Kyle & Jackie O Show since its Melbourne launch – the lewd and obscene content issues that have turned away listeners and contributed to the duo capturing only a 5.8 per cent market share in that city, the advertiser boycott that has impacted revenue, the damning broadcasting authority investigations that found the program repeatedly breached broadcasting standards and concerns for Sandilands’ health – while acknowledging the show’s expansion was a “legitimate topic of investor interest”.
“We stand firmly for freedom of speech, we stand firmly against censorship, bullying and for the role that broadcast media plays in reflecting a wide range of voices and entertainment formats within accepted standards,” Davis said.
He added the controversial duo had been number one in Sydney for 50 consecutive surveys and had a large audience that was “double the audience of Australia’s top TV show”.
Separately ARN board member Alison Cameron, whose proud family media company Grant Broadcasters was acquired by ARN in 2022 for $300 million, said she didn’t believe Sandilands was “misogynist or sexist” but admitted she was not a regular listener of the show.
Radio industry sources afterwards speculated on the likelihood the meeting, also fronted by ARN chairman Hamish McLennan, would be Davis’s last.
Pundits predict Davis will be back in his native Ireland by Christmas and snugly ensconced in a new home he recently acquired there.
ARN stocks finished Thursday slightly up, at 58c, after hitting a record low of 53c on Tuesday.
Out of style
The future of popular women’s magazine InStyle is under a cloud again following word the current editor and her team have signed off after three years at the helm.
Editor-in-chief Justine Cullen paid tribute to the magazine and her staff in a social media post this week.
In the post she described the latest iteration of the Australian/New Zealand edition of the magazine as “an act of wild optimism and a real labour of love”.
“The Autumn print issue will be the last made by me and the team,” she posted.
Cullen was appointed editor-in-chief of the magazine in 2022 by independent publisher True North Media CEO Simon Bookallil. Cullen was also chief content officer of True North, which was owned by Bookallil’s Bashful Group creative agency.
Bookallil was a former partner and director of Australian Fashion Week.
He was overlooked in Cullen’s post.
‘F**king legend’
Singer Tex Perkins has paid tribute to Australian drummer James Baker who died this week, aged 71, a decade after being diagnosed with liver cancer.
“I’ve known Baker since 1983. I was 18, he was like a father to me. We drank a lot of beer together, whether at the Southern Cross Hotel, the Hopetoun Hotel, the Trade Union Club or on his couch in front of the TV at his house in Chelsea St watching re-runs of Green Acres,” said Beasts of Bourbon and Cruel Sea frontman Perkins.
“A lot of beer, never anything else, just beer.
“And in all the time I’ve known him we never had one argument, not one disagreement, not one shitty word. I can’t even remember one misunderstanding. In 42 years! He was always sweet, cool and often very funny! We laughed a lot.”
Perkins went on to describe Baker, who was born in 1954 and was inspired to become a drummer after seeing Ringo Starr play with The Beatles, as “one of my all-time favourite drummers – nothing flash or unnecessary, just solid beat!”
Baker spent his formative years in the seventies refining his energetic swampy punk-rock style in WA bands before joining The Scientists with Kim Salmon and, notably, the Hoodoo Gurus in 1981, playing on their landmark 1984 debut album Stoneage Romeos and catapulting a generation onto the dancefloor with his infectious surf beats.
The Beasts of Bourbon with Perkins and Salmon followers and afterwards The Dubrovniks.
“Put simply, James Baker is a f**king legend. I feel blessed to have known him and I loved him, always have, always will.”
Baker is survived by partner Cath and two daughters.
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