Forget prime time, 5pm is where the loyal TV audiences are
The Australian free-to-air television industry is obsessed with prime time. The evening slot — between 6pm and midnight — is where the most important programs are placed, and it’s where the most promotional money is spent. Shows are bumped from prime time as soon as they fail to cut the ratings muster.
Advertisers love prime time, too. But it’s not always where the audiences are. Over at 5pm, two game shows are delivering millions of viewers across an hour-long timeslot, day after day.
“We’re obviously ecstatic with how Tipping Point’s going,” Geoffrey Dyer, the director of network scheduling for the·Nine Network tells Mumbrella.
“I think if we all put our hands on our heart and we’re being honest, it has surpassed our expectations of how well it was going to do.”
Dyer is talking about the network’s most consistent ratings success, outside of the 6pm news. Each afternoon from 5pm, tennis star Todd Woodbridge hosts a game show that is half general interest quiz, half pinball. It’s a blend of light knowledge, and lighter competition (the contestants often cheer each other on), all mixed with Woodbridge’s warm charm. It’s also subject to the whims of ‘The Machine’, a monstrous version of a sideshow coin game. This contraption pushes puck-shaped counters towards the titular tipping point, with contestants feeding extra counters in from the top.
Todd Woodbridge and The Machine.
If you’re confused, you’re probably not alone. The show’s appeal — or indeed its premise — is impossible to explain succintly, but it’s been a ratings success since debut, reliably drawing more than a million daily viewers since launching in early 2024.
Over on Seven, The Chase Australia is battling for that same 5pm timeslot. It’s a more orthodox quiz show, with veteran Larry Emdur in the hosting role, and four contestants battling each other and an expert who works on behalf of ‘the bank’, a growing money pool. Emdur won the Gold Logie last year, due in part to the show’s remarkable success. It was his first-ever win, despite being on TV since 1984.
At the moment, Tipping Point rates slightly higher than The Chase Australia, although the two shows compete fiercely on a daily basis. They are often the only two non-news program in the top five of the ratings on any given evening. Both shows draw audiences of between 1.2 million and 1.5 million people each day, competing not only with each other, but with massive prime time plays like MAFS, Farmer Wants A Wife, and Nine’s latest shiny floor program, The Floor.
Last week, The Chase Australia “secured its highest rated week of the year”, a Seven spokesperson tells Mumbrella, with the biggest cash prize in the show’s history, $129,000, handed out. “More record-breaking wins are ahead,” the network promises.
Larry Emdur on The Chase
“This market has had a rich history in terms of successful game shows,” Dyer notes. This is true, although they usually rate well in prime time, before being put out to pasture in the afternoons, often as reruns. In the past, an Australian quiz show will launch in prime time, as with Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, before being regulated to the afternoons, once the gloss had worn off.
But this attitude has shifted over recent years.
“The 5pm slot has been a really strong game show slot for a very long time,” Dyer says. “Us and Seven have been battling it out in that slot for quite a while.”
Historically, the hour before the news was divided into two timeslots, with the 5.30pm news lead-in being the plum spot. Seven launched Deal or No Deal in 2003, which was a 5.30pm rating success, beating out Nine’s stalwart, The Price Is Right – then in its seventh iteration since 1957. Nine rotated a number of shows across the two timeslots, before settling on Millionaire Hot Seat in 2009.
“It took us months and months and months to get that first win over Deal or No Deal,” Dyer says. “Then eventually those wins became more frequent.”
Andrew O’Keefe, Deal Or No Deal
Dyer notes that high ratings for the 5pm slot are unique to Australia. “It’s counter to what happens in other markets, where it’s a bit unusual that your 5pm slot can rate as high, if not higher, than segments of prime time.” Dyer puts this down to habit – something linear television is uniquely placed to serve.
“The power of free-to-air, at the moment, is certainly familiarity,” Dyer says. “I think viewers know what to expect when they come to us across the afternoon, and same with our counterparts at Seven. So, it’s one less decision they have to make in their day, when there’s so many options for entertainment these days.”
In an era of streaming and on-demand content, such appointment viewing is rare. The demographics for the timeslot skew older, Dyer says, with many younger workers in transit. Quiz is also traditionally dominated by 40-plus audiences, although the appeal can be general.
“It’s familiar. It’s easy, lean back viewing. It’s something that you can participate with the whole family. So it plays to all of those traditional strengths of free-to-air.”
Interestingly, both The Chase and Tipping Point have their genesis in UK versions, which each Australian network previously aired mid-afternoon, with surprising success.
Geoffrey Dyer
By 2014, the UK version of The Chase was doing so well for Seven in the usually barren 3pm slot, the network sent out a casting call for Aussies living in London to appear in an Australian pilot version of the show, shot on the ITV set.
This was ultimately shelved, but the idea ruminated, and a local version launched in 2015, replacing repeats of Deal Or No Deal at 5pm, and Million Dollar Minute at 5.30pm — the latter being a Hot Seat knock-off that had sputtered along for two years.
The Chase Australia was an immediate rating success, beating Nine’s Millionaire Hot Seat, which had ruled the 5.30pm timeslot since 2009.
More importantly, it helped revitalise Seven’s 6pm news bulletin, which had lagged behind Nine’s for years. Nine quickly extended Hot Seat to an hour, and took on The Chase head-to-head for the full 60 minutes.
Hamish Turner, then Nine’s program director, was paying close attention to Seven’s 3pm success, and how they had parlayed this into a 5pm locally produced blockbuster. He loved the Tipping Point format and imported the UK version to air on Seven in the 3pm timeslot, reformatting the network’s afternoon block in the process, and setting up a head-to-head for the two formats.
“It initially did very well,” Dyer recalls. “And then, COVID hit and just that whole afternoon block just started to do better, because everyone was trapped in their homes. It exposed it to a whole tranche of audience who wouldn’t have normally seen it because they’re at work.
“And the phenomenon of Tipping Point started to become a thing.”
The dreaded machine
By this point, Millionaire Hot Seat had been losing the 5pm battle to The Chase Australia since the latter show’s 2015 inception. It was time for a change.
“We were and are immensely proud of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and Hot Seat,” Dyer notes. “But at a certain point, it had reached its maturity. I mean, I think we did 2,500 episodes. And the … Millionaire brand had been on air for about 25 years at that point.
“It was time to pivot into something else. And Tipping Point was the obvious successor.”
Nine tasked Endemol Shine Australia with making a local version, altering it to suit the less-staid Australian game show market.
“One of the things with 5pm game shows is we want them to be a little bit more alive and agile,” Dyer explains. Nine added a studio audience, absent in the UK version, and loosened the format so the peak action happens in the final 10 minutes, during the crucial lead-in to the 6pm news, which is where the other major battleground between Nine and Seven lies.
“We want that last ten minutes to really sing, and be a great, lean-forward viewing experience.”
Part of this was increasing the jackpot from the $10,000 on offer in the UK version, which meant giving Woodbridge carte blanche to increase the cash offer on the fly, throw in bonus holidays to further tempt the contestants to risk the purse, and basically served to make the last few minutes slide seamlessly into the headline news stories.
So far it’s worked, and Woodbridge hasn’t bankrupted the network with spontaneous generosity.
If fact, Tipping Point is doing so well that Nine have flirted with moving the format into prime time.
The show actually launched as a prime time special on Christmas Eve, 2023, before launching in its 5pm slot the following month. Last year saw a handful of prime time Tipping Point specials built around Nine’s Olympics, which rated well for the network, albeit surrounded by blanket Olympics coverage. January saw an Australian Open special, while special episodes built around Travel Guides, and The Block are coming down the pipeline.
For now, these remain “elevated” specials.
“There’s no appetite for us to move it full time into primetime,” Dyer confirms, saying the show’s success remains under-reported.
“I think there’s an underestimation of how strong it’s going at the moment: how many people are watching it, and how big a part it is of people’s day to day lives.”
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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… As it always has …
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Does Todd really have carte blanche to increase the offer? I reckon there are bean counters doing the odds in relation to the budget, experienced producers weighing up the value of the contestant to the show (and what they think audiences will want to happen), and a voice in Todd’s ear telling him how much to offer.
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