Is Seven’s Winning Arvo utter garbage or utter genius?

There’s a new five-hour weekday block in Seven’s afternoon schedule. It has taken its most successful non-Summer Bay-based formats, tossed them in the air and sticky-taped them back together, William Burroughs cut-up style.

Winning Arvo runs from 1pm until 6pm each weekday, and is hosted by Alex Cullen. It’s a rolling mix of game shows — mostly imported from the UK — interspersed with news updates, and live viewer giveaways.

Such lowbrow programming has attracted the ire of Australian media, the most strident of which was a day-one review from TV Blackbox’s Robert McKnight under the headline ‘”Australian television just died”.

A scatologically obsessed McKnight — once executive producer for Studio 10 — called it a “pile of shit”, “the biggest pile of horse manure”, and a “turd”, before undermining his credibility with the line: “Daytime television in Australia was once the home of innovation, variety and compelling viewing.”

Hmm.

Winning Arvo opens with a lunchtime news update by Cullen, a quick throw to a local news blast from whatever city your couch happens to be in, then a cash giveaway — where a home viewer with a computer propped on their lap plays a game that resembles (but is legally distinct from) Nine’s ratings winner The Tipping Point. Cleverly, the only way to be a participant of these giveaway segments is to tune into The Morning Show, which runs from 9am to noon, meaning that Seven will potentially have prize-hungry viewers on the hook from 9 to 5. What a way to make a living!

After the first giveaway, Winning Arvo crashes into Blankety Blank, a UK game show first aired in 1979 and not updated since. (Fun Aussie twist: Peter Andre was a celebrity guest on last Friday’s episode.)

The format repeats: news headlines, Tipping Point coin-pushing arcade-style game, imported game show. There’s an hour-long news break at 4pm, then Seven’s top-rating locally-produced version of The Chase, where Larry Emdur attempts to out-grin Cullen.

Speaking of Cullen, he is perfect for this role. Until the fateful Today show episode in January when he decided to accept a $50,000 token-of-appreciation from billionaire Adrian Portelli in exchange for helping to rebrand him on air, he had a daily light-entertainment audience of close to a million on Nine.

I’m betting there are a lot of these viewers who don’t see a moral difference between Cullen’s cheeky payola stunt and, say, Today broadcasting from Disneyland for an entire week this July. Or, for that matter, Richard Wilkins’ constant promotion of Sophie Ellis Bextor, who Today viewers must assume is the biggest pop star on the planet given the banket coverage she gets.

Plus, Cullen is genuinely funny and — like a lot of sports reporters who aren’t ex-football players — he already looks like a game show host, anyway. It seems like a perfect match. (Note to Seven: There’s surely room in the Winning Arvo schedule for a Perfect Match reboot.)

During the second day of Winning Arvo, a contestant cried with relief and joy when she won $10,000, explaining it would “make a hell of a difference”, and mentioning a sick husband for extra afternoon pathos. Now, that’s television!

The weekly giveaway was capped at $25,000, so the stakes were considerably lower for the remainder of the week, and by week two (this week) they had made the Tipping Poi– sorry, the unrelated coin game into a Friday-only fare. But news, then games, then news, then games, seems like a winning arvo to me.

Seven have spared some expense on the set and games for Winning Arvo

Ratings-wise, it’s working — albeit, at a leisurely pace. The first week saw Seven gain a percentage point in audience share in the 1-4pm ratings block, week on week, meaning they enticed a number of free-to-air viewers who weren’t tuning in the week prior to switch over from repeats of Ahn’s Brush With Fame or whatever they were previously watching. The Chase already draws over a million viewers every night at 5pm (1.25 million tuned in on Wednesday this week) and as Seven’s game show block becomes an ingrained viewing habit, this number should increase further.

Numerous critics have pointed out the unsteady blend of hard news and fun giveaways doesn’t necessary jibe, but isn’t that exactly what Nine’s Today and Seven’s Sunrise are?

Sunrise, which has won its morning timeslot for twenty years and running, successfully delivers the hard news of the day while a man in the Cash Cow suit waits in the wings. Don’t weathermen wear wacky ties while reporting on flood disasters?

Sure, Seven has not poured millions of dollars into the set. Sure, the Tipping Point coin-pushing arcade-style game looks like it was souvenired from a regional RSL. Sure, the show’s graphics appear to have been rendered on a Super Nintendo. Sure, every single home viewer appears to be aiming their laptop camera directly at their neck. This, I would argue, all adds to the charm. At least we know AI isn’t involved – unless Cullen is actually one of those fake celebrities that are popping up.

Winning Arvo is good, easy television. It’s also on during the deadest, driest, tumbleweed-strewn hours of the programming day. It’s not The Sopranos — but you still get to see people win and cry. Isn’t that what good television is all about? Isn’t that what last weekend’s AFL final was, and this weekend’s rugby league grand final will be, when you really, truly break it down. Winning and crying — and games that don’t actually matter unless you have money on the line.

Plus, if it fizzles out, Seven can always bring back the horoscopes.

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