Keep making risky content, Tom Ballard tells ABC in tearful Tonightly goodbye
Tom Ballard, host of ABC’s axed comedy show Tonightly, bowed out last night with a tearful call for the ABC to go on taking risks.
Last month ABC announced it would axe the show after less than a year, citing a need for a “fresh approach”.
Tonightly bowed out with 44,000 metro viewers
Sad to see Tonightly go! Satire is an important part of the fourth estate. Hope the cast/crew will continue to create important discussion-provoking content elsewhere.
Harrison, back to the eastern suburb’s of Sydney with you…
Sad but glad to see that rubbish show gone.
The bigger question is this.
Why did the ABC let this program – which got something like 40,000 nightly viewers nationally (!), when commercial stations look at 400,000 viewers as a starting point of success – continue on for a year?
At a commercial network, anything that was patently a dog from the start would have been dragged off air within two weeks. And, those responsible for this egregious programming misjudgement asked to ‘please explain’ (as a preamble to their probable exiting the organisation).
But no, at the national broadcaster the program continued on, month after month, wasting taxpayers’ money, until the sheer weight of the indisputable awfulness of the program, induced them to axe it.
The video sums up neatly in 3 Minutes 47 Seconds all the reasons why it only attracted only 40,000-odd (very odd) people and has been axed.
An embarrassment to the ABC (which is saying something) and to Australian broadcasting.
It shows the great unwashed have more common sense that we give them credit.
I agree their swansong encapsulates the show pretty well.
The show attracted more than 50 million views to a single video on Facebook. So it wasn’t entirely unpopular.
It’s hard for a show on a FTA multichannel to get attention. The Feed and The Project are very similar. Yet one gets infinitely more viewers than the other.
Tonightly got better with time. By the end, I like to think most satisfied viewers of The Weekly would find the best half-hour each week of Tonightly to be funnier than The Weekly.
The end of the show leaves the ABC Comedy channel to be a place for people who like hearing jokes they’ve heard before.
Perhaps the ABC should give up trying to broadcast TV to people under 40, and instead commission various-length programs for social media and Netflix.
TV programs are for individual taste. However, the parts of this program I had the misfortune to watch, demean the quality programming that is available. Even Ballard’s “unbiased” view of his program, by necessity, used the descriptive “sh*t” in his farewell words. To many that says enough.
ABC cancelling a truly awful “comedy” show that spouted so much negativity due to Tom Ballard not being able to see through any other filter than rainbow which detracted from broadcast in a major way. It was terrible and the proof is in the audience numbers.
Hey Tom, you’re having a larf !
Do we have stats for the iview views though. Its no surprise that a millennial audience would be watching shows on live streaming, as plenty don’t even own a TV set.
These guys wrote and recorded each show in a day. There’s ya problem right there. Some new talent will come of it. Ballard’s coming back. Look out for a show ‘ How Hard Can It Be?’
thank god that crap show is gone…!
the cast should take lessons in entertainment at the corner pub rather than think they are in stand-up comedy in a corner pub, perhaps they should go back to that.
If the public figures they ridiculed and abused used same language and methods, they would be accused of being racist, sexist and right wing fascists, but its ok for a millennial, boofhead to dish it out.
I tried to watch it a number of times but could not get the punch lines and cringed at the forced audience laughter … Bring back the laugh track.