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Kyle & Jackie O’s drastic ratings drop

The audience for Kyle & Jackie O’s Night With The Stars declined from inheriting more than 1.4m viewers from The X Factor to just 200,000 by the end of the show, an analysis of minute-by-minute overnight ratings shows.

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Source: OzTam

The Seven show, filmed in LA, was a pilot featuring the radio pair in a mainly chat-based format. Segments included Mariah Carey’s husband, a somewhat awkward interview with Justin Bieber and Kyle Sandilands driving around trying to talk to hookers. it also included footage shot during the pair’s Today Network radio show.  

The rapid audience turnoff was reminiscent of the decline of the similarly heavily promoted Ben Elton Live from Planet Earth earlier in the year. Across its hour-and-a-half or so, the show averaged a consolidated metro audience of 560,000.

Reviews for Kyle & Jackie O Night With the Stars were tough. The Sydney Morning Herald said:  “While the advertisements to the show promised it would be ‘controversial’, segments of Kyle Sandilands chatting to street prostitutes or hanging out in strip bars were neither shocking nor funny.”

And the Herald Sun reported: “Within minutes of the radio duo’s highly anticipated program A Night With The Stars going to air, fans had already taken to Twitter to pronounce the 90-minute special ‘awkward’ and a ‘disaster’.”

However, despite the disappointing result, analyst Steve Allen of Fusion Strategy pointed out that “a severe drop off” was always to be expected because of the “huge” audience The X Factor had just delivered, and the lateness of the timeslot, which ran through until after 11.15pm.

He said that the audience was also comparable with the ratings for  Body of Proof which had been running in the timeslot.

Although the show had previously been discussed as a pilot, Allen warned: “You would have to be careful to build a new show off the back of this result.  One suspects it was not well enough produced/ directed.”

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