Peter Allen miniseries draws 1.212m as Dr Who beats The Biggest Loser on its return
The second part of the Peter Allen: Not The Boy Next Door miniseries drew a metro audience of 1.212m viewers for its finale last night, down marginally from last week where it drew 1.33m viewers.
Joel Jackson as Peter Allen in Not The Boy Next Door
The result will be seen as a win for Seven which invested heavily in promoting the tele-movie on the life of the Australian born singer/songwriter.
However, last night also saw The X Factor shed nearly 300,000 viewers from its 2015 debut last week drawing 1.26m at 7pm, but the singing show was still the most watched program of the night.
Good job, almost brilliantly well done by the producers. Joel Jackson was very fine in the role, but the character was wearing slightly thin as the second episode approached midway, right at the time where it was carrying most of the screen time. I fear that had the series been in three parts, there would have been fewer than a million tuning in for the last third.
The two part mini series was a fine indication of the kind of brilliance we are capable of producing, and the standards we will set when we get the writing firmly under control, and Producers/Directors, acquaint ourselves with the purpose of sentimentality and theatricality in the correct doses. It is a mistake to hide the storylines behind glitz and razzmatazz, however well presented it may be, and it certainly was well presented in this production by both boys behind the boy.
Series was full of historical inaccuracies. Some examples: Peter Allen auditioning for Bandstand in 1962 performing “Up, Up and Away”, a Jimmy Webb song which wasn’t known until 1967. Olivia Newton-John never sang “I Honestly Love You” on Countdown. Olivia Newton-John appeared on Bandstand only once – in 1969 with Pat Carroll, not with Peter Allen in the early 60s. Peter Allen’s celebrating his debut album in 1970 but there are scenes of a disco with “Disco Inferno” playing and mention of Peter Frampton’s “Frampton Comes Alive”, both which came out in 1976. Technological anachronisms like Bandstand in 1962 having Shure SM58 microphones – these were not available until 1966, etc. Not sure who the series researcher was but that was a pretty poor effort.
@ Viewer.
Yes, you are right in what you say, these are the points that producers often think make the retelling a better story, a kind of “never let the truth interfere with a good story” example, which Peter Allen certainly never did.
The women around him as a child, were clean and well presented, as they would have been in the day, but all were far too “made up” and much too posh for the era and for the town. The entire production was sanitised, which is an attempt to give it wider appeal, in a world where non thinking people often make value judgments based upon the most trivial of matters.
It is also a widely spread error of art departments, to get the cars wrong in period pieces. The cars are seen parked in a country town set in , say 1965, and each car is from the year of the production, each one has clean and polished paint, and there are no old cars anywhere to be seen, nothing with a dent or a rusty body, all are pristine and either new or in some cases a year or more ahead of their time.
@Richard Moss
From “brilliantly well done” to “the entire production was sanitised” in two posts. How could these two co-exist?
I didn’t watch it because the trailers were so sacrine.