Thursday’s TV viewers turn to news shows for Gillard drama
Thursday’s political upheavals, which saw Julia Gillard replace Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister of Australia, led to most news and current affairs programmes experiencing big lifts in audience.
Ten’s 7PM Project faced one of its first head-to-head current affairs tests, with Nine’s A Current Affair and Seven’s Today Tonight both pushed back in the schedule because of extended news bulletins.
And despite a smaller overall audience than it has been enjoying of late, The 7Pm Project delivered well for Ten in its younger demographics, winning both the 16-39 and 18-49 demos, according to preliminary overnight metro ratings from OzTam.
Meanwhile, viewers also turned to the ABC with 7.30 Report pulling in nearly 1.2m viewers and ABC News reaching 1.1m. Seven News was the most viewed news bulletin of Thursday though, with more than 1.4m viewers.
During the dramatic morning’s events, Nine’s decision to extend Kerri-Anne Kennerley paid off, with KAK (301,000) beating Seven’s The Morning Show (252,000) for virtually the first time since her rival launched. Ten News and Ten’s The Circle were left for dead on 56,000 and 65,000. (Edit: See comments below – It was extended Today in KAK’s timeslot)
Menawhile, Masterchef, which last night saw polarising contestant Joanna Zalm the 16th eliminated, powered on with a 1.8m audience winning the night.
The weekday start involved in yesterday’s 4.30am Socceroos game led to relatively disappointing viewing figures for SBS1. The Australia-Serbia game delivered an average of 728,000 vieweers – well behind the 1.1m who tuned in for the public holiday Monday 4.30am drubbing by Germany.
Nine narrowly won Thursday night, leaving Ten (23.8%) with a narrow lead over Seven (23.2%) for the week.
Thursday’s top 15 shows:
- Masterchef Ten 1.803m
- Seven News Seven 1.435m
- Glee Ten 1.322m
- Nine News Nine 1.308m
- Sea Patrol Nine 1.191m
- The 7:30 Report ABC 1.160m
- Today Tonight Seven 1.135m
- ABC News ABC 1.100m
- Law and Order: SVU Ten 0.951m
- A Current Affair Nine 0.932m
- Ten News Ten 0.905m
- Home and Away Seven 0.879m
- The 7PM Project Ten 0.828m
- Getaway Nine 0.817m
- Catalyst ABC 0.768m
Thursday night’s channel share:
- Nine: 23.4%
- Ten: 23.2%
- Seven: 20.5%
- ABC1: 16.6%
- SBS1: 5.5%
- GO!: 4.2%
- 7TWO 2.3%
- ABC2: 2.2%
- SBS2: 0.9%
- One: 0.7%
- ABC3: 0.5%
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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A big news week without question and no doubt we will probably hear repeatedly and for weeks to come on how strong the figures were for audiences on all ‘screen media’. One would imagine that newspaper sales went through the roof as well, ah but alas, we shall forever be left just wondering.
What a shame that we shall never know the impact on circulation sales when a big story such as this breaks.
Carol
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More than a little misleading. Kerri-Anne was dumped for the morning and Today show extended over the top of her. Sunrise handed over to the Morning Show at 10am. Up until 10am, Sunrise once again comprehensively beat Today in ratings. Interesting when you consider Today continually slams Sunrise as “light and fluffy” but when news breaks viewers turn to Sunrise. As they say in politics… the people have spoken.
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Thanks for that clarification, James. I think that confusion crops up because the time slots are (I believe) coded in advance so late changes don’t always reliably show up agsint the preliminary ratings.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella