What went wrong at Ten Breakfast?
With the dust settled on Ten’s failed entry into the morning television market, Lee Zachariah sifts through the rubble to find out what really went wrong with Breakfast in a feature that first appeared in Encore.
A billboard tells a thousand words. In this one, a tall handsome man holds his hand over the mouth of a shorter, less handsome one, as a blonde presenter laughs uproariously and another smiles blankly at the camera. Ten was entering the race for the breakfast TV audience, the billboard told us, and it was placing all of its chips on a man whose number one selling point appeared to be a case of halitosis.
“It’s going to bring a little bit of life back into breakfast television,” Andrew Rochford announced at Ten’s 2012 upfront presentation. Rochford was the tall, handsome one on the billboard. “It’s getting a bit tired nowadays.”
Less than a year later, the presenter, who got his start in the media as a contestant on Nine’s reality series The Block, would quit the show after sagging ratings and palpable on-set tension. It is possible to analyse on-screen body language for signs of antipathy, but the casual viewer didn’t have to look too hard with Breakfast. A couple of months into the show’s run, Rochford had been moved away from the couch-based set and was presenting his own mini-Breakfast show off to the side, barely interacting with the other hosts. Four months in, he would be gone altogether.
If a commercial breakfast show was irreverent without treating its audience like complete morons, I might switch over from ABC News Breakfast.
News Breakfast is more serious than I’d like in the mornings, but I can’t stomach cash cows and crossing to an LA gossip reporter to read Russell Crowe’s Twitter feed.
I think it’s just unfortunate Ten never got the formula right, because it could’ve been the next 7pm. There was some real talent on there, including Melbourne reporter Ben Lewis. Very good live presenter and I hope Ten nurtures him.
Come on- you can hardly blame Paul Henry for giggling like a school girl over that Indian politicians name.
Sheila Dikshit
I meamn seriously, who didn’t have a bit of a chortle when they first heard that name?
“Primum non nocere,” the Latin phrase practiced in deed and spirit by MDs, if not actually uttered in the Hippocratic oath, is well known as “First do no harm.”
When acting upon the stage, the unwritten law is “Never inflict pain upon an audience” and though it irks me slightly to admit it, presenting a breakfast show on television is akin to acting before an audience and so falls under the same caution.
The formation, presentation and demise of the Ten breakfast show was, like the Titanic, not down to one, but a chapter of disasters.
Theatre requires specific arts and sciences to run smoothly and effectively, it is an art form that often runs contrary to good financial policy, and generally runs at odds with the upper echelons of business practice.
The running of a theatre is best left to a crew of artistic decision makers and a board of financial and hard line business people; within the clash that results, is the catalyst for success.
In the case of Ten, it seems to me that too many business people at the top made too many (it sometimes only takes one) creative decisions, and, assuming that such people were indeed there at all, that not enough artistic considerations were made by those who should have been making them.
The Ten breakfast show failed to touch its audience, the presenters seemed more like a club group, an elite or “in crowd,” which immediately alienates the audience, who are made to feel like voyeurs; they are of course just that, but, excepting specific controlled circumstances, must never be made to feel as if they are, because it inflicts the pain of guilt.
This deserves a declaration of interest upfront as I appeared as an occasional unpaid contributor to Breakfast (generally it seemed to coincide with the ratings dropping slightly). I’d like to come to the defence of Paul Henry.
It’s very easy to look at Breakfast with hindsight now we know the numbers and talk about why it failed.
But as a viewer, I generally found it to be the show where something unexpected or spontaneous was most likely to happen. In large part, that was down to Paul Henry.
The controversies over his worst moments on NZ TV sometimes overlook that and draw him as something of a buffoonish character. That was what I was expecting.
But he was smart and stayed in the moment. As a result, that made him a very sharp interviewer, willing to go off script to pursue a point, rather than follow a series of questions prepared for him the afternoon before by a presenter. He is also far funnier than many people realise.
Clearly he didn’t work in that timeslot and with that format. And I suspect that no Australian programmer will risk him in a format again.
That’s a shame. He was much, much better than he was given credit for.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
Kochie and Karl – love them or hate them – aren’t offensive or antagonistic. When I’m eating breakfast half-asleep in front of the idiot box I want something soft and fluffy and don’t want to hear fighting and antagonism while I’m psyching myself up for the day at work! It’s not rocket surgery.
Sydney is crying out for an alternative to 7 and Nine in the mornings. Ten almost had it. They had 2 good young Aussie presenters, an excellent sport and weather coverage and a crew that really wanted to take up the challenge.
Any television program needs to build an audience and all it takes is courage on the part of the people who make the decisions.
Lets hope this new management has that courage and gives us all that alternative.
@Greg
Yes, I agree with all you have said, but I must add that the decisions these people require the courage to make, must be predominantly the right decisions.
Good competition is essential for any industry. Ten has all the grounding, insight and expertise to be driving the top, but it must first determine the texture of good television, from that place, I firmly believe that they will grow rapidly to the ranks of excellence.