Seven's September Stuff Stinks

Watching the promos for Seven's September line-up during the Lympics is a welcome reminder as to why commercial television is not worth watching. Okay, I confess that I am not typical of most, and that my tastes are a little more subtle and cynical than the average couch potato, but it's hard enough to watch the promos for this dross, let alone the programmes themself.

Trading Spouses?? Playing it Straight?? Deal or No Deal - the Psychics Special?? A shooting death on Home and Away?? Why not save us the pain and combine the whole lot - A reality game show in which armed psychics have to pick and shoot the gay guy based on their interaction with a family of strangers. Yep. I'd watch that.

UPDATE - Thursday, 26/8, 11:45pm - It looks like yesterday's comment on Seven's fortunes was rather well timed. Just hours later, the Australian and it's excellent Thursday Media section had a savagely critical piece by Mark Day of Seven, and it's mini-Kerry:

This is a critical roll of the dice for Seven, its management, its board and its majority shareholder, Kerry Stokes. In the cold, harsh reality of business, it's time to piss or get off the pot.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thanks for all the fish

After 13 years with Blogspot, I've shifted blogging platform. So (drumroll, please), you can find my new blog here . Ari on the Web will stay online, so you can scroll through the archives for all sorts of embarrassing tidbits. To make it easier to find some of my writing on particular themes, I've grouped some pieces together under a few labels: Cancer Fatherhood Indonesia travels North Korea travels United States travels Undergraduate days   So as they say here in my new home of Japan, so long, and thanks for the all the fish.
Read more

Can conspicuous consumption save the news business?

Image
It’s a dire time for the news industry. Readers are flooding to social media for content, advertisers are moving with them and costs are being cut at a brutal rate in a desperate bid to meet falling revenue. It is increasingly clear that business models that depend on amassing large audiences in order to provide a forum for advertising will always struggle against the “niche of one” audience that social media platforms can provide for advertisers. There’s been lots of talk lately about ways to fund public interest journalism. One idea is to tax the online aggregators – Facebook and Google, primarily – that sell advertising against the news content of others to support news organisations. Another is to make news subscriptions or donations to its producers tax deductible.  Both ideas are worth considering, but they do not abrogate the need for news organisations to seek better ways to draw revenue from consumers.  (It is alarming that discussion of efforts to...
Read more

A place to rest my head

Image
I dream one day of visiting Pyongyang and staying in the wonderfully pyramidic Ryugyong Hotel. The outer shell of this hotel which dominates the Pyongyang skyline was built in the 1980s, and the interior was, well, never built. It seems possible that the project was commenced in a pique of optimism as North Korea put in a claim to share the 1988 Olympic Games with its southern brothers, but just as the offer was rejected - just like the bid to share the 2002 Soccer World Cup failed on the basis of North Korea's request to host the Opening Ceremony, Semi Finals and Final - the hotel was never completed. Nowadays, in stands pointing to the sky much the way that Kim Il Sung's statue does, both perhaps as a symbol of the excesses of North Korean enthusiasm. Instead of the Ryugyong, like most foriegn visitors to Pyongyang I found myself staying at the Yanggakdo Hotel. The Yanggakdo Hotel is a slice of Cold War Bondesque paranoia writ large. The hotel is located on an isla...
Read more