When TV3 lost the rights to Home & Away in 2013, it lost something much more important than Alf Stewart's pragmatic pearls of wisdom and Irene's cafe-based counselling - it lost its Pied Piper, merrily delivering viewers to the 6 o'clock news.
Since those dark days of Mediaworks receivership, one of the most oft-cited theories for 3 News' declining ratings has been the lack of a 'strong lead-in' to the evening bulletin.
The winning formula for a successful lead-in show seems like a wonderfully inexact science, and its importance may well be overstated. But what kind of pre-news power plays are being employed by the evil geniuses at the helms of our deeply competitive free-to-air channels?
Ray Meagher plays Alf Stewart on Home and Away
TV One's lead-in campaign begins in earnest at 4.25pm, as the suspenseful production music of The Chase heralds the arrival of one of the modern era's toughest, most demoralising quiz shows. The format is a proven lead-in smash for the UK's ITV, who have to date churned out a staggering 720 episodes — enough to play back-to-back for a full month — to fill its 5pm timeslot.
The reason they've been able to make so many episodes is presumably that nobody ever wins, and even if they do it's a truly meagre sum by game show standards. This afternoon, the Chaser — scowling Mastermind champ Shaun Wallace — eliminates Angus and Luke during the Head-to-Head round, leaving just Laura and Lucy to challenge him in the Final Chase for a depressing total of £4000.
The team behind The Chase
Meanwhile TV3's lead-in effort is under way with another marathon episode of the mystifyingly popular competitive renovation franchise The Block: Triple Threat. It's not immediately clear how the 'Triple Threat' part of the title sets this series apart from any of the others. Unlike The Chase, where each episode can be enjoyed in isolation, The Block really requires viewers to go all-in, but seven-and-a-half hours a week of it seems like a fairly unrealistic time investment.
According to the Sky EPG, the episode I'm watching is 'S10E24'. God that's grim. What is wrong with us? Whoever writes the episode descriptions — for some reason I always picture them as a kind of Dickensian factory boy — has committed a typo, so that in this afternoon's episode "the teams get started on Living and Rining Room week."
Eddie McGuire hosts Millionaire Hot Seat on TV One
Back on One The Chase host Bradley Walsh, a perfect composite of every grifter, dodgy cabbie and love rat to tread Coronation Street's cobbles, is presiding over yet another farcical Final Chase. It's not even close — Laura and Lucy go home with nothing. In an age where Deal or No Deal (Prime's 5 o'clock lead-in to Prime News at 5.30) hands gurning morons oversized $20,000 cheques just for standing there shouting numbers, do we secretly crave this kind of parsimony?
After an hour of The Chase I'm at risk of quiz fatigue, but here's Aussie champion Eddie McGuire with Millionaire Hot Seat whether I like it or not. This is a man who has quiz show banter down to a sublime art form. One contestant has innocuously listed 'Reading Wikipedia' as a hobby. "What do you find out in Wikipedia?" McGuire asks conspiratorially. "How often do you read the Wikipedias?" The besieged chap finally mumbles something which makes him sound like the saddest man in the world. "Good on ya mate, yeah, good," McGuire drawls.
Back on The Block the show's four aggressively normal Australian couples — one of the blokes is called 'Josho' — have split up, with the boys left to demolish walls and haul bits of MDF around, while the girls go furniture shopping. With the ladies out of the picture, the gents are free to indulge in some gripping dialogue about bulkheads and building codes.
Scott Cam hosts The Block: Triple Threat on TV3
The show ends with everyone reunited and enjoying a cheeky vino together. "What a journey!" crows a guy in a Wolf of Wall Street shirt — one of those ones where the collar and cuffs are white but the rest of the shirt is blue. Mate, tell me about it.
There are two divergent approaches being taken here. While the mavericks at TV3 play a high-risk game in trying to convert a prime time format into a lead-in smash, the traditionalists at One stick with a proven pre-news quiz show diet.
In cricketing terms, both seem a bit like a bowler running in from the boundary only to be out of puff by the time they reach the crease. At least with One's line-up you can skip The Chase and check in later for a nice compact pre-news round of Hot Seat.
TV3's old golden goose Home & Away, meanwhile, fills the 5.30pm timeslot over on TV2 — delivering viewers to endless Friends repeats like an elevator to nowhere.
