Greg Dixon: Loyalty counts in 7pm war

The old Holmes show used to love its polls. If someone moved a chair down in Parliament or spat on the pavement, it'd be off with a survey of concerned folks at home: call 0900-OUTRAGE now to tell us if this means the end of civilisation ...

At a dollar or so a call, the show must have made a small fortune over the years on what were always entirely unscientific, and therefore pointless, polls.

As any statistician will tell you, a self-selected sample of opinion (especially when it's paying for the privilege) is about as useful as a broken remote. But this never stopped Holmesy from wringing whatever significance he could from these half-baked vox-pops.

However there's one recent poll - a real and scientific one this time - that should be exercising old Paul and causing real sphincter-tightening for his new employers at Prime as they prepared for the launch of Paul Holmes.

The Herald-Digipoll released early this month revealed that 73 per cent of those surveyed said they would not be tuning in to Holmes' new show. Now that is significant. A hefty vote of no-confidence a month out from going to air is hardly what you might call fertile ground for ratings success on a par with TV One's Holmes.

That does, of course, leave 26 per cent, according to the poll, who will in all likelihood tune in, at least initially. And if all these people watch, then Prime will surely be satisfied - it's a bunch more than the number watching the channel at 7pm right now. I'm sure they're already chanting "Rome wasn't built in a day" to themselves.

But the poll does suggest that it's channel loyalty rather than personality that TV One (and to a lesser extent TV3, which launches John Campbell's 7pm show in April) has on its side in the delicious little war that's about to break out at 7.

And there could be no clearer indication that Paul Holmes, which premieres on February 7, is truly up against it than the sudden rise of Hot Auctions.

This unheralded and rather tedious Aussie real estate show attracted more than half a million viewers last week, making it the third most-watched show behind One News and Coronation Street.

Why would so many people care so much about the buying and selling of Australian houses? The answer is that they don't.

The show was screened straight after One News and roughly only 50,000 bothered changing the channel after the day's headlines were over.

Apparently you can screen a half hour of anything, the test picture even, and people will watch TV One at 7pm.

So much for personality television, then. But TV One's experiment with non-personality-driven television, which began at 7 this week, is looking very much like so many fatuous words.

Close Up@7's Susan Wood clearly thinks herself the star of the show and she ain't shy about letting us all know.

In her first interview of the year - with Diane Jelicich, the Welsh mother of the then missing baby Caitlin - she managed to insert herself for no reason whatsoever: "People have wondered here - I wonder as a mother, actually - you left the country without little Cait ... "

It was a fairly nauseating moment in a fairly nauseating story - this was simply a bitter custody battle beaten up in a season short on real stories and growing tired of tsunami coverage.

It's likely only to get worse as the year wears into middle- then old-age: when we finally have three nightly current affairs shows chasing a small pool of stories, the quality will almost certainly plunge to new, previously undreamed of depths.

And I'm pretty sure I know what the polls will say about that.