Mike Hosking on the TVNZ current affairs show Seven Sharp.
Mike Hosking on the TVNZ current affairs show Seven Sharp.
We’re looking back at our columnists most popular pieces from 2015. Today, Seven Sharp's ratings have gone ballistic - but why? Paul Casserly tries to find out.
There they sat on my personal video recorder, aka, on the MySky box. The letter 'K' denoted that I had at some stage decided to save the shows for some reason. One was Seven Sharp, the other Campbell Live. The date was May 27.
A few weeks later Campbell Livewent out on a high, ratings of half a million, or about 300k more than Road Cops, or Come Dine With Me, have managed in the weeks since. I like to think some bean counters have been shocked by that numerical lesson in a scene like that one in The Hunt For Red October when the crewman yells, "You arrogant ass, you killed us", but I'm sure bean counting is a rather long game.
Yes, numbers go up and down and people take the ones that suit their arguments, but some do stand out a bit. A recent headline in the Herald caught my eye: "Seven Sharp hits new ratings record."
On June 24 they hit a whopping 675,000. This was off the back of the real story, that One News had dragged in some 858,000 of us as their well-honed news hour steams off as poor old 3News battles on. These numbers may be down to any number of factors, among them, the weather, Who Wants to Be A Millionaire, Home and Away, and the obvious fact that some people are doing their jobs, really, really, well.
Mind you, in the last weeks of Campbell Live, it usually rated better than 3 News, so an equivalent number for that show might be something like 800,000, to Seven Sharp's 675,000, not that there is any use counting dead beans ...
