The 7PM Project
Channel: Ten
Day and time*: Monday - Friday, 7:00pm(*as at August 2009)
That's news to me
There are a few things
in television you shouldn't mess around with - and the news is high on
that list. It's no coincidence that the "straight" 6 p.m. news
bulletins are among the highest rating shows on the box. People turn to
them to find out what's going on in the world as they cover, in a format
that many people find easily digestible, eveything that could be important
from world politics to the weather. Ten has for several years bucked conventional
wisdom with its 5 p.m. news bulletin; and now they're trying something
even bolder with The 7PM Project.
Basically this
is an attempt to blend comedy with hard news. It's something that's been
done before of course. There's Good News Week; although that
show is clearly more heavily skewed towards comedy than it is towards
news. Then there's the now-departed Newstopia with Shaun Micallef,
which is probably the closest cousin to this show.
The format involves one "straight" newsreader,
Carrie Bickmore, and two comedians-cum-commentators in Dave Hughes and
Charlie Pickering. So Bickmore reads a "serious" news story
and Hughes and Pickering get the chance to pass -hopefully - funny comment
on it. Complementing them are MTV host Ruby Rose and Australian Idol host
James Mathison who are oddly listed as "correspondents" but
they're probably closer to the "colour guys" in sports broadcasts
than anything else.
You don't have to be a genius to recognise some of the risks the show
runs. For a start, many of the stories on the show will have been seen
possibly less than an hour earlier on the news. Those who take such things
seriously might not appreciate what they see are significant issues being
made light of. There's also the small matter of trying to generate enough
laughs from what are essentially not funny topics to keep the comedy fans
satisfied.
The latter issue is probably the show's Achilles heel. Hughes and Pickering
struggle to generate much in the way of genuine hilarity from the material.
Bear in mind, these are two funny guys - their stand-up shows are proof
enough of that. So that leads me to conclude the format is likely to be
the problem. It's an issue that plagued Newstopia as well, even
with Micallef's considerable talent behind it.
Can Ten pull the show out of the fire? Well, the signs aren't great. After
the surprisingly stratospheric ratings of Masterchef Australia,
this show was always to be facing a huge challenge. There are already
dark mutterings about its future. It seems the answer may lie in going
the Good News Week route and abandoning the "hard news"
stories (politics, crime etc) in favour of lighter stories and those "strange
but true" bits that never seem to lose their attraction. The question
is whether the show's producers can move beyond the original concept and
revamp the format.
As it is, The 7PM Project is a light and reasonably entertaining show, but certainly not essential viewing.
Phil James
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