The Sun-Herald

The Tribal Mind: Busting the box's big myths

To determine what is Australia's National Snack, go to Who We Are.

by David Dale
TIME for another reality check. Network television, like printed newspapers, was supposed to be dead by now. We were meant to be getting all our news and entertainment from computers, DVDs, portable players and mobile phones.

In fact, as this column revealed recently, sales of weekly and daily papers are declining at less than 2 percent a year, which hardly suggests an imminent demise. Is television an equally stubborn survivor? Now that we have the audience data for the first half of 2009, we're in a position to do a postmortem on the still-kicking corpse. Lets address some conventional wisdoms.

Australians are losing interest in mainstream television. This is sort of true. In the first half of 2003, an average of 3.91 million people in the mainland capitals watched free TV between 6pm and midnight. This year, the figure was 3.6 million - a drop of 8 per cent. If you consider only viewers aged 16 to 39, the drop over six years was 17 per cent. It's even more worrying for the networks when you realize that Australia's population rose by a million people over that period.

BUT (and it's a big but, which is why I wrote it in capital letters) over the same period the average prime time audience for Pay TV stations rose by 60 per cent. So in total, Australians are watching about as much TV now as they were six years ago. Which makes the conventional wisdom sort of false as well.

Channel Nine is fighting back. False. Its average prime time audience this year is down 20 per cent on 2003 (and down 23 per cent with its target audience of people aged 25-54).

Channel Ten is soaring. Sort of true, if you look only at its share of the audience relative to the other free networks. In the first half of 2003, Ten had 22.6 per cent of the prime time audience, while Nine had 30.7 per cent and Seven had 25.6. This year, Ten has 23.3 per cent, Nine has 26.4 and Seven has 28.0.

But in terms of the actual number of viewers, Ten had an average of 859,000 during prime time in 2003, and now has 821,000, a drop of 5 per cent (and it's down 15 per cent with viewers 16-39).

Australians prefer US dramas and comedies to anything Australian. The last time this was true was in 2005, when we went crazy for Desperate Housewives, Lost and House. Since then, those shows have slumped. Look at this year's hits ...

Favourites of the first half (and who were the main viewers)
1 State of Origin matches 1 and 2 (mostly men aged 16-24 and 25-54)
2 Underbelly: A Tale of Two Cities (people 25-54)
3 The Biggest Loser final (people 5-15 and 16-24, women 25-54)
4 Packed To The Rafters (people 25-54)
5 The Logie Awards (people 25-54)
6 Seven news (people over 55)
7 Talkin' 'Bout Your Generation (people 5-15, 16-24, 25-54 )
8 Masterchef (people 5-15 and 25-54)
9 Twenty/20 Cricket Aus v NZ (men 25-54)
10 A Lion Called Christian (over 55)
11 Border Security (over 55)
12 Thank God You're Here (16-39)
13 NCIS (16-54)
15 Find My Family (over 55)
16 So You Think You Can Dance Australia (5-15, 16-39)
17 Merlin (5-15)
18 New Tricks (over 55)
19 Midsomer Murders (over 55)
20 The Simpsons (5-15).

So we've embraced Australian dramas, documentaries and talent quests, plus a couple of English dramas. Should that make us feel better about ourselves?

David Dale is the author of Who We Are -- A snapshot of Australia today (Allen and Unwin). For daily updates on Australian attitudes, bookmark http://blogs.sunherald.com.au/whoweare.