The House Always Wins

Just to cap off a week of Randling posts, let’s pause to note the fact that – unlike, oh, every other Wednesday night ABC comedy show in living memory – Randling is now being repeated on ABC1 Friday nights in prime time (9.30pm to be exact). Wow, who would have thought the demand for a show that lost half its’ viewers in three weeks would be so great the same episode needed to be shown twice in three days? Presumably if you don’t start watching it now that it’s on twice a week they’ll simply start showing it three times a week. Hey, they can show it 24/7 if it’s what it takes to make it a hit. AND DENTON ONLY HOSTS HITS.

Let’s just posit an alternative here: when serious people start calling for Randling to be dropped – again, lost 400,000 viewers in three weeks – the ABC are going to pull out the “combined” rating figures across the week for Randling (being shown twice in the same week means both figures can be added together). “What are you naysayers talking about – Randling is a hit,” they’ll say, pointing to figures more rubbery than a mobile condom warehouse, “look at how well it rated across the week”.

Bollocks to that. They could have turned Strictly Speaking – you know, that exciting public-speaking based gameshow no-one watched – into a ratings “hit” if they’d played it five or six times in a week. This isn’t a case of the ABC repeating a popular show by public demand; this is a case of them trying to disguise a dud by playing funny buggers with the figures. If only they’d hired some funny buggers to make the damn thing in the first place…