More on ‘Cheers to 50 Years of Television’
Posted by BE on June 4th, 2010
Email from Andi Brotherston, TVNZ News and Current Affairs Public Relations Manager, in response to a complaint about the programme from regular contributor to this website, Merv Lowe:
Thanks for your email.
I appreciate that you didn’t like it. I also appreciate that you have very strong views on what the show should have looked like.
Our programmers disagree with you and decided to do something different. They did so and it worked. 760,000 people watched it.
Ratings are our benchmark and I don’t believe there is a better one.
Prime TV is doing a series of documentaries later in the month. They may well prove to be similar to what you had anticipated.
It will be interesting to see how many people watch them.
As you know TVNZ has to make money today. The only way to do that is to achieve high ratings. You may not like it, you may not be alone in not liking it but that is an issue for Government not an issue for us. We are doing what our shareholder requires us to do.
Andi
Email from Andi Brotherston to me, in response to my previous post:
Cheers to 50 Years of Television is one of the highest rating programmes in the last 50 Years of TV. There’s few others that have held such a large audience over such a long time. It won every 15 minute slot between 8:30pm-10:30pm.
I have spent my entire career in private radio and private TV (until now) where we valued and respected our audience and never thought we knew better than them. So my view is that it’s extremely patronising to say 760,000 people are wrong.
Surely so many people can’t be that wrong? Added to that, we’re starting to receive calls from people wanting us to repeat the programme or to buy it on DVD.
Andi