Something is missing on week nights at 7.30pm on the ABC and it's not just the word "report".

The retooled 7.30 is misfiring: the public broadcaster's current affairs flagship is suffering the effects of a belated and blotchy start to the year as it comes to grips with the generational change invoked by the departure of Kerry O'Brien. Shortening the name has become a motif for the show's failings. Something is missing.

For many, many years there has been a simple, implied promise — watch the ABC for an hour from 7pm and, between the state news broadcast and The 7.30 Report, you would get both the day's events and an understanding of their significance. Currently, the pledge is only half fulfilled and the problems for 7.30 already appear worryingly entrenched.

...

There are nights now when 7.30 looks and feels akin to a weekly news magazine review. The segments are tied to the news but they're neither drawn from the latest headlines nor likely to generate their own the next day.

Leigh Sales opens the first segment of the relaunched program earlier this year.
The five slots on a recent half hour were given over, in order, to the issue of fathers who unfathomably punish their former partners by harming their children; the varying impacts of the Australian dollar's appreciation; the breakdown of talks between logging and environmental groups in Tasmania; an interview with a leading science and technology writer about the startling pace of technological change; and the story of a HIV-positive cycling enthusiast from Sydney about to compete in a taxing American race.

The result was considered, workmanlike television. Unless your benchmark is the parallel universe of Today Tonight — dole cheats, speed cameras, electricity bills, repeat endlessly — that's just not good enough.

Part of the malaise rests with the bet-hedging decision to replace O'Brien with the Sydney-based Leigh Sales and Canberra-based political editor Chris Uhlmann. The reality is that Sales hosts the show but does very little besides studio links. She has rarely been used as an interviewer recently, with a reporter speaking exclusively to Qantas boss Alan Joyce, for example, on the day the airline's pilots moved decisively towards industrial action. Her main source of interaction is with the teleprompter.

Uhlmann, despite his habit of muttering "sure, sure" as he waits for guests to finish an answer, delivers sharper interviews, although he's prone to prosecuting a single, at times insignificant, point if he senses there's a victory to be had.

Neither is being given an opportunity to shine, let alone stamp their authority on 7.30. Nor do they collaborate. In one Monday-to-Thursday block two weeks ago, they were on air together once and it was hardly a dialogue.

It's not as if they're taking a back seat to essential content. One recent, baffling piece marked the Queen's first visit as monarch to Ireland by merely excerpting three minutes of her generic, inoffensive speech. The story that should have gone with it didn't eventuate.

Since its belated start to the year, when it missed crucial stories such as the Queensland floods because of the wait to construct a new set (the result was totally worth it, if you're still missing Battlestar Galactica), 7.30 has been falling away. Audience numbers that began in excess of 700,000 nationally were last week barely above 500,000.

In television, shows come and go but The 7.30 Report was held to a higher standard, one that 7.30 is sadly falling short of.


Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/not-all-news-is-good-news-20...

progressiveslol wrote on Jun 2^nd, 2011 at 8:27pm:


Way to prove my point! Why pander to nasty people like you when you're just going to attack them as biased no matter WHAT they say or do?!

Kat wrote on Jun 2^nd, 2011 at 8:41pm:


Problem for the conservatives is that anything that is not the extremist right murdock point of view is seen as some kind of communist plot.
The seven thirty report died for me years ago, it simply was sliding to the poor qualities of most post news current affairs. I do think the ABC has done a better job than most through a variety of its current affairs programming but the 7:30 report isn't one of them.