Why Sunrise really failed

Friday, April 9th, 2010 at 2:00 pm

There’s been lots written about why Sunrise failed. The most humouros involve the powerful Rick Giles. The most modest theory though comes from Bomber Bradbury:

TV3 never set out to offer an alternative to what was already being offered, which is why initially the appointment of Oliver Driver (after his amazing work doing 30minute political interviews on Alt Tv) had such a ratings reaction, finally a liberal alternative to Breakfast. Sadly once I stopped writing the questions for Oliver, he quickly fell back into the dumb TV that saw Sunrise bleed away to nothing.

So there we have it – why TV3, Sunrise and Oliver Driver all failed.

I watched the farewell episode today. Lots of good humour, and was a good send off. While Oliver’s politics would frustrate me, I don’t regard it as a good thing to have less choice and competition in news.

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Posted in New Zealand | 61 Comments »

Key rules Hide in

Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 2:10 pm

John Key on Sunrise said that he was confident that Rodney Hide would be in Government with National, and be a Minister in a National-led Government.

While in one sense this is not surprising, it is I think the first time John Key has explicitly said that Hide will be a Minister.

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Posted in Election 2008, NZ Politics | 127 Comments »

Lots of fun

Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 at 8:08 pm

The interview with the Veronicas was lots of fun. God knows how it will look on air, but we enjoyed doing it. A couple of minutes will be on Nightline tonight and the full 20 minutes or so will be on You Tube at some stage.

I have to say that Jessica and Lisa were absolutely lovely. They had no ego or pretences as some celebrities have, and were just very fun to talk to. At the beginning of the interview, David Farrier said we should all label ourselves to avoid confusion so he did a “David F 1″ label and I did “David F 2″. But then Jessica and Lisa labelled themselves “Veronica 1″ and “Veronica 2″ so we still had no idea who was who, and they refused to tell us.

Nightline is known to be a bit quirky, but I may have set some record with my question when they said how much they wanted to be in NZ, as they loved Lord of the Rings. For some reasons I asked them if they had “pet hobbit nicknames” for each other. David Farrier was like “Where the hell did that come from?” but they just laughed and said no nicknames but Lisa liked Frodo while Jessica liked Aragorn.

I was going to end the interview by asking them the “Rove” question – “Who would you turn gay for?”. But luckily I checked just before we filmed, and it seems both girls are bisexual and have had girlfriends (but currently are dating boys) so that question may not have quite worked!!

As I said, it was a lot of fun, and they were genuinely really nice. Not at all what I expected.

By coincidence I am also on Sunrise tomorrow. Not sure exactly when, but the taxi comes for me at 6.30 am so I guess just after 7 am on air. Talking about the taped conversations and ramifications for National and others.

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Posted in DPF, Fun Things | 11 Comments »

McCarten and Hooton on TV3

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 10:16 am

For political junkies, TV3 had Matt McCarten and Matthew Hooton on Sunrise this morning talking polls and politics.

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Posted in NZ Politics | 7 Comments »