Numbers: The final episode of The Art Life TV show went to air last night. We logged a very respectable 205,000 viewers, down from ep 2 but with an average of 253,000 viewers per episode. So how did we stack up against the rest of the field?
SBS’s Sugar Town: The Bridegrooms attracted 140,000 viewers after being picked in the program guides of the Fairfax press as the doco of the night. Ha ha! [One reader noted we were lucky not have been up against Wilfred on SBS, but hey, we’d have made that puppy our bitch as well…] Overall, TEN took out the time slot with 976,000 viewers watching Numb3rs, Crossing Jordan had 769,000 on Network Seven while The Nation on Nine had 575,000 people watching.
Feedback: Some of the feedback we’ve been getting has taken us to task over a perceived Sydney bias in the artists we included in the series. In reality however, such a claim doesn’t really stack up. There were 10 artists from Sydney, 7 from Melbourne and 4 from elsewhere:
Melbourne
Howard Arkley [deceased]
*Matthew Sleeth
*Darren Sylvester
David Rosetzky
*Glenn Sloggett
*Lily Hibberd
Jan NelsonTotal: 7
Sydney
*Del Kathryn Barton
Richard Glover
*Rachel Scott
Noel McKenna
*Merliyn Fairskye
*Petrina Hicks
TV Moore
Fiona Lowry
Ben Quilty
*Mark Titmarsh
Total: 10Elsewhere
*Narelle Autio [Adelaide]
*James Guppy [Noosa Heads]
*Adam Cullen [Blue Mountains]
Emil Goh [Seoul, South Korea]Total: 4
The * indicates the people actually interviewed on the show, and on that basis, it was virtually a 50/50 between Sydney/Melbourne. If you’re interested in quotas, you’ll also note we did well on the male/female gender split, but poorly on the young/old, white/non-white quotas. Must try harder! It’s also been pointed out that four of the artists are represented by Kaliman Gallery, drawing dark conclusions… Actually, our masters are Stills Gallery.
Repeats: The word we’ve had from the ABC is that the show will be repeated in the near future, most likely first on Sunday afternoons before the august Sunday Arts program, then at at some indeterminate point in the future on ABC2. Sorry Angry of Melbourne, but all your worst nightmares are coming true! We’re still working on vodcasting the show and will advise our readers as soon as we know how that turns out.
Now, let us never speak of this thing again…
