Yasmin’s Getting Axed

At least we can only hope so. Channel Ten has finally outdone even themselves with a new low in cheap, exploitative TV. Yasmin’s Getting Married is a reality TV format purchased from Scandinavia (God forbid we could come up with a TV show format on our own) and has a simple premise: Find Yasmin a husband in 9 weeks by letting the audience vote on who she dates.

Question 1. Who the fuck is Yasmin?

Answer: Who cares?

Question 2: Why would we want to vote on who she marries?

Answer: If we vote for Idols and Big Brother contestants, why not this too?

Question 3: Why does the studio audience laugh hysterically at every inanely stupid thing Ryan Phelan says?

Answer: If you are stupid enough to want to be in the studio audience for this crap you are stupid enough to think that primary school innuendo can pass for wit.

Question 4: Why is this crap on five nights a week?

Answer: Because Channel Ten is so ludicrously tight with their money that they thought they could get away with making one program on a shoestring budget and still fill a week of primetime spots where they can charge lots of money for advertising. A great plan… in theory.

Ten has already proven that they don’t need to make many shows to fill their schedules. Big Brother, The Biggest Loser and Australian Idol are excellent nightly line-up fillers. You only need one set, one host, one cast (mainly unpaid ‘contestants’), one lot of titles, one theme song and from that you get 10 hours of programming that conveniently also fulfils the Australian content requirements. Added to that is the wonderful addition of SMS voting which generates millions of dollars and pays for the production.

Then along came Yasmin. I’m sure the executives were salivating at the prospect of success with this. The show has one very basic set (which looks pretty cheap and must be the only set on TV without a plasma display), it goes out live (no annoying editing or post production costs), it has no million dollar prizes, it has lots of SMS voting and it can go on every night in the lucrative 7pm timeslot. The holy grail of television production: no costs and lots of profit. But they forgot one very basic principle. Even though TV audiences are fairly dumb and will swallow most of what you feed them, they do still require some level of interest. If Yasmin had been a previous contestant on Big Brother, a celebrity or a sports star the audience might actually care who she marries. As it is we have no idea who Yasmin is and more importantly we don’t know if we like her.

I don’t know who OK’d this program but clearly they have no understanding of why people watch TV. Although it’s not surprising that they would be working for Channel Ten, after all, this is the same network that thinks we watch TV to see promos for other TV shows.

For a long time now Ten have seen fit to plaster annoying supers and scrolls across our screens during our favourite shows and over the credits to promote other programs but now they have taken it even further. In an astoundingly arrogant move they now bring up supers 10 seconds before the end of a segment that read “Don’t move. A Ten promo is coming up”. They actually think that viewers want to see a Ten promo. Apart from anything else we have probably already seen it fifty times today. This type of promotion is proof that the networks have lost the plot.

If the executives and producers really knew what they were doing they wouldn’t need all this intrusive promotion. If they put on good shows, people will watch. Harassment and bombardment might get people to watch once but they will only stay watching if the show has something to offer. And it’s not like Australian audiences have particularly high standards. If they watch Dancing On Ice and It Takes Two and as a producer you still can’t come up with something to capture their interest you really should be looking for a new job.

In the meantime, good luck to Yasmin. I hope she finds the man of her dreams. And if not, no matter, she might be called back for a new series… Yasmin’s Getting Divorced or Yasmin’s Up the Duff or perhaps Yasmin’s In a Loveless Marriage and Has Turned to Prescription Drugs To Help Her Cope. Actually I think even I might watch that.