Pointless Australia: Network Ten to axe game show - NEWS.com.au

Network Ten plans to “chop” Pointless less than a year after it replaced Family Feud on air.

The game show, which is hosted by Mark Humphries and Dr Andrew Rochford, has consistently struggled to rate well in its 6pm timeslot.

“Pointless is gone!” entertainment reporter Peter Ford revealed on Triple M Hobart this morning. “Yesterday people involved with the show were told that it’s finishing.”

Network Ten declined to comment when contacted by news.com.au.

“Of course the Channel 10 Network will once again say that I’ve made this up and they will have some spin about it being rested or whatever,” Ford said on radio.

Pointless still has many episodes up its sleeve which are yet to air so the show won’t disappear from screens immediately, but it is on the way out according to Ford.

“I think you’ll find with the passage of time … you’ll find the show has got the chop and they are looking at options,” Ford said.

Last week Ten’s Head of Programming, Daniel Monaghan, told TV Tonight the network was disappointed with the show’s ratings.

“I would like it to do better,” he told the site. “I do think we’ve suffered a little bit from people who watched Family Feud and people who watch Pointless are not at all similar. So we’ve learned a lot.

“It’s a well-made show but whether or not we will be able to get there is another story.”

The Australian version of Pointless (it’s based on a UK format) launched on Network Ten last July as a replacement for Family Feud which was also dropped due to poor ratings.

When announcing on his 2Day FM breakfast show that Family Feud was being cut last year, Grant Denyer blamed Network Ten for thrashing his game show.

“We’re probably guilty, if anything, of driving it into the ground a little bit too early,” he said on radio.

“Six days a week, twice a day, plus All Star episodes, we might have squeezed that lemon a little bit too much.”

Denyer told news.com.au that he later rang his bosses at Network Ten and apologised for making that comment.

“That’s the first thing I said and I hadn’t really had the time to find the language to explain why it had been dropped,” Denyer told news.com.au in June last year. “I kinda stumbled my way through it and that quote keeps getting brought up and I was starting to feel guilty about it.

“TV shows do end — it’s a fact. They can’t all go on forever and I understand that better than anybody. So I did reach out to the CEO and the head of programming recently going, ‘Hey, I’m sorry I said those words at the start. I hadn’t thought of any others at that point and I wish I had been a little bit smarter at the time.’

“At the end of the day I’ve got a cracking relationship with the network and I probably should have found more appropriate words at the time. But you know, there was no other television show that was on as much as our show … it certainly had more rotation than anything else on any network.”

The question now is: What will replace Pointless?

“One of those options could be to bring back Family Feud,” Ford speculated on radio this morning. “They’ve got the set there ready to go.”

Let's block ads! (Why?)