With filming delayed in Japan after the earthquake and tsunami last year, The Wolverine will start filming for the Hollywood studio 20th Century Fox in August.

The movie will reputedly follow the relationship between Wolverine and Mariko, the daughter of a crime lord, amid the samarai culture in Japan.

“Sydney is going to be doubling for Japan in a big way,” Jackman told Channel Nine.

It will be the sequel to X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which also shot in Sydney four years ago.

While that movie, a spin-off from the X-Men franchise, disappointed many critics, it still took more than $370 million worldwide three years ago and confirmed Jackman’s appeal as the gruff superhero.

Much of the shoot for the first Wolverine movie took place at Fox Studios and Cockatoo Island with exterior scenes around the city and in New Zealand.

Jackman said in a statement: “I couldn’t be more excited to return to Australia to film the next chapter in the Wolverine saga, thanks to the significant support from the Federal and NSW Governments … Not to mention, Deb (wife Deborra-Lee Furness) and I will get to spend some time with the family back in Australia!”

He specifically thanked the Prime Minister, Julia Gilliard – “she was instrumental with this” – for supporting plans to shoot the movie in Australia.

The Deputy Premier and Minister for Trade and Investment, Andrew Stoner, said the movie would create almost 2000 jobs for cast, crew and extras, and spend more than $80 million in the state.

“It is a testament to our screen industry that Hugh Jackman and his team have chosen to come back to NSW, after such a positive experience making X-Men Origins: Wolverine here in 2008,” Mr Stoner said.

While the high value of the dollar has been a disincentive for international productions, the state has also attracted The Great Gatsby, Lego and Walking With Dinosaurs 3D.

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Figures released this week by Statistics New Zealand detail a 4% rise over 2010′s headline figure. The Hobbit’s importance to the Kiwi economy was highlighted in October 2010 when ministers promised to rewrite the country’s labour laws and offer a $25m tax break to the Hollywood studio Warner Bros in order to ensure the Lord of the Rings prequel was shot on the same location as its predecessor.

Gisella Carr, chief executive of locations marketing agency FilmNZ, told the Hollywood Reporter the boost was not just about Jackson’s adaptation of JRR Tolkien’s childrens’ novel. “[It's] everyone in the screen industry playing their part, whether they are working on international or domestic production, or both,” she said. “We could never have imagined the scale of these figures a generation ago. It is a testament to our screen entrepreneurs who are converting creative projects into economic headlines.”

Big-budget Hollywood films shot wholly or partly in New Zealand in recent years include Avatar, 10,000 BC, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Thirty five productions visited the country in 2011, contributing revenue of more than $563m – up 15% year-on-year. “We are holding our own internationally, the level of revenue is increasing from year to year – despite a global recession and despite the fact that much of the screen industry runs on a project basis with breaks between activities,” Carr added. “We are now starting to see trends over time, and what is emerging is a picture of consistent growth and sustainability.”

The figures, while encouraging, are still dwarfed by those of the US film industry, which generated $40.8bn in 2011. The world’s largest movie-maker is trailed by India, whose burgeoning industry is believed to contribute around $640m to the country’s economy. The Chinese film industry was worth about 16 billion yuan ($2.5bn) in 2010. The UK film industry is worth about £4.2bn ($6.7bn) annually.

The Hobbit, which will be screened in two parts, the first arriving in December this year and the second in time for the following festive season, has had a chequered path to production, prompting a steady stream of tabloid stories suggesting a “Hobbit curse”. Setbacks include the departure of original director Guillermo del Toro in 2010 after extended delays relating to studio MGM’s financial travails, a fire that destroyed a number of vital miniatures, an enormous row with a local New Zealand union which prompted the labour law changes, and Jackson’s own hospitalisation last year for surgery to treat a stomach ulcer.

The cast, including Martin Freeman, Andy Serkis, Benedict Cumberbatch, Cate Blanchett, Christopher Lee, Elijah Wood, Martin Freeman, Orlando Bloom, Sir Ian McKellen, Billy Connolly and Stephen Fry, is now complete and the shoot for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey began just over a year ago at Stone Street studios in Miramar, Wellington, and on location around New Zealand.

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There are vast amounts of resources at www.aliiance.org.au

When Samoan actor Jay Laga’aia recently criticised Australian TV for racism and not casting multicultural actors after being cut loose from Channel Seven’s long-running soap Home and Away, the blogosphere, talkback radio and newspaper comment forums went into overdrive.

Actor Firass Dirani also weighed in, telling an interviewer ”major networks did not create roles for people from a broad range of cultural backgrounds”.

The overwhelming message is that opportunities for actors who are, or look like, ”ethnics” are significantly lower than for whites and that Australian TV networks are failing to represent the racial and ethnic make-up of what is one of the most culturally diverse countries on the planet.

For its part, Seven rejected Laga’aia’s comments as ”offensive” and ”insulting”, noting that after 18 months on the show his character needed to be rested.

The comments of Dirani and Laga’aia were welcomed by Marea Jablonski of actors’ agency BGM, who believes Australian TV does not reflect its audience and that commercial TV is very conservative in its casting.

Within the industry, there is certainly a heightened awareness of the sensitivity and reactions the ”whitewashing” accusation provokes.

A recurring issue for Actors Equity, the union that represents actors, is when roles that do not require a particular ethnicity – the policeman or the hospital surgeon, for instance – end up being played by Anglo actors and, conversely, when the drug dealer or crooked car salesman is played by someone of, say, Middle Eastern appearance.

The benchmark for the practice of ”colour-blind casting” Actors Equity would like to see become commonplace in Australia is Deborah Mailman’s roles in The Secret Life of Us and the current Offspring.

The producer of both shows, John Edwards, says he ”has never received from on high any prescription to be more Anglo or anything else. As early as Police Rescue, Sandra Levy and I cast Leah Purcell as a character.”

In the case of Mailman, Edwards didn’t cast her because of her Aboriginality but her presence.

”Sometimes you do that when you’re casting. You think, ‘Who do you want to see on TV?”’

Ironically, he reflects, casting Mailman in The Secret Life of Us ”created other problems, because you thought, ‘What’s this Aboriginal person doing without Aboriginal friends?”’

Edwards insists that accomplishment and suitability rather than prescriptions of ”types” should drive casting decisions. ”I would hate it if you patronisingly cast people for ethnicity when they’re not good enough.”

One drama on screen now presents a reversal of the apartheid of which many shows are accused. In The Straits, the ABC’s far north Queensland-set crime drama, white actors are in the minority.

However, while initially earning encouraging ratings, the series has failed to maintain audience levels. Last week it slumped to just 460,000 viewers nationally.

Producer Penny Chapman, who also made the similarly undervalued RAN for SBS, says she is drawn to stories about parts of the country that Australians don’t know about, ”not because I’m a do-gooder”.

She believes, however, that there is an element of truth in Dirani’s observation.

Chapman senses network executives play it safe when deciding who to put onscreen.

”What they aren’t worried about is faces that aren’t white, I think what they’re nervous about is what faces that are not white will say.”

In the case of Dirani’s breakout role as nightclub owner John Ibrahim in Underbelly, what made the character interesting wasn’t just that he’s Lebanese but what he got up to.

”What it’s about is if you are going to cast people of non-English-speaking backgrounds, what are you going to do with that character?” Chapman says. ”What you have to do is think, ‘How do I make the life experience of this character resonate with people out there?’

”There is a tendency to go with the lowest common denominator but the funny thing is … in 40 years we will be mainly Eurasian.”

She, too, is nervous about prescriptions for populating the screen with ethnic faces, arguing ”the trick for us as program makers is to find ways to make it work for networks, find creative ways for networks to go out there with a more interesting mix of drama that people will find compelling.”

Chapman notes the large number of ”sensationally good actors” of indigenous and non-English-speaking backgrounds who have emerged from the ranks in recent times, such as Mailman, Dirani, Aaron Pedersen and Don Hany.

Neighbours executive producer Richard Jasek believes there is more sound and fury about this issue in the media than among viewers.

Jasek, who took over from long-time executive producer Susan Bower earlier this year, says Neighbours is acutely aware of the need to reflect the diversity of the community.

The stalwart soap has long been criticised for its Anglo-centricity, though Jasek notes that subtle changes are taking place.

Those changes, he says, aren’t a tokenistic response to controversy but are driven by the requirements of the storytelling and what audiences respond to.

Most notably, an Indian-Sri Lankan family, the Kapoors, recently took up residence in Ramsay Street and there’s a handful of guest roles, some of which are ongoing, played by actors of Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, Greek and African descent.

”Our instincts as storytellers is to tell a story about the world as we know it,” Jasek says.

”There’s never been pressure that we should or shouldn’t have any kind of story,” he adds, recalling a storyline about a wheelchair-bound character in 1995 when he was a director of Neighbours.

”It’s in our interests to keep the accent of the show current. It would be stupid to cast Anglo characters only. It’s not a numbers game, it’s about remaining in line with contemporary reality that has been put through our perspective.”

Jasek denies that British audiences are leading the charge for a more diversified cast, Neighbours and Home and Away having been targeted by equality campaigners in Britain for their whiteness.

It’s not just the shows we watch on television that have drawn scrutiny of late. Diversity, or the lack thereof, is a significant issue in advertising agencies around the country. An advertising industry creative contacted by Green Guide says there is regular encouragement to present some kind of diversity when there’s a group of people in a commercial. However, when there is only one or two featured, they are almost always white.

”It’s not spoken about but I guess it’s a reflection of trying to reflect the audience back at themselves and a possibly outdated assumption that most people are white. I have sat in a casting session for a fashion brand where a client referred to a model as ‘too Asian’.”

The record is better in reality and non-scripted shows, which generally tend to be more broadly cast than scripted shows. Think, for example, of Mo and Mos, the Muslim couple in The Amazing Race Australia, and the racially diverse contestants ofMasterChef and My Kitchen Rules, and any number of younger-skewing talent shows such as Young Talent Time.

A notable exception is The Block, which was criticised last year by Multicultural Arts Victoria.

When the Green Guide published a front-cover image last June featuring the show’s cast of 16, the section received a cluster of letters from readers disappointed by the lack of diversity.

Producer Julian Cress has consistently maintained that there is no agenda to exclude non-whites.

He says that while the number of applicants increases with the popularity of each return season, the demographic is remarkably similar; white 24-year-olds who are recently married or in a relationship, desperately hoping for a foothold in the property market and think The Block could be the ticket.

”I respect the opinion of people who say we should reflect a wide ethnic cast but we can’t go out and search for specific people,” he says. ”We are accused of racism but to do it another way would be equally racist.”

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The resulting company, Cordell Jigsaw Zapruder (CJZ), will become Australia’s fifth major TV production house.

It will also be the only one of the five to be Australian owned.
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The other four – RTL’s Fremantle Media, Endemol’s Southern Star, Shine Group’s Shine Australia and ITV’s Granada Media – are owned by foreign media conglomerates.

“We saw ourselves as the corner shops lovingly making and selling local product increasingly in the shadow of the multi-national supermarket chains that are bringing in formats by the container load,” Denton told the Herald.

“We know what happens to corner shops in Australia when Woolworths and Coles appear in town, they disappear. So we both felt we either had to become a lot smaller or bigger. We didn’t want to become smaller.”

The combined group – CJZ, as it will be known – currently has 10 shows in production for the ABC, Foxtel, Nine, SBS, and Ten.

They include the new Denton series Randling for ABC1, Mega Truckers for the cable channel A&E and the telemovie The Great Mint Swindle for Nine.

Another four programs are already on the slate for later this year.

Denton and Cordell Jigsaw owners Michael Cordell and Nick Murray will remain co-principals of the merged company.

The deal comes as smaller production companies are struggling to find and maintain traction in the local market because of an increasing number of formats being imported from overseas.

Beyond Television, one of the bigger small independents, has weathered that shift largely by focusing on producing programming for overseas markets, such as the mega-hit Mythbusters, which it produces for America’s Discovery channels.

Smaller companies, such as Working Dog, Essential Media, Quail TV, Giant Dwarf, Matchbox, Freehand, Cornerbox and WTFN tend to focus on only a few projects at a time, and do not own the vast libraries of programs and formats their bigger cousins do.

Denton said without that programming “heft” it becomes difficult for smaller companies to compete.

The other alternative is to seek investment from a foreign studio, as NBC Universal did with Cornerbox and Freehand did with the BBC. In exchange for a stake in the company, the local outfit controls the development and production of the parent companies formats in this market.

Denton says every option was considered. “We’ve had all of those conversations with various people, but we’re really pleased we’ve taken this direction, which is to remain our own masters and to remain totally local,” he says.

“It’s a mature marketplace. We think there is a place for a really strong local independent which doesn’t have any overseas masters it has to work to,” Denton said.

Co-partner Nick Murray said production companies in Australia needed to either be “big or small [to survive]… medium-sized is difficult. It’s about evolution. It’s about saying how do we better harness our resources and continue to deliver interesting ideas.”

Murray said the two companies were complementary.

“We don’t cross over in many areas but we have really similar interests,” he said. “Andrew and I, for example, want to do more comedy, we want to mentor more people and comedy is light on the ground at the moment in the market.”

The company’s third partner Michael Cordell, whose credits include the controversial SBS documentary Go Back To Where You Came From, said talks began between the two companies more than six months ago.

Cordell said the market was presently too dependent on foreign formats.

“I can understand why they do it, but I think the networks do it because it gives them a greater sense of security,” Cordell says. “But what it means is they are reluctant and skittish about taking risks.”

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Rob Green

Nader Hamdan

According to entertainment news website Variety, Legendary Pictures has “officially pulled the plug” on Cooper’s movie Paradise Lost, which was set to film in Australia.

It said budget issues were the reason behind the announcement.

Australia’s Alex Proyas, who directed I, Robot and The Crow, was set to helm Paradise Lost – his film adaptation of John Milton’s 17th-century poem.

Proyas said in July last year that the movie, which was slated for a 2013 release, had a budget in excess of $100 million.

Variety’s report revealed people close to the production had said Proyas had a strong vision for Legendary, but the technology wasn’t up to scratch yet and the filmmakers couldn’t reduce the budget enough.

Cooper was set to play the role of Lucifer and just this month, News Ltd papers had said the 37-year-old star would take up Sydney residency for three months.

The movie was also set to star Casey Affleck, Dominic Purcell and Aussie Callan McAuliffe, with the majority of filming at Sydney’s Fox Studios.

Proyas had said a lot of it would be “created on computer, on sound stages”, as the main locations would have been Heaven, Hell and Eden.

The NSW government, who called the movie a “major coup” for the state last year, said it was a huge disappointment for the filmmakers, cast and crew.

“This is a blow to the NSW film industry,” Deputy Premier and Minister for Trade and Investment Andrew Stoner said in a statement on Friday.

The movie was predicted to bring $88 million to the state and create 1300 jobs, and it was lured to Sydney with financial incentives from the state government.

The NSW government had not yet spent any money on Paradise Lost when Legendary pulled the plug.

Mr Stoner said the government is still committed to attracting international projects and they are in negotiations with major studios for other future projects.

“We will continue to take a proactive approach to marketing the States talent and facilities, especially in light of the high Australian dollar,” he said.

He said production had already begun at Fox Studios Australia on a Warner Bros animated film about children’s toy Lego, which is being made by Oscar-winning Sydney animation studio Animal Logic.

AAP

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Body of Proof (Seven)

THERE have been plenty of shows about socially dysfunctional renegade brainiacs but few have been so utterly charmless as Body of Proof. If you’re going to have a lead character who’s constantly getting people offside, you need to give them something to compensate, such as Dr House’s wit. If they’re going to lack basic social skills, they need to make up for it in some way, as Dr Temperance Brennan does with her adorable bemusement. Dana Delany as Dr Megan Hunt was not witty, adorable or, really, anything that explained why one of her colleagues didn’t stuff her in a body bag and seal it tightly halfway through the first episode.

Criminal Minds: Suspect Behaviour (Seven)

IF THERE’S one thing the franchise-crazy Americans should be good at by now it’s police procedurals. Yet this dopey CM offshoot was a travesty of the form. The cringeworthy overacting. The atonal direction. The terrible dialogue. The stupid plots. Everything was wrong but most painful to behold was the sight of brilliant Oscar-winning actor Forest Whitaker slumming it on a show so far beneath him.

Crownies (ABC1)

SURPRISINGLY, given a 22-episode opening order, Crownies had big shoes to fill; no ABC drama had more air time this year. Given such expectations, a show that fluctuated between the blithely lightweight and the merely annoying was always going to disappoint. While the story of a group of young solicitors working for the Office of Public Prosecutions did pick up from early episodes, it continued to value high jinks over moral issues and repeatedly resorted to groan-worthy sexual dialogue.

Dinner Date Australia (Seven)

THIS cheap knock-off of dating show Dinner Date was designed – in probably less time than it takes to make instant soup – to cash in on the popularity of network stablemate My Kitchen Rules and its appealing co-host, Manu Feildel. Each week, three lonely hearts would prepare a home-cooked meal for a man/woman they hoped to impress. The one who didn’t cause food poisoning then took the lucky, or perhaps unlucky, single on a grown-up date. Feildel, whose corny links rhapsodising about food and ze long-wahj of loff had nothing to do with the unfolding dates, about whom it was impossible to care.

The Event (Seven)

IN THE wake of Lost’s detailed, often magisterial, arc there was a small burst of paranoid conspiracy television series, although the only question that ultimately mattered was whether they could get through an entire season without being cancelled. Rubicon is quietly screening on Nine but The Event arrived first with some fanfare but soon appeared at ever-later hours. Beset by ludicrous cliffhangers and stakes-raising revelations, it ultimately ignored Lost’s lessons: take your time to get the characters right before it all goes haywire.

The Family (SBS)

FROM the start, this local adaptation of the acclaimed British program was defined by what it was not: not Big Brother, not Sylvania Waters and not a cynical reality show in which the contestants were prodded and provoked for your viewing pleasure. Rather, it was a fly-on-the-wall documentary series in which Melbourne’s Cardamone family were instructed to act as normal and ignore the little cameras dotted about their house. Unfortunately, the comfortable ordinariness of their lives made for, well, ordinary viewing. Not awful, just dull.

Four Weddings (Seven)

THIS is one of those shows about which you wondered whether the people who agreed to appear in it had any inkling of how they would appear once the show’s producers and editors had their way with them. Four brides attended and rated each other’s weddings for the prize of an all-expenses-paid honeymoon. Cue the bridezilla, the bride who bought a $50 dress on eBay, the bride who thought she was just that little bit special, the overweight bride whose plan to shed 20 kilos for her big day didn’t pan out – and, once the cameras were rolling when the bitchy comments flew, bingo, you had one of the most crass and nasty shows we’ve seen on TV for some time.

Hardcore Pawn (7mate)

THIS series was unpleasant from the outset, focusing as it did on an unlikeable pawnshop owner and his two equally unpleasant offspring. Les Gold made Shylock look like a sweetheart and the decision by the producers to focus alternately on him and on the people who frequented his store, rather than the objects they brought, might have created a ratings hit (relatively speaking) but it also created uncomfortable viewing. The whole purpose was to be entertained by Detroit’s most downtrodden trying to raise cash by hocking their few remaining possessions and it was when someone tried to sell one of their gold teeth that Hardcore Pawn went on the ”banned” list.

Housos (SBS)

FROM Roseanne to Shameless, there’s a whole host of groundbreaking comedies about life on the wrong side of the tracks. This wasn’t one of them. Dragging out gags that were tired when the Wog Boy films ran with them, hammering lifeless cliches, resorting to shouting f— in a fruitless effort to disguise the complete absence of wit or insight, Housos was so lazily awful it was impossible even to muster enthusiastic contempt. Every 25-minute episode merely felt like an hour of your life you would never get back.

Jersey Shore (MTV and 7mate)

HIDEOUS people talking loudly in grating voices, having sex with each other and occasionally vomiting. That’s really all you need to know about Jersey Shore, yet it became a breakout hit. (It’s MTV’s highest-rating show in history and the cast made Barbara Walters’ 10 Most Fascinating People list.) Why? That remains one of the great mysteries of 21st-century television, along with why anyone cares about the Kardashians and why Deadwood was cancelled after three seasons. So much on telly represents a real golden age. Jersey Shore is its Stone Age.

Junior MasterChef (Ten)

IT’S one thing to have a bunch of consenting adults attempting to brulee on national TV while weeping about their ”food journey”. It’s quite another to witness steely-eyed Alannah from Surrey Hills (names have been changed to protect the innocent) determined to out-hollandaise her rivals. Ambitious upper-middle-class parents hothousing their precocious little angels in Larousse and the complete works of Elizabeth David are the new tennis mums and dads. Oh yes, it’s all in good fun – until little Jackson ends up in therapy when his souffle doesn’t rise. Aren’t there laws to protect children from this sort of thing?

Kyle and Jackie O’s Night with the Stars (Seven)

THE King of Vile and his snivelling sidekick spread like a virus from the airwaves to the TV screen with their misnamed chat show Night with the Stars. Stars? They must have meant preternaturally preserved former model Janice Dickinson, retired Playboy bunny Kendra Wilkinson and Jersey Shore himbo Mike ”the Situation” Sorrentino (feel free to Google them; we had to). Proving there is a TV god, viewers turned off in droves, prompting the chivalrous Sandilands to commit what we can only pray is career suicide by calling a female entertainment reporter a ”fat slag”.

Million Dollar Drop (Nine)

REALITY TV meets game show: a couple are given $1 million, then asked eight questions whose answers are written on trap doors. They place money on the doors, the amounts reflecting their confidence in the answer. But they can use only three, meaning they can lose it all in one go. It held promise but the more you watched, the worse it got as the novelty wore off and the naked avarice and – it must be said – stupidity of the contestants turned Million Dollar Drop into an experiment in game-show sadism. Whatever happened to quiz shows in which people were rewarded for their intelligence, not punished for their greed?

My Kitchen Rules (Seven)

THE initial promo looked promising – Ke$ha’s track Tik Tok playing over visions of laughing contestants dabbing cream on the ends of each other’s noses – but as soon as they were in their respective kitchens, it just got dull. Professional chefs and judges Manu Feildel and Pete Evans never looked entirely comfortable, either. The word ”passion” was thrown about a lot but it was rarely felt.

The One (Seven)

IF YOU are making a show about home renovations, you wouldn’t cast people who don’t know one end of a screwdriver from the other. By the same measure, it would help if a show that promises to find Australia’s most gifted psychic included people with at least a modicum of sixth-sense nous. In what was almost an unintended spoof, a clutch of psychics undertook a series of challenges designed to test their mettle. Week in, week out they’d fail abysmally, though the very concept of a TV show that sets out to ”test” paranormal abilities is risible anyway.

The Only Way Is Essex (LifeStyle You)

WE DON’T like the show but we dislike ourselves more for watching past one episode of this ”reality” series about a bunch of over-tanned, vapid twentysomethings and a miniature pig named Mr Darcy. Blonde Lydia, who has trouble walking and talking – at the same time – does nothing to dispel the cliche. The rest of them – man-child James ”Arg”, Mark, who has some interesting things to say about his sister’s boob job, and beautician Amy – party, fight, make up and … we’ve lost interest.

The Renovators (Ten)

TOO many people, too many nail guns, too many trucks. The small moments that help viewers connect with a contestant were smothered by the scale of the production. Every episode looked the same and the show’s heart got lost in a cloud of plaster dust.

Sea Patrol (Nine)

Proclaiming itself to be the most expensive Australian drama made, Sea Patrol was a classic case of over-promising and under-delivering. At times it felt more like a recruitment ad for the navy – replete with eye-glazing chunks of nautical jargon – than an action-based drama. Making matters worse was its stodgy dialogue, lack of chemistry between the romantic leads and the tendency of characters to spend hours standing on deck, staring into the distance. Perhaps they were looking for a decent script. Or an offer from another network.

Sarah Palin’s Alaska (TLC)

Even by the standards of Discovery (owner of TLC), this was an egregiously cynical, content-free cash-in on a fleeting public infatuation. To pick a nadir at random, how about the episode where Sarah Palin decides to restock the freezer the traditional Alaskan way – by chartering a plane to fly 800 kilometres so she could kill a caribou she took six shots to hit?

Silent Witness (ABC1)

Its Friday-night slot on ABC1 suggests a middle-aged audience fortified by milky tea and sweet biscuits – the kind that would get all hot and bothered by gratuitous TV nudity. But, curiously, they can’t seem to get enough of Silent Witness’s stomach-churning gore. Each episode generally features a blend of rape, dismemberment and rotting corpses being sliced open on cold metal tables. For those who can handle such graphic depictions, the series offers tightly written, layered storylines. Those with a normal gag reflex are advised to take anti-nausea medication before viewing.

Today Tonight (Seven)

It’s hard to say what hurts most: that TT continues to sit high on the list of most-watched shows most weeknights or that it should do so in the face of the lively, thoughtful current affairs so bravely attempted by Ten and George Negus earlier this year. The weird thing is, even people who watch these shows think they’re crap. Yet they watch. Sigh.

Top Design (Nine)

This tacky attempt to cash in on the perceived appetite for home renovation shows and the appeal of Jamie Durie failed to do justice to either. Durie’s star power appeared distinctly faded as he struggled to generate excitement in yet another design competition that pitted people against each other under the pressure of ridiculous deadlines. Competitors predictably bickered about budgets and taste as they endeavoured to construct and decorate, say, an inviting outdoor living area in the middle of a multistorey car park. And the show was overloaded with clumsy product placements and sponsor promotions.

The Undercover Princesses (ABC1)

The contract we enter into with some reality TV shows is: we’ll relax critical faculties in return for something fun, fast and cheesy. Undercover Princesses welshed on the deal. Could have been fun, funny, illuminating. It was slow and stodgy.

Written and compiled by Frances Atkinson, Larissa Dubecki, Debi Enker, Melinda Houston, Paul Kalina, Michael Lallo, Craig Mathieson, Bridget McManus, Andrew Murfett, Brad Newsome and Jim Schembri