I’d like to tell you all a story. It’s about two blokes and a crazy plan. Two blokes who thought it’d be a great idea to put a show on telly about hockey. And the only thing that would get in their way….would be the fact that, well, they had absolutely no idea what they were doing!
But before I talk about the heady days of 2005, back where it all began, it’s my duty to make an announcement on behalf of the crew.
The show has always relied heavily on sponsorship. We are not a profit making machine, we exist only for the promotion of hockey. Finding sponsorship has never been easy, but we’ve worked hard and pulled together enough funds, year after year to bring The Hockey Show to air. But as Channel 31 are not a commercial network, we’ve had to be clever about how we build value for money for our sponsors, and how we’ve integrated their brands with our show.
Last week, ACMA (Australian Community Media Association) – the big mummy governing body of C31 and all other Community Broadcasting moved the goal posts – heavily restricting what we can offer our sponsors.
Contrary to previous years, we can barely show a company logo at the end of our show, let only incorporate sponsor logos onto in-camera wardrobe. Channel 31 is happy for us to have as many sponsors as we like, but they just can’t return them any commercial value for their investment. Sure we can promote our sponsors on our website, but our contracts and agreements have also been based on a strong level on free-to-air exposure. Our show rates extraordinarily well and it’s those viewers that are of great appeal and value to our sponsors. But it’s those viewers that ACMA has decided, our sponsors cannot connect with.
So, it’s with some level of sadness that I announce we are pulling the show from Channel 31.
Our last show on 31 will be in 2 weeks time on Wednesday 23rd July.
This isn’t the end of THS. And our website isn’t going anywhere, in fact it’s only going to get bigger. But our relationship with Channel 31 has, for the moment anyway, come to an end. We intend to continue activity here online, the exact structure of the show in coming seasons will be discussed and announced over the coming weeks.
It’s been a long journey to this point, but this is merely another episode in the life of THS. A life that began back in 2005 with two extraordinarily eager members of our hockey community, who started their very own TV show.
I’m not really sure if Hugh Jellie and Dan Miles knew the beast they had given birth to at the time, or that the show would go on to become one of the highest rating programmes on the entire Channel 31 network, but with blind faith, they persisted. Fulfilling a drastically unmet need in the hockey community – simply: a bit of bloody exposure.
Some four years down the track, as The Hockey Show enters its fourth on-air season, the combined crew has successfully put to air 70 episodes, that’s over 35 hours of hockey on free-to-air TV (probably more than the entire combined coverage of the last 6 Olympic games, as well as all those 4 sec grabs from sports tonight over the last decade).
But the road to Channel 31, and to ratings dominance wasn’t a simple process, it wasn’t a quick phone call and a handshake. Hugh and Daniel persisted for an entire year throughout 2004. The original pilot series of the show was shot in their lounge room. Two blokes, one guest and a crappy handicam sitting ontop of the telly. Every week they filmed a new episode and each time the programming staff at 31 replied “Thanks, but no thanks, we already have a dozen or so panel programmes”. “But none about hockey!” they would replied. Alas, it wasn’t until the very last episode, after months and months of trying that the boys went down to the State Hockey Centre and film some game footage, recording the commentary live through the camera. Despondently they submitted this last ditch episode. The response was resounding: “You’ve got yourself a show! ”
As it stands, the show has a very lean crew this year. The show’s brain’s trust consists of about 6 key people. Nick Ball, Hugh Jellie, Ben Ryan, Myself, Luke Kilmartin and Adam Barty. Nick Ball and Ben Ryan are the show’s producers and hosts, Nick also does the bulk of the editing and post production for the show. Hugh, Luke and Ben also do a lot of the filming and assist Nick with the editing, sound and commentary where their skill permits. While I’ve fulfilled the role of the show’s creative director, helping Nick and Ben with the overall direction of the show, including the themes and content and have been responsible for the redirection of the site you’re currently using. Adam is primarily our I.T man and assists with geek related computery stuff. So that’s the crew. Not massive, but passionate.
To create the show each week, the crew dedicate between 4 to 5 days of their week in amongst their full-time jobs starting on a Wednesday night to plan the week’s upcoming episode. Driving from Greensborough to Frankston and everywhere in between to film two games, the filming of a game typically is a 3 to 4 hour round trip after which the long editing begins on a Sunday morning at 10am and finishes the following Tuesday at 9.30pm…give or take a few hours. Then, the whole thing is packaged up, shipped to C31 on Wednesday morning to go to air that night…before the whole process starts again.
Despite the necessity for passionate volunteers, the show’s real lifeline has come in the form of sponsorship. Because of the week-to-week format of the show, it has in fact proved quite expensive to produce. It may come as surprise to some that, on average, the show costs about $4,000 per episode. None of that money goes to us, it doesn’t cover our time or petrol. It covers the production costs and broadcast fees and that’s it. $4,000 per episode. So, this year, we’d planned to put a 13 week season to air. That’s about $50k worth. So it’s easy to see, just how important our sponsors are, and just how damaging Channel 31′s policy change has been to us.
Over the years the show has been applauded, awarded and shit-canned, it’s been taken for granted, loved, hated, enjoyed and criticised. But most importantly it’s never been ignored. And that is something we’re all extremely proud of.
Whether on Channel 31, online or in some other guise, we have, and always will, keep dribblin’…
A ONE HOUR VISUAL AND AURAL FEAST featuring all your favourite moments from the past four years including the great goals, the great laughs, the great stuff-ups, the great people of the Victorian hockey community, a random homeless guy on the street plus much much more…
