AACTAs fail to attract

THE rebadged AFI Awards, the ungainly AACTAs, had a high-profile, star-studded debut at Sydney's Opera House on Tuesday night. But clearly there's still work to do. The delayed and truncated telecast on Nine attracted a miserable 314,000 viewers nationally. To put that into context, the film and TV industry's so-called night of nights was convincingly beaten by the likes of The Bold and The Beautiful (387,000), Deal or No Deal (513,000) and even Seven and Nine's breakfast shows. This year's TV audience is slightly up on the previous presentation, in December 2010, which attracted 270,000 eyeballs.