10 has announced the brand new season of The Cheap Seats is set to premiere on Tuesday 30 April at 8:30pm on 10 and 10 Play.
Comedians Melanie Bracewell and Tim McDonald, alongside their cultural correspondent Mel Tracina, return to cover all the important stories in the news world. Plus, there will be all new instalments of Mel’s Markets, Timformercials, Across The Ditch and What’s On What’s On In The Warehouse.
Bracewell said: “Despite Tim and I not being on speaking terms, I’m willing to fake it for the 2024 season of The Cheap Seats. I’m hearing whispers that ‘Across The Ditch’ will be returning, bigger and better than ever. I am the one doing the whispering.”
McDonald added: “We’re so excited to be back for Season 4. New year, new stories, but the brief remains the same – Media Watch meets Love Island. 2024 will be a year of big events, from the Olympics in Paris to the US Election. I think there’s even a pickleball tournament in Launceston. We’ve got it all covered.”
In November 2021, Mediaweek spoke to Bracewell and McDonald about how the show came together and what the world looks like from The Cheap Seats. The Cheap Seats is produced by the team at Working Dog Productions, who originally approached Bracewell and McDonald.
McDonald: “The Working Dog boys had been playing around with this idea for a long time, then Channel 10 came to them and said, ‘we’ve run out of NCIS, have you got anything for Tuesday nights?’. They turned to Mel and I – we had both been doing Have You Been Paying Attention? for them – and they said, ‘we’ve got this idea, do you guys want to have a play around with it?’ We got to play around with it at the start of the year, and we did about seven or eight pilots.”
Bracewell: “It almost started with the Have You Been Paying Attention? off cuts. They’d say, we find all the stuff and we have no idea where to put it, so could we just hand it off to you guys and you guys make it funny.”
McDonald: “On Have You Been Paying Attention?, the clips we play tend to be about five seconds long. We don’t have time to play anything longer than that. We were finding great stuff that was 20 or 30 seconds long, so I think it was a way to use all that stuff that we find each week in a different way.”
See also: Melanie Bracewell and Tim McDonald on the view from The Cheap Seats