A two-year old Abba special run for the third time on television on Sunday night as pulled almost the same sized audience as the ARIA Awards.
The 2013 Bang A Boomerang special pulled 519,000 viewers on the ABC across Australia last night, not that far removed from the 570,000 viewers who turned in for the ARIA Awards on Channel 10 earlier in the week.
The ARIA Awards was a big budget pop show featuring appearances from some of the biggest names in pop music today. It showed that the likes of One Direction, 5 Seconds of Summer and Katy Perry have about the same pulling power as Abba, who broke up over 30 years ago.
The ARIA Awards were a ratings disaster for Network 10, not only failing to make the Top 20 for the night but also being out-rated by the ARIA Red Carpet fashion show before the event.
‘Bang A Boomerang’ continues to resonate with Australian audiences. The special captures that moment in time when Abba ruled Australia’s airways to the point where in their first placement in the Rolling Stone Encyclopaedia of Rock they were listed as an Australian band, not a Swedish group.
The ABC synopsis of the show says, “ABBA: Bang a Boomerang digs deep into heartfelt memories, cardboard cartons of memorabilia, face-to-face encounters, local pop icon recounts, lavish personal and public ABBA museums and Australia’s rich media archives to relive a moment of collective national ‘craziness’, when we did literally go ABBA mad. The result is a warm, bright, captivating engagement with ABBA’s time Down Under that will remind us all of the band’s impact and how our open-hearted embrace of all things ABBA would eventually define us. One in three Australian households owned an ABBA record – from Prime Minister Fraser to eight year olds around the nation, we were hooked even if some of us didn’t want to admit it back then and we didn’t realise the crush would be for keeps”.
