ABC is still looking to get its 6-7pm schedule right, whilst also interrogating durations and timeslots of other shows.

From today ABC puts Spicks & Specks replays into a 6pm timeslot as it tweaks its 6-7pm scheduling with Antiques Roadshow moving back to a 5pm start.

ABC had dabbled with its hour prior to the 7pm News bulletin for some time, recently commissioning Claire Hooper’s House of Games, based on a UK format. It got around 100k viewers less than repeats of Hard Quiz, which remains at 6:30pm.

Prior to this it commissioned A Bite to Eat with Alice which screened across 2024 and, in 2025 at 5pm.

Director of Screen, Jennifer Collins tells TV Tonight, “6pm to 7pm for us is very important, leading into our 7pm news. We’ve tried a number of things in that slot.

“We’ve got a strong daytime audience, so our offer is holding that audience and building on it with more entertainment / lifestyle. We’re not commissioning something new for that slot at the moment, we’re putting our priority and our dollars into prime time. But we did have that opportunity to commission House of Games as a fixed run.”

Managing Director Hugh Marks has also been looking at the broadcaster’s schedule, in terms of timeslots and nightly genres to see where more change can be made.

Question Everything is not returing while Planet America moved to Mondays

“Monday nights are great. I think our Wednesday nights have been really strong in entertainment,” he said.

But ABC has also been commissioning less original content after 9pm on Wednesdays. What’s the future look like?

“We are looking at Wednesdays from 9pm, knowing that we’ve got a captive audience that comes through our Wednesdays. There’s light audiences that only come on Wednesday, and they’re looking to stay for the evening. So we are looking at that post 9:00 timeslot.”

“Every night is under analysis,” Marks continued.

“Since I’ve joined, we’ve been having scheduled discussions about ‘What does Sunday night look like, ideally, going forward? Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday night, etc?’ We’re looking at every show.”

Collins added, “We do lot of half hours on the ABC so we’re interrogating the duration of the shows, we’re looking at the run of the show. We’re looking at the shows themselves. We’re looking at the nights. So we’re doing a lot of work on the schedule.”