I asked him how did the move get brought to his attention and what his reaction was.

It was pretty much, uh, the first option, which was – this is what we think. What do you guys think? No one will see it coming, it will be, a bit of a gamble but we will stick with it, which is what Ten do very well, to say look this is what we are planning on doing, we’ll stand by you and we are not expecting too much in the early goings.

He continued by explaining the unexpected consequences of the move that made him happy not having to interview certain reality stars anymore.

[...] we think its just a nice way to reset, and they were looking at having, a live night because thats not what everyone else had at the time, so going straight through from think at the time, from Biggest Loser to Big Brother into us, so it was just live from start to finish and to be honest for me it was I didn’t have to have Big Brother housemates on anymore [laughs] and I sort of say that as a bit of a joke but seriously I was over it by that stage and and it obviously meant there was no point because someone had just been evicted before us and interviewed by Gretel, and so you wouldn’t have then had last weeks evictee on your show afterwards because it was old news, so it just meant, negated it all together and I was really happy with all that.

In the next installment of the interview we focus on the constant timeslot changes.

I asked McManus how he feels about helming a show in its 10th season.

“Actually Looking back over all the stuff, is really inspiring to make you want to keep going, because there is so much stuff we look back going ‘jeez some of those ideas you could probably bring back in a different guise and do all over again’, so it’s nice to still be around”.

He continued to talk about how the show originated and how he would still be happy broadcasting at the shows original 11pm Wednesday timeslot.

“[...] when we started I would have thought just to be to doing 10 years at eleven o’clock on a Wednesday night, where we started would have been okay but now we have sort of progressed into now what is, you know the toughest timeslot of the television week and still going well, so that’s nice”.

In the next installment of the interview we focus on how the show got moved to Sunday Nights and issues over the inconsistency of the timeslot. Look out for that later this week.

In this post, Rove addresses the status of ‘The 7pm Project’.

“Ultimately it’s biggest problem was, it was really heavily pushed as a launch when it was meant to be, maybe a bit more of a ‘lets ease it in’, when it was first pitched to us as something that we were going to try and get up and happening.”

The problem, McManus said was that nobody really knew what the show was going to be.

“and… I think the biggest problem it had was everybody thought they knew what the show was going to be… and it wasn’t what they thought it was going to be”

I asked whether people thought it was going to be similar to ‘The Daily Show with Jon Stewart’?

“…well, yes some people thought it was going to be The Daily Show, some people thought it was going to be… just a very newsy show, but with comedians talking about it, I mean everyone had a different idea. So then when it wasn’t that, they just went ‘well I don’t know what it is and I don’t get it’ and they sort of went away”.

On it’s current status and whether it is safe….

“Where its at now, is where it was expected to start and you’re always going to do very well when you launch off the back of the highest rating show in television history [laughs] in this country, outside of major sporting events, so the good thing is at the moment, you know it’ll be round, just again sometimes I think… people sometimes, arm chair experts are a lot more vocal than they used to be, and you know we are about to celebrate 10 years and we weren’t doing all that good when we started”.

Subscribe to our RSS to keep up to date, more of the interview with Rove will be released over the coming week or so.