Karl: ‘No wonder we don’t have any viewers’

When asked what he “dislikes most” about his job on the breakfast program, Karl first joking that working with co-host Allison Langdon was a “punish”, before adding that it was the early starts he finds trickiest.“I’m in bed with my daughter, who’s one-and-a-half, at 7.30pm every night,” he said, explaining that he has to be up for work at around 3.30am.Andy informed Karl that the average bedtime for most Australians is at around 11.14pm.“Is it? No wonder we don’t have any viewers. That’s late!” he quipped.It comes as the Today show has struggled to keep up with Seven’s Sunrise in the ratings game in recent years.But Nine’s offering did manage to catch up to its competitor earlier this month with a small victory of 248,000 metro viewers to Sunrise’s 237,000.The surprise result is a sign of the long-embattled program making inroads to closing the gap with Seven’s Sunrise, fronted by David Koch and Natalie Barr, who replaced Sam Armytage earlier this year.In June, Karl and Allison told TV Week that beginning their tenure as new hosts — 12 months after Karl was booted — during the catastrophic bushfires following into the Covid pandemic was “the best thing” for the relaunched show. “The focus was the story, as opposed to us and our relationship,” Allison explained. Karl similarly described the timing as “probably the best thing for us to try to cement what we were going to be to the Australian public.”Though the revamped panel certainly had a promising debut in January 2020, it consistently trailed behind Sunrise in the following months, only picking up again now.In the past, Karl has admitted if Today didn’t start catching up the ratings battle, he’d “be off the show again”, having been rehired after a nightmare 2018 to replace Georgie Gardner and Deborah Knight, who brought in some of the show’s worst ratings ever.Karl has admitted the tumultuous year that led to his sacking in 2018 was the result of intense public scrutiny “taking its toll”.He said at the time: “Towards the end of last year, I was cooked. It had taken its toll, a lot of the [media] attention – all the unwarranted attention I thought, and you can’t control any of that.“I’m not going to complain too much about that, but what it meant was that in a work capacity I don’t believe for a second I was at my best. I think I was struggling towards the end of last year.”