SAY what you like about rugby league - that it's one-dimensional, repetitive, even a little lowbrow - but year after year the fans keep tuning in to watch.
Channel Nine's telecast of the third State of Origin match on Wednesday was watched by an average of 2.144 million people and a peak of just more than 2.5m, which was not only the biggest Origin audience in a decade but the second-biggest national audience to tune in to a sporting event this year.
It's an impressive result for a sport that is taken seriously in only two states. Indeed, if there had been as much viewer interest in the other three mainland state capitals as there was in Sydney and Brisbane (national audience figures are based on the five capitals), Wednesday night's audience would have approached 4.5m.
In some quarters, though, it had been expected that Origin III, as the series decider, might do even better - specifically, that it might top the men's final of the Australian tennis Open on Channel Seven as the highest-rating sporting event so far this year. In the event, it fell about 300,000 short.
This was not for lack of trying by Nine, which packed in as much off-field drama as the telecast could stand. Viewers were left wondering whether league players really hug each other as often as we saw them do at the end of the match (even Mal Meninga gave hugs all round) or whether they were just acting for the cameras. Let's hope it was the latter.
As always, the most striking feature of the Origin telecast was its extraordinary popularity in Brisbane. As you would expect, Brisbane's average audience, 705,000, was smaller than Sydney's 912,000, but, when you take their respective populations into account, you find that the proportion of Brisbane people who tuned in was nearly twice as high as Sydney's. The precise ratio was 1.85.
In fact, about two of every three Brisbane people watching television on Wednesday evening were tuned into the Origin, which is as many as any TV channel could hope for.
As the accompanying table (of the top 10 audiences) shows, this year's Origin matches have been the second-, third- and fourth-most watched sporting events on Australian television so far this year, ahead of a Twenty20 cricket match against India, which is placed fifth.
All of which demonstrates again that Australians are strangely conservative where sport is concerned. Their tastes in other areas of life might change every few years, but they continue to prefer the same old sports - cricket, tennis, one or other of the football codes and not much else.
Other statistics illustrate the point. In a list of the 20 sporting events that have attracted the biggest average national audiences so far this year, all but two are tennis, league or cricket matches. Only one AFL match makes this second list, although there is a simple explanation: ordinary AFL competition matches are not televised live and nationally.
Again, a Twenty20 match has topped the list of cricket audiences. Clearly, this latest form of the game is not the passing fad that many believed it would be.