Courtney Barnett Channel Seven Special Attracts Over 600,000 Viewers

World-beating Aussie talk-singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett has been conquering the market pretty much everywhere she's gone, so it's little surprise that the mainstream Australian media has pricked up their ears and taken notice, with the Pedestrian At Best hitmaker being the subject of a 10-minute spot on Channel Seven's Sunday Night program last night.

Barnett's introduction to an audience largely unaware of her meteoric rise at home and in international circles was ostensibly a success, with a solid 674,000 people tuning in over the course of the program, making it the ninth-highest-rating program of the evening, just ahead of top-10 gatekeeper Poldark, on ABC, which brought in 617,000 viewers in the same time slot.

The interview took place in London, where Barnett is presently making a name for herself with the European public, having already killed it in the US, where she racked up high-profile TV spots on shows such as Ellen and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon as well as becoming one of the most-buzzed-about acts of South By Southwest. She put up an expectedly humble, aw-shucks fight against interviewer Rahni Sadler's ebullient line of questioning, claiming that she feels like she's "tricked everyone" by rising to her current lofty position with more than a little luck on her side.

You can watch the full exchange below.

Although Australian TV viewership is — and has been for a long time — held to the standard of the 'magic million' mark, pulling in a shade less than 700,000 pairs of eyeballs on a Sunday night is nothing to scoff at, especially when you consider that (the albeit far more expensive) Rove Live was coming home with sub-800,000 figures towards the end of its life.

However, while it nominally seems an impressive figure for the program, Sunday Night itself was actually trounced by its primary commercial competitors, with the exception of Poldark: Shark Tank, on Channel Ten, picked up 729,000 viewers, while Nine's 60 Minutes cleaned up for the time slot, pulling in a menacing 885,000 viewers across the five-city metro results.

There's simply no stopping the news, though — Seven News was the most-watched program of the night, with just under a million-and-a-half people tuning in (1,433,000), while Nine News was just a little bit behind with 1,268,000. The only other shows to clear the 'magic million' demonstrate the country's continuing love affair with reality TV — House Rules (Seven) picked up 1,131,000 viewers, while MasterChef (Ten) ended up just ahead of ABC News' evening edition (927,000) with 1,056,000 viewers.