Channel 7 has accused its fierce rival Channel Nine of stealing the original format for its most successful reality TV hit My Kitchen Rules, a six-year-old cooking show which regularly attracts 2.4 million viewers across the country.
Seven will face Nine in court on Tuesday, a week after Nine premiered The Hotplate – a show about “unsung local restaurant heroes” competing for a $100,000 prize.
A Channel 7 spokesman said on Monday: “Channel Nine’s on-air promotions for its program had a strange sense of deja vu.”
“We then saw it. We believe Nine has appropriated Seven’s My Kitchen Rules original format and related production elements, and contravened copyright. That’s why we’re in court.”
Channel 7 said The Hot Plate was almost identical to My Kitchen Rules in its casting, costuming, sets, music, promotion and judging processes.
A judge will decide if Seven has grounds to claim Nine and the production company Endemol stole its intellectual property and infringed its copyright.
A spokeswoman for Nine said the network would defend the matter on Tuesday morning: “The Hotplate is an original format developed by Nine and we will be vigorously defending these claims.”
When The Hot Plate aired last week some viewers were adamant the show was very similar to MKR and called it a blatant rip-off.
Hmm ... did they rebrand #MKR as #Hotplate?
— Carla Delvex (@CarlaDelvex) July 12, 2015
Can one with IP law knowledge tell me why #mkr don't block #hotplate? Where is this show conceptually different? @Jrojess @PatrickJCarter
— Speake (@speake53) July 30, 2015
While My Kitchen Rules has celebrity chef judges Manu Feildel and Pete Evans as its frontmen, The Hotplate has British food writer Tom Parker Bowles – who is also the son of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall – and Melbourne chef Scott Pickett as celebrity hosts.
Pickett has hit back, saying Seven’s new reality cooking show Kitchen Revolution flopped when it went up against The Hotplate on Nine last week and that is why they’ve called in the lawyers.
“I think it’s just sour grapes because Restaurant Revolution hasn’t really kicked,” Pickett told the Herald Sun.
“At the end of the day, Channel 7 might want to have a look at themselves. House Rules is an absolute rip off of The Block, and A Current Affair was around 20 years before Today Tonight came on the scene. People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Obviously there are a few similarities, but that’s food shows.
My Kitchen Rules was itself labelled a rip-off of MasterChef Australia when it launched in 2010. Ten had launched MasterChef to huge audiences and Seven was not far behind with MKR to cash in on the renewed interest in cooking shows. Many in the industry said MKR was a combination of British cooking show Come Dine With Me and MasterChef.
In 2015, Channel 7 added Restaurant Revolution to its menu of reality shows already bulging with The X Factor, Dancing with the Stars, My Kitchen Rules and House Rules.
