Major S.F. TV Station Dropping Lottery Spin

The station covering the second-largest television market in the state--the San Francisco Bay Area--announced Friday that it will not broadcast the California Lottery’s “Big Spin” television show tonight. Whether the show will be broadcast in Los Angeles remained unanswered.

The nine other stations in the statewide consortium that had contracted to broadcast the weekly, half-hour show--including one in San Diego--said they will air the program as scheduled at 7 p.m. today.

“The only thing I can tell you is we are not scheduled to run the lottery this Saturday,” said Bob Mitchell, assistant program director at KGO-TV in San Francisco.

KABC-TV Undecided

A spokeswoman for John Severino, general manager of station KABC-TV in Los Angeles, said the issue was under discussion.

State Lottery Director Mark Michalko said earlier this week that executives of both stations told him that they do not think their contract to carry the troubled lottery show for a year was binding.

Selected finalists on the show spin a lottery wheel to win grand prizes ranging up to more than $3 million.

Lottery officials moved the taping of today’s show to the Cal-Expo grounds in Sacramento after disputes developed with the Hollywood studio that had been filming the program since its inception in October.

Revenues Due to Drop

Producers in Hollywood and stations in major markets reportedly had grown dissatisfied with the program’s projected advertising revenues, which are expected to drop as a result of the recent shift from Monday nights to Saturday nights, when it is expected to attract a smaller audience.

Michalko, who had to resort to an 11th-hour court order to get last week’s show on the air, said he decided not to seek another temporary restraining order from Sacramento Superior Court Judge James T. Ford because Ford had indicated “that he didn’t want us coming back on a week-to-week basis.”