Ray Martin has been threatening to walk for much of the year with three major dummy spits in media interviews. And we got more “nobody loves me” … “Give me my own show or I’ll walk” lines in a front page story in the Herald Sun ‘s TV guide last Wednesday.

But judging from his efforts co-hosting Nine’s election coverage on Saturday night, Martin should take a lesson from John Howard, that other old stager who stayed too long, and leave immediately.

His performance on Saturday night showed again why viewers don’t much like him any more and why his pleas for his own show should be falling on deaf ears at Nine.

It would be wrong to say Martin was wholly responsible for the embarrassment of Nine’s fourth place finish behind the ABC, Seven and Ten’s Star Wars repeat. Others took the decision to try and chase Seven into a less serious style of coverage.

But viewers are off Ray. They went off him when he was hosting A Current Affair from 2003 to 2005. Martin didn’t like that but it was one of the reasons why he wanted to get off ACA and do something else. He has always wanted an interview show of his own, much like Andrew Denton’s Enough Rope , which he resents (he mentioned it in the Herald Sun story).

Ray has had interview-based programs in the past. We all remember his interview with Tom Cruise in which Scientology didn’t get a mention.