Logies 2016: Waleed Aly Gold Logie win highlights local industry’s inadequacies
THE cringeworthy Logies have long been mocked as a lame irrelevancy but it well and truly jumped the shark last night, writes Rita Panahi.
Opinion
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IT’S time to put the Logies out of its misery.
This cringeworthy affair has long been mocked as a lame irrelevancy but it well and truly jumped the shark last night and not just because a divisive co-host of a lowly rating program took out the top award.
The interminable production was lame, dull and worst of all so painfully earnest; the sort of wretched fare you’d inflict on Guantanamo Bay prisoners if it wasn’t for those pesky Geneva Conventions.
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The amount of self-important preaching, from attendees suffering under the delusion that the Logies actually matter, was nausea inducing.
It seemed those taking part thought they were at the Nobel prize ceremony and not at an event that serves only to highlight on an annual basis the local industry’s many inadequacies.
It was fitting that the Gold Logie winner was Waleed Aly, a professional Social Justice Warrior who appeals most to Lefties with a first year arts student view of the world.
Aly’s particular brand of pseudo intellectualism is popular among the clickbait-susceptible hashtag heroes of the Twitterverse and among Left leaning media commentators.
However, sadly for Channel Ten most Australians don’t share this warped worldview and The Project is by any sensible measure a consistent ratings failure smashed nightly by Seven, Nine and even the ABC.
The Project only beats perennial cellar dweller SBS on a regular basis but it has many fans in the media who regurgitate Aly’s scripted rants often it seems to troll their online audience.
Any ‘Aly nails it’ piece is guaranteed to generate hundreds of outraged comments from readers, not because of the author’s race or creed but due to his often objectionable viewpoints.
The very reasons that make Aly a darling of the far left, particularly in the arts and media community, alienate many Australians sick of hearing their country continuously unfairly trashed.
The former head of public affairs for the Islamic Council of Victoria is a “terrorism expert” who thinks Islamic State are weak, speculated that the Boston bombings were the work of home grown “American patriots” and who couldn’t figure out the motivations of Islamic terror group Boko Haram. Indeed Aly has dismissed terrorism as an “irritant” that kills relatively few people.
It’s little wonder that many looked at his Gold Logies nomination with a mixture of bemusement and mild displeasure.
Aly also claimed recently that he and his wife, academic Susan Carland, couldn’t afford to purchase a home in Richmond.
This claim, like all of Aly’s utterances, was reported uncritically in the media despite the multi-employed TV star, academic, writer and speaker’s earnings putting him in the top one per cent in the country.
The Gold Logie is supposed to be for the most popular personality on Australian television.
The most popular categories voted for by the public have been relabelled “best” but the question remains; just how many people bother voting for the Logies?
Industry sources say the number is embarrassingly low and open to manipulation from publicity departments.
When is the last time you bought a TV Week or visited their website, let alone cared enough to cast a vote in the Logies?
I love television and I still had no idea who many of the “stars” on the red carpet were.
Aly is a symptom of an industry that is so full of itself that it’s blind to its place in the hearts and minds of Australians, most of whom couldn’t give a stuff what sanctimonious actors or Play School hosts think about current affairs.
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