How The Front Bar slayed The Footy Show

IT’S had a great 24-year run, but it’s time The Footy Show conceded defeat. The world has moved on, and audiences want funny, not mean, and witty, not abusive.

LIKE a Benny Hill sketch or an episode of Are You Being Served, the AFL Footy Show needs to be acknowledged for its contributions to TV history, but also accept its style of mean-edged pisstaking is no longer what the world wants.

Its counterpart, the NRL Footy Show, is currently embroiled in a fat-shaming controversy — familiar territory for the AFL Footy Show, which has for so long featured Sam Newman’s relentless barrage of misogyny and more recently, trans-phobia. This stuff once had people tuning in in droves, but recent ratings show the audience has moved on.

It turns out when it comes to football programs on TV, we now prefer witty to belligerent, and insightful to abusive.

The recent 14,000-strong Herald Sun footy fans survey crowned The Front Bar the most popular football TV show, with 30.3 per cent citing it as their favourite. Second was Foxtel’s AFL360, with 21.5 per cent.

The once mighty Footy Show limped in at 7.5 per cent.

Herald Sun readers — a decent proportion of them obsessive footy fans — should be The Footy Show’s heartland, the viewers who will tune in no matter what.

The Front Bar is on to a winning and winsome formula with Andy Maher, Mick Molloy and Sam Pang.

This year the show spent what must have been a decent amount of money signing up the likes of Dane Swan, Chris Judd and Brendan Fevola, and even that hasn’t done the trick.

Instead, viewers are turning to shows that favour wit over the mean edge The Footy Show has cultivated in recent years. That edge can be sheeted home largely to Sam Newman, whose humour, like a shock jock’s, often derives from insulting and demeaning those he disagrees with, or those he doesn’t understand.

There’s still some stalwarts cheering him on, but they’re standing with a shrinking crowd. And I’d wager a guess that if they looked around, they’d find themselves pretty well surrounded by men of a certain age, and very few women or young people.

You can’t have a hit show by appealing only to that thin sliver of the world.

In its heyday, The Footy Show appealed to both men and women, regardless of the fact it was a woman-free zone.

Both the AFL and NRL footy shows made a change to that status, bringing in Rebecca Maddern and Erin Molan respectively — admirable, but not necessarily fixing the shows’ core problems.

Just like Top Gear, in its glory days before Jeremy Clarkson got all punchy about steak, The Footy Show once traded on not necessarily attracting an audience of experts, but fans of decent entertainment.

The Footy Show’s audience once loved Sam Newman’s irreverence, but the schtick has worn thin.

But what we once found entertaining, now seems at best old hat, and at worst, actively offensive.

And those fans have now moved to The Front Bar.

I couldn’t claim to be a footy expert — far from it — but I never miss an episode of The Front Bar.

The show is capturing the footy fanatics, with a bonus helping of people like me — not diehard footy fans, but who still get, and appreciate, most of the jokes.

And for those claiming The Footy Show has been felled by “PC gone mad”, well, there’s nothing particularly PC about The Front Bar.

I don’t watch out of a desire to support diversity on TV. It’s hosted by three middle aged men, with a couple of generally middle aged male guests each week.

And I don’t watch it because it has edgy new comedians making cutting edge jokes about social issues — Mick Molloy and Sam Pang have both been around for decades, and their jokes don’t have any particular agenda.

I watch it because it’s properly funny.

They take the piss out of guests — even the great Bruce McAvaney copped a ribbing for being a relentless “close stander” two weeks ago — but it’s never, ever mean.

It’s also not sexist, demeaning or nasty.

Maybe it says something about how divided and angry we all are. When we go home we’d rather be entertained and informed, and not have unPC rubbish shoved down our throat.

Claire Sutherland is the acting editor of RendezView.

@brolga2