Prince Harry and Meghan Markle may not be amused about being the subject of satirical treatment. But the memorable South Park episode that dropped the week before last featuring Harry and Meghan – named the ‘Worldwide Privacy Tour’ – has driven a huge spike in interest in the cartoon series.
Among many other hilarious moments, the episode features a thinly-veiled version of the Prince promoting his new book, Waaagh! (a spoof of Harry’s best-selling take-down of the royal family, ‘Spare’) on breakfast TV, while he and Meghan simultaneously hold up placards demanding ‘Privacy’ and to ‘Stop looking at us’.
Unsurprisingly, the episode has driven days of headlines around the world – and in Australia, the publicity has given viewership of the show an unprecedented boost. The cartoon screens in the wilds of Ten’s multichannel 10 Shake, as well as free and paid streaming platforms Paramount+ and 10Play.
On 10 Shake, the week-on-week comparison saw a remarkable 221 per cent uplift in live viewers for the episode when it screened last Thursday week – which begs the question of whether Ten should have elevated the episode to the main channel at some point. The show’s live streaming minutes on 10Play were also up by 59 per cent.
But the big impact was apparently on Ten’s paid streaming service Paramount+. Diary was unable to source numbers out of the US head office of Paramount+. But nearly two weeks after the cartoon aired, it remains the No.1 trending program on both Paramount+ in Australia, and, we’re told, in other countries worldwide.
Maybe that’s why South Park’s creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, are two of the richest men in Hollywood – having signed a deal with Paramount in 2021 that will see them earn more than $US900m over six years.
‘I’m no union flog’: Tingle hits back at ABC critics
Laura Tingle’s five years as 7.30’s chief political correspondent have given her a front-row seat on the political games that leaders play. But now it’s Tingle herself who’s contesting an election campaign in her own right.
For those who haven’t heard, Tingle has thrown her hat in the ring to contest the poll for the next staff-elected director of the ABC. The election is being conducted by no less than the Australian Electoral Commission at the public broadcaster, with voting commencing last Friday and running for five weeks until March 31.
But as Tingle has rapidly discovered, the campaign trail can be a testing place for someone who has never put themselves up for election before.
On Wednesday, she was given the endorsement of one of the key union factions at the public broadcaster, the Community and Public Sector Union. But the cut and thrust nature of campaigning is already well underway, with grumbles from election rivals for the ABC staff director position that Tingle has already made a policy ‘backflip’.
When Tingle launched her bid for the ABC board just over three weeks ago, she put out a note to ABC staff stating that she would be an “independent” candidate: “I have decided not to seek the union’s nomination for the job,” she wrote. “There are clear obligations for directors of any board to be independent and while I would obviously listen to all staff concerns, I feel it would be detrimental to simply be perceived as representing the interests of one sector of our workforce.”
But by now accepting the CPSU’s endorsement, Tingle has received some private criticism from fellow candidates: “It’s a complete backflip, to say you’re independent and don’t want to represent one sector of the ABC workforce, and then accept a union’s endorsement,” one candidate told us.
When Diary reached Tingle on Sunday, she described that criticism as “ludicrous”.
“I don’t regard it as a change of heart at all,” she told us. “I’m smiling benignly. Am I supposed to turn around and say I’m not accepting the CPSU endorsement? It’s ludicrous. The CPSU has chosen to endorse me. I didn’t seek their endorsement.
“As far as I’m concerned, I haven’t changed my position in any way, shape or form.”
There has been no backroom deal that saw her win the union’s endorsement, and she is “no union flog”, Tingle said.
“All of this stuff is more fascinating for you than it is for me. I’m honoured to be chosen, but I haven’t made any promises to the CPSU.”
She says her motivation instead is about making a contribution to the ABC board. “I’m not going to go through the frenzy of offering everyone an ice cream,” she told us. “I don’t need it on my CV, and there are much easier things in life. It’s just a way of giving back to a long career in journalism.”
The other major union at the ABC, the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, has endorsed prominent Melbourne-based ABC business reporter Dan Ziffer. Other candidates include ABC Radio Sydney’s Evenings presenter Indira Naidoo, and The Drum co-host Dan Bourchier.
Politics, of course, is in the Tingle family’s blood. Her father, the late John Tingle, was a prominent NSW politician and ex-2GB broadcaster, who was the founder of the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party way back in 1992.
Around the ABC headquarters, the campaign is already in full swing. Ziffer, who is campaigning heavily for better pay, is said to have been mailing flyers to the homes of some ABC staff and turned up in several ABC offices, including Hobart and Brisbane. Naidoo is lobbying for some of the popular vote in Sydney over her opposition to the ABC’s planned move of some of its Ultimo staff to Parramatta, which she argues will cause “untold chaos”.
But with her national profile and now CPSU backing, the smart money around the ABC is strongly on Tingle.
Hanson cartoon to satirise Wilkinson and FitzSimons
Lisa Wilkinson may still be nowhere to be found on the screens of her actual employer, Channel 10, more than three months after her departure from The Project.
But we can thank Pauline Hanson for giving Wilkinson a comeback of sorts to our screens, along with her equally high-profile husband, Peter FitzSimons.
Diary can reveal Wilkinson and FitzSimons are about to be lampooned in Hanson’s South Park-style hit cartoon series, Please Explain.
The Hanson camp has revealed few details, but Diary is told an episode of Please Explain will feature Wilkinson and FitzSimons taking over the parliamentary “class” that has figured prominently in the satire.
The premise of the episode is that the pair have been recruited by FitzSimons’ one-time tennis partner, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Apparently Wilkinson and FitzSimons – who will feature in pirate gear and his trademark bandana – will play the role of drama teachers to the unruly political class.
The couple will teach politicians how to tap into their sense of “victimhood”. The cartoon is said to pull no punches: apparently satirising Wilkinson’s belief she was a victim of a media pile-on following her controversial Logies victory speech in June last year.
But which politicians will be cast as the 47th parliament’s biggest “victims”? Diary is told that list will include former Labor leader Bill Shorten, Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young (with whom Hanson has had a testy relationship) and Bob Katter.
The episode will also mischievously feature former Labor PMs Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard as “hall of fame” victims.
The two-minute cartoon series – which regularly draws in a million viewers a week across YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and Twitter – normally features a cartoon version of the One Nation leader (voiced by Hanson herself) as the regular teacher of the unruly class, featuring everyone from Albanese to Peter Dutton, Adam Bandt, Penny Wong and Lidia Thorpe.
The series was meant to last until last year’s federal election, but returned this year by popular demand to lampoon the new Teal and Green-heavy parliament, after a fundraising campaign by One Nation in which it sold bottles of rum with labels featuring the cartoon.
Chalmers sets off a media stink
Jim Chalmers has already started to develop something of a pattern of planting controversial policies through the media, and leaving his boss Anthony Albanese to clean up the mess.
Last week, Chalmers created the story of the week through a speech to the financial services industry on Monday, where he unleashed his war on superannuation tax concessions for the rich, slamming the previous Coalition government’s super policies as “disastrous” and claimed that super policy in future needed to be “equitable and sustainable”.
Chalmers’ office clearly wanted to make a splash in the media. Political journalists around the country tell us the speech was strategically leaked under embargo to most media outlets across the country.
And what a stink it caused!
As one seasoned Canberra media type wryly observed on Thursday, the day Chalmers jetted off to India to join the G20 Finance Ministers’ meeting: “He certainly left a turd in the well on the way out.” Indeed.
It was left to Albanese to attempt to put out the by-now raging superannuation bushfire with a garden hose, when he faced a grilling from journalists at the National Press Club on Wednesday: “We said during the election campaign that we did not intend to make big changes to superannuation – and we don’t.”
Nine CEO: Why I watch MAFS
It’s the show that routinely features extramarital affairs, debauched dinner party fights, and this season is said to even include wife-swapping.
So Diary’s colleague, The Australian’s media editor James Madden, couldn’t resist using some of his precious time in a rare interview with Mike Sneesby to ask the Nine CEO whether he actually watches his network’s ratings juggernaut, Married At First Sight.
“I do, yep,” Sneesby replied definitively – even claiming to “co-ordinate” with his wife Ursula to ensure the couple were “all aligned” and up-to-date with the latest crazy shenanigans in MAFS world. Now that’s dedication to your job!
But a persistent Madden couldn’t resist asking Sneesby what he liked about MAFS.
Alas, for Sneesby at least, it’s not about the affairs, wife-swapping or fights – but the way it “unites” Australians.
“We love the fact that Australia loves it,” Sneesby told Madden. “That’s what I love about it most.
“It’s been an important part of our Nine schedule for so long and in my household we probably feel about it a lot like the rest of Australia … It certainly unites people around the TV sets in my household.”
We believe you, Mike.
Meanwhile, Sneesby’s highest paid talent, 2GB’s Ray Hadley, appears to be angling to get a gig as an amateur ‘tough love’ psychologist on MAFS to give a tongue-lashing to the rogue grooms, who he dubs ‘palookas’.
On his 2GB morning show last week, Hadley pitched the idea to the show’s chief headshrinker, John Aiken. “There will be no punches pulled! I will be giving it to blokes like (controversial grooms) Shannon and Harrison, and telling them they need to wake up to themselves!”
Hadley giving it to the ‘palookas’ on the MAFS couch? Sounds like a ratings winner.
The Logies: no date, no location
Less than four months before the 63rd annual TV Week Logie Awards are due, there’s plenty of intrigue in TV-land about when and where they will actually happen – with frustrated networks struggling to get any information at all.
The nominal date for Australian TV’s night of nights is meant to be mid-June. But organisers have already indicated to various TV networks that this date is already off the table, with the ceremony to be late in 2023.
A January email obtained by Diary and sent to multiple networks by Logies publicist Kelly Black has signalled that no final venue has been decided, providing only vague time frames.
“We will be in touch to confirm a date and venue,” Black wrote to the networks. “For planning purposes, it may be useful to know the event will likely fall in the new financial year.”
But the vagueness of that note has only amplified the networks’ concerns, because of the huge logistical exercise of marshalling fickle stars to travel interstate to attend a once-a-year ceremony for which there is, unusually, no date or location.
For the Logies, 2022 was a watershed year in multiple ways.
Not only was it the last year of a lucrative three-year contract for Annastacia Palaszczuk’s Queensland government to stage the awards on the Gold Coast, but it was also the end of a 27-year run for Nine – its long-term broadcaster – to screen the awards.
Are Media, which is TV Week’s publisher, caused a stir with its left-field choice to screen the awards on Seven and not Nine from 2023 onwards.
Part of the attraction of the Gold Coast for the networks have been the rich incentives provided by the Queensland government to bring their biggest and brightest stars, like David Koch, Karl Stefanovic and Julia Morris to the ‘Glitter Strip’.
Diary understands that Palaszczuk offered the networks up to $1000 for each on-air ‘star’ they brought to the Gold Coast Logies, up to a maximum of $75,000 per network. The Queensland government also offered $25,000 per network for each to promote their participation in the Logies.
The TV networks are now concerned that whichever state or city takes on the Logies from 2023 onwards continues to provide these incentives, to help defray the costs of up to $300,000 per network for them to attend the Logies. Without these subsidies, the networks would be likely to send much smaller contingents.
As one prominent network source says: “Without the government subsidies, it becomes unviable for us to send all our talent.”
Kate Ritchie to join Fitzy and Wippa?
There is strong word around radio circles that ex-Home And Away star Kate Ritchie is about to make a return to radio on a new show.
A ‘tired’ Ritchie announced last year she was taking a break from her NOVA FM national drivetime radio show, Kate, Tim and Joel, to focus on her health. Australian Idol host Ricki-Lee Coulter has been filling in while Ritchie has been away.
But Diary hears whispers that a refreshed Ritchie is now on the verge of a comeback, although her new home could be on another radio show.
The word is that she could join Nova’s Sydney breakfast show Fitzy and Wippa, hosted by ex-AFL player Ryan Fitzgerald and Michael Wipfli, to give the show a boost. If that move were to proceed, it could potentially leave Coulter to stay permanently on Nova’s national drive show. Watch this space.
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