It’s not all bad news, you know. The SARS-COVID-2 pandemic which has infected millions and decimated the global economy has also led to the cancellation of the Australian television industry’s embarrassing night of shameless nights, the Logies.
The crescendo of the evening’s narcissism, the awarding of the Gold Logie for most popular television personality has thrown up a comedian, a journalist and Grant Denyer (who wasn’t working in television at the time) as winners in three of the last four years.
The comedian and last year’s winner, Tom Gleeson, openly and amusingly gamed the voting system which makes professional wrestling look like they really are hurting each other.
In a media statement, Fiona Connolly, publisher of Bauer Media’s weekly titles, including TV Week, announced: “All parties agree the most positive outcome is to not hold the TV Week Logies, including public voting” in 2020.
Won’t someone think of the dealers?
I fret for the cocaine dealers who would normally see this television event with the same urgency our brewers, vintners and distillers regard the Christmas holiday period. Where to now for the hardworking suppliers and couriers of Colombia’s biggest export product? Well, there’s JobKeeper — possibly — but their employers might find registering a bit tricky.
When this massive exercise in wanton conceit was still held in Melbourne, a television personality of my acquaintance hit the toilets during one of the many breaks in the broadcast schedule which may or may not be designed specifically for recreational drug use.
She entered the women’s toilet to find all the cubicles in use. She then rattled the handle of the disabled toilet to find it firmly locked. Becoming impatient and thinking she could miss the award for best local television personality in Mudgee, she took to abusing the inhabitant or inhabitants behind the locked door in the belief they were not using the disabled toilet for its prescribed purpose but rather as a private place to hoover up snifters of marching powder.
Stereotyping saves time
She commenced an anti-cocaine tirade which became more abusive as her anger rose. The epithets were thick and heavy — parasites, junkies, sluts and included language fouler than you, gentle reader, should have to peruse.
The abuse continued until the door finally opened and emerged, the doyen of Australian track and field athletics and multiple-sclerosis sufferer, Betty Cuthbert, who was wheelchair bound at the time. Not doing drugs obviously and most definitely using the disabled toilet for its prescribed purpose.
Oops.
Our television personality was left aghast. It was a horrible faux pas but perhaps an understandable one as she had just left a table of 12 whose entire meal order amounted to a shared bowl of chips.
Stereotyping, after all, saves time.
Free-to-air free fall
The broadcast of the Logies was never must watch television at least not in any household I’ve been a member of but now it tells the depressing tale of an free-to-air industry in free fall.
The Logies may have had some moments years ago when the television industry regarded the viewing public if not with a sneer then at least at a dignified distance.
Back in the golden days of Australian television we had Homicide, Division 4 and Matlock Police appearing on our screens in black and white. Sure, we had to ignore the press board sets with load bearing doors that never opened or if they did the whole mis-en-scene would collapse around cast members’ ears. Where doors did open, they needed to be closed gingerly, carefully else the entire set would start to quiver as if amid an event that was pushing the needle on the Richter scale deep in the red.
But there were writers who could trick up plot lines all the way to predictable denouements and actors who knew what they were doing. On any one of these shows, you were likely to see some of Australia’s finest actors of that generation appearing as violent hoods and cold- blooded murderers.
In comedy it has been a little different. You’ll need only the fingers on a leper’s hand to count Australia’s successful sitcoms in the last 20 years. Kath and Kim’s parody of suburbia is one. But the noteworthy remainder make our flesh crawl – Acropolis Now, Kingswood Country and let’s not forget Australia’s longest running sit-com, Hey Dad! Now there’s a reunion show that ain’t going to happen.
But lines of demarcation were solidly in place. Buffoons who believed they had talent were dispatched to Pot of Gold only to be disabused by caustic judge, Bernard King and never seen again.
Now the industry regards the viewing public as rich pickings. There’s never any shortage of people who will do almost anything to get their dials on television. An industry that once regarded the viewing public at a safe distance now hires them on minimum wage, degrades and humiliates them either as entertainers, chefs, builders or as prospective sexual partners. A nation of television wannabes is nothing to celebrate.
That’s where we are today; an industry where people with little talent hire others with even less and subject them to psychological torment by waving around the promise of a seat at the Logies and a few minutes in the brassco rubbing shoulders with someone else of equally dubious claim to celebrity.
Look, I know we’re in the midst of deadly pandemic and the faster we can move safely on from it the better we will be, but I figure if we can stretch it out until mid-2021, we could be shot of the Logies forever. That’s some silver lining right there.
Albanese in danger of bombing out from public perception
Through bad management, bad luck or a combination of both, Anthony Albanese’s first term of leadership has been divided into two halves of distraction and failure that have damaged Labor’s achievements.
Incoming CEO Matos flies under radar to meet ANZ team
ANZ’s top brass will have more insight into the plans of the bank’s CEO-elect Nuno Matos, after he held a string of clandestine meetings with them last month.