Strewth: The Reich stuff

Sky News’s ill-fated chat with an Adolf Hitler fan opens the door to exciting programming ideas.

Sky News’s ill-fated chat with an Adolf Hitler fan on Sunday night prompted an expression of deep regret from station boss Angelos Frangopoulos and rage from some of its presenters. But we wonder if ultimately it opens the door to exciting programming ideas. Off the top of our head: Aryan Eye for the Straight Guy; All Reich on the Night; The Fast and the Fuhrerious; Mein Kampf Rules; Puttin’ on the Blitz; and MasterRaceChef. Having aired this thought (such as it was) on Twitter yesterday, Strewth was inundated with more suggestions, among them Backyard Blitzkrieg and Gestapo’s Coming to Dinner. And it’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. In 1990, an evidently unprepared Britain found itself on the receiving end of a new TV sitcom called Heil Honey I’m Home! Created with the idea of lampooning shows such as I Love Lucy, it revolved around the home life of Hitler and Eva Braun and their fraught relationship with their Jewish neighbours, the Rosensteins. It will probably not come as a twist of any magnitude to learn Heil Honey I’m Home! was pulled after its pilot episode, though what did make it to air has since found eternal life on YouTube. In an interview last year, show creator Geoff Atkinson conceded it didn’t “entirely deliver”. Still, he is hoping Netflix will come begging for a reboot. Meanwhile the Hitler fan’s interviewer, the suddenly showless Adam Giles (the former Northern Territory chief minister), may now be hoping for something similar.

Rod awakening

Fans of “senator-in-exile” Rod Culleton rejoice! The man who made powder-blue blazers great again was at the High Court yesterday — more than 18 months after he was disqualified from the Senate — and firmly suggesting his case be reopened. Afterwards he showered upon journalists thoughts ranging from the emotionally frank (“I’m really cranky about it”) to the pleasingly gnomic: “A river can’t rise above its source.” We should know by Friday week whether he’s successful — so until then, keep all digits crossed.

Not that rubbish!

ABC editorial director Alan Sunderland got himself comfortable yesterday and shared his thoughts online. “I read in the news the other day that the ABC was about to launch ‘a replica version of BuzzFeed’ to produce the kind of content that does well on commercial sites. I was outraged. What’s happened to editorial standards at the ABC? I thought. Why are we dumbing down our content to produce tabloid-style rubbish? Where is the editorial director of the ABC, and why aren’t they making sure we stick to our charter? Then I realised that I was the editorial director of the ABC, and this terrible retreat to populism was happening on my watch. How could I have missed it?” Nothing of the sort was happening, he went on to emphasise as this odd soliloquy morphed into an introduction to the ABC Life site. It’s a bit odd to sledge BuzzFeed this way. Amid its fluffier offerings, it breaks stories and pursues them, and smashes it out of the park on a host of issues. To cite just one very specific example close to our heart, when Russian opposition figure Boris Nemtsov was assassinated near the Kremlin, two of the finest pieces we read were from BuzzFeed. Maybe Sunderland just hasn’t read it for a while.

Brooke’s last stanza

In Friday’s Strewth we had an item that opened with these two lines: “As Rupert Brooke and company discovered in World War I, there’s nothing quite like coming under fire in the trenches for stirring poetic sensibilities. And so to the Labor Party ranks as the ongoing investigation into backbencher Emma Husar rumbles on with its ballistic to-and-fro of accusation, fierce denial and persistent leak.” The short version is that, via an apposite slab of war poetry we came to a blunt, almost verse-like thought from a Labor figure: “When your political narrative is whether or not you flashed your gash at a colleague, you could probably say you’re off-message.” Not everyone’s cup of Earl Grey as it turned out, but such is the calibre of Strewth’s readership that the main response to this item was to point out Brooke never was in the trenches, dying en route to Gallipoli. We should have gone with Wilfred Owen.

Surely shome mishtake

Meanwhile in Tasmanian organ The Examiner: “The Hobart DJ who assaulted former prime minister Tony Abbott last year has been nominated for an Australian of the Year award. The nomination for Astro Labe came via a friend and its receipt was confirmed on Wednesday.” Labe did time for headbutting Abbott, but as the Examiner noted: “Criminal convictions do not automatically count a person out of being considered.”

[e-mail]