First of all, let's get it out of the way. The black face skit on Red Faces last night was terrible, and should never have gotten to air. Someone should be sacked for allowing it on television, because people were going to be offended, and rightly so, and this entire controversy could have been avoided. I'm in no way defending that skit.
But I am defending the return of the show.
Look, I don't really want to sound like a culture warrior when talking about the return of a little TV show like Hey Hey It's Saturday. But the line dividing those who attack the very fact that the show returned in the first place, or that somewhere between 2 and 3 million Australians would watch it on a Wednesday night in 2009, and those somewhere between 2 and 3 million Australians who did watch it last week (and watched it last night) resembles the lines that divide the culture warriors.
On one hand you have what best can be described as "the arts/entertainment elite commentariat" (if that can best describe anything or anyone). Reading The Age over the last two weeks, you wouldn't have read one good thing about Hey Hey's return. Critcisms ranged from laziness and mere nostalgia on Channel Nine's part to indulging in jingoism and old-fashioned, backwards values that should have disappeared long ago.
Marieke Hardy, The Age's commentator and niece of Australian comedy legend Mary Hardy, has written twice in the last fortnight about how appalling Hey Hey is. She describes Hey Hey as "mindlessly bad", and suggests "We're better than this, I'm sure we are."
It's this kind of holier-than-thou attitude which makes people who watched and enjoyed Hey Hey over the last two weeks, and when it was on TV regularly over ten years ago, furious.
And at the risk of rivalling Hardy in being holier-than-thou, we're right. We're right because we take TV, and especially commercial TV, for what it is: unpretentious entertainment, and nothing more.
Commercial TV is not a tool for social change, and it's a fairly safe bet it never will be. It is by its nature uneducational, but not everything needs to be. If you want something more highbrow, watch or do something else. It's a free country.
Criticising Hey Hey because you personally don't find it funny is fine. However, many other people do. Criticising those people (and Hardy does it, and Catherine Deveny does it all the time) for finding Hey Hey amusing is like criticising a person for liking cheeseburgers purely on issues relating to the taste of a cheeseburger.
When it comes to food, or music, or movies, people just like what they like. Hardy says she is fine with nostalgia, and is "going to see Fleetwood Mac in December. But Daryl and the gang have never produced something creatively on par with Rumours and the sooner everyone realises that the better."
Marieke, that's your opinion. But it is not a matter of logic. It is not something that can be argued to a agreed position. We live in a pluralist society. Not everyone is sophisticated, or erudite. Live with it.
It's just entertainment. Masterchef isn't exactly "Hot Docs" on SBS either.
It's also not a reflection on greater problems with our society. Molehills shouldn't be made into mountains, and long bows shouldn't be drawn.
The saddest thing is that I, and people like me, have to read this stuff and get angry, because for many people my age and a little older, Hey Hey reminds them of a simpler time when they were children and the mere sound of a fart sent one into hysterics. I guess Marieke would have been yelling at these kids to "GROW UP!"
Personally, I find myself in tears when the show began, precisely because it was just as I remembered it, and I found myself sitting on the couch at what is now my house, but was the house where I watched and loved Hey Hey for 19 years with my departed grandparents. It reminded me of how much I missed the show, and how much I missed them. It's getting dusty in here just thinking about it.
And that is what nostalgia is really about. I don't need some too-smart media scribe telling me I should be more intelligent than that. It's not about smart, and it makes me feel sorry that they don't understand that.
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2 comments:
Andrew, there is about as much point arguing with Marieke Hardy as there is having a sit down conversation with Andrew Bolt. Their jobs are to fuel pointless argument and get people to buy newspapers.
That said: I like nostalgia as much as the next girl raised on Young Talent Time and Hey Hey, BUT I don't want that nostalgia spoiled by blackface. That's the wrong kind of nostalgia... Hey Hey is welcome back as long as they get some quality control. I find it mind boggling that nobody picked that up. I mean surely... how many people must have seen that guy getting ready to go on stage and said nothing?
I actually meant to make a comparison about Hardy and Bolt, a sort of "you've read seven Bolt/Hardy articles, you've read them all" point, but forgot too.
(Disclosure: I read Bolt's blog mainly for links to other stuff, but no so much his columns).
Other than that, I agree with everything you said. How did someone not stop this going to air? I would have never put that on. When I saw it I immediately said "there's going to be trouble tomorrow".
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