A warning: this blog entry is going to seem a little like a self-indulgent whinge.
Correction: this blog entry is going to seem a little more like a self-indulgent whinge than my usual slightly self-indulgent entries.
Anyway, last week Rosso, or Merrick and Rosso "fame", announced he was quitting his breakfast radio show in Nova in Sydney. He currently hosts the show with his comedic partner, and former Home and Away actress Kate Ritchie.
The news coverage about this was something akin to the moon landing.
This morning the lead article on both the Herald-Sun and The Age websites was about Rove McManus ending his self-titled Channel Ten show.
For me, Merrick and Rosso are just some comedians who have had some success. They had a TV show on Channel Nine called Merrick and Rosso: Unplanned (I used to call it Merrick and Rosso: Unwatched), and I liked Merrick's work on The Hollowmen (I, rather surprisingly, didn't like the show overall).
While Rove won three Gold Logies, this is not the big deal it was in the 1980s. For God's sake, Kate Ritchie won Gold Logies in consecutive years, the second just last year! Rove's three wins just go to show the dearth of real personalities we have on Australian television, considering the award is for the most popular personality. Actors have won 10 of the last 13 Gold Logies.
Rove's flagship Channel Ten show was never "Can't Miss" TV the way IMT or the Don Lane Show was, anyway. You could argue that the last Australian "Can't Miss" TV show that wasn't acted or news-related was The Comedy Company.
Australian television has been veering towards low-cost entertainment that use unknowns as the stars for sometime. It's just embarrassing that if in 2002, instead of giving it to Georgie Parker, they had given the Gold Logie to the person who probably was the most popular personality on TV in the preceding 12 months: Sara-Marie Fedele from Big Brother.
Next week, Australian Idol will conclude, and Channel Ten has promised at least another year. It will probably be it's last.
I know shows like Today and Sunrise have to fill their 3 hours somehow, but a little bit of proportion please. The end of Merrick and Watts on radio is not Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis breaking up, and Rove leaving his tired show isn't exactly big news.
Maybe I'm just too concerned about television for someone who is getting married in 20 days. My fiance would agree with me. For once.
Showing posts with label TV. Show all posts
Showing posts with label TV. Show all posts
Monday, November 16, 2009
Thursday, October 8, 2009
In defence of Hey Hey
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.
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.
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Opening post
Well, I never did get MySpace back on at work, so I've created my own blog. Hopefully this gives me a bit more cache in the wider community. Hopefully this will enable to help some people I know discover what "cache" means. And not in the I.T. sense.
So here it is. Favourite subjects will be AFL, politics, cricket, the culture wars, TV, movies, music, religion, and maybe some other stuff. I'm going to keep it professional, so don't expect any updates of what is going on in my life. I still get Facebook at home, and I'll use it for that.
Some random thoughts for a Tuesday morning:
So here it is. Favourite subjects will be AFL, politics, cricket, the culture wars, TV, movies, music, religion, and maybe some other stuff. I'm going to keep it professional, so don't expect any updates of what is going on in my life. I still get Facebook at home, and I'll use it for that.
Some random thoughts for a Tuesday morning:
- I'm not sure who comes into Collingwood's side for Alan Didak and Heath Shaw on the weekend. But I'll be happy if Didak doesn't play. GO SAINTS!
- Brendan Nelson will still be Opposition Leader when Parliament resumes.
- The Dark Knight is good, but not incredible.
- Can't miss TV shows right now? Top Gear, Media Watch, Two and a Half Men, Spicks and Specks, and nothing else.
- God I wished The Hollowmen was better. But maybe I'm too close to the reality.
- Final ladder prediction? Geelong, Hawthorn, Western Bulldogs, St Kilda, Sydney, Kangaroos, Collingwood & Adelaide. Bottom Eight Richmond, Brisbane, Essendon, Carlton, Port Adelaide, Fremantle, West Coast & Melbourne.
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