As we dragged our weary bodies down a dingy backstreet in Burnley one Tuesday afternoon, slowly and reluctantly making our way to Channel Nine studios, the townhouses turned suddenly to disheveled offices. As we passed the studios for Hey Hey it’s Saturday! and the MTR radio headquarters, we knew we’d reached our lowest point.
When TV executives think they’re onto a good thing, they bleed the idea dry. How else can you explain the reappearance of Hey, Hey It’s Saturday! or the continued presence of Jules Lund?
The success or failure of a tv show is a mysterious thing. A strange alchemy, often accidental, can create a dazzling hit, while seemingly brilliant choices can create a program so crushingly horrible, the only thing certain is being the butt of the Logie host’s jokes that year (if the joke isn’t indeed the Logie host themselves).
I’m lost in L.A. somewhere between La Cienega North and La Cienega South, trying to find a place called “Largo”. With less than an hour til it began, hungover and sick after a road trip to Vegas, I realised the Ellis reading was tonight. Frantically scrawling down the address, I set off into the fray, running down La Cienega Boulevard. But the numbers aren’t going in any discernible order and I’m high on medication and I keep trying to flag a cab but none are driving past. I don’t know what I’m looking for, whether it’s a bookstore or a venue, and I’m starting to doubt if the address I wrote down is even correct.
Election time. It’s a phrase that strikes fear (or at the very least, boredom) into the hearts of many. As if our screens weren’t filled enough with politicians, with the election campaign in full swing, we can be sure of one thing: politicians on tv, ruining most of it. No longer confining themselves to news programs, our leaders now look beyond the shores of 7.30 Report-land – infiltrating, over the last few years, almost every light entertainment program from Sunrise to Talkin ‘Bout Your Generation. Not even the reliably vacuous Hey Hey, It’s Saturday! is safe. Because people who enjoy the cerebral humour of Dickie Knee et al. vote too.
Read, watch and comment along from 7:30pm Sunday 25 July on Channel Ten and the Farrago website, as Bethanie and Tim plate up their alternate nitpicking, critique and praise of the 2010 MasterChef Australia finale. What’s that, you say? The media is already saturated with MasterChef hype? Pish posh, as Matt Preston might say.
Nothing, it seems, is new in television anymore. There is no Bloomian anxiety in the world of the small-screen. While “invention tests” might be required of contestants, it’s far easier for TV executives to simply steal a successful dish, altering little aside from the garnish (and Channel Ten shouldn’t feel too smug either; they stole the MasterChef format from the BBC).
Curious multi-coloured swirls adorned the cover of Tame Impala’s debut EP in 2008. It was a painting by lead singer Kevin Parker of the Orion Nebula – that strangely beautiful place, sometimes visible in the night sky, of churning dust and gas particles known as a ‘stellar nursery’. A place, quite literally, where stars are born. Whether intended or not, that cover has proven prophetic for the band who have since been signed by mega-label Modular, toured Australia with sold-out shows, are supporting MGMT on their upcoming US tour, and will return to play Splendour in the Grass later this year. It has been something of a meteoric rise for these Perth psychedelic rockers with their distinctive, retro-hued style. This month, the band released their LP, InnerSpeaker – voted one of Faster Louder’s most anticipated albums of 2010 – and the first single ‘Solitude Is Bliss’, into the cosmos.
With another election year upon us, the once safe world of entertainment television can expect to be inundated with politicians. Politicians are of course integral to programs such as Q&A, but what of the lighter side of the televisual landscape? Does the presence of our political leaders make great television? Or is it merely a cynical exercise in self-serving PR that sometimes, tantalisingly, has the potential to turn into a train wreck, and provide fodder for The Chaser for the remainder of their season?
It’s all too common these days to see hosts and other personalities vanish from one television show, only to appear on another program or even another network a month or two afterwards.
Every era has its blonde starlet, from Jean Harlow to Marilyn and Madonna. Yet, in the past decade the platinum idols of the music world had become carbon copies of one another—Britney, Jessica Simpson, Christina Aguilera—some days it’s difficult to tell them apart.
There is something incredibly distasteful about emblazoning one’s body with the Australian flag. While there is nothing wrong with patriotism in principle, it has increasingly come to mean nothing more than thinly veiled racism. The kind of person who would brand their body with the Southern Cross is usually the same who would proudly display on the back windshield of their car that sickening hallmark of the ignorant bogan, a “Fuck Off We’re Full” sticker.
With the dawn of digital television, and the bounty of new channels we now have to flick past instead of the original five, there is a whole lot more television to hate this year. While the tumbleweeds blow across our collective screens in the non-ratings period, one of the more interesting developments has been Channel 9’s contribution to the digital TV landscape: GO! Consisting almost entirely of re-runs of decades-old sitcoms, the exclamation point had seemed to me rather unnecessary – there was little in this line-up that would be alarming, I had thought. Until, boys and girls, I stumbled upon a little show called Dante’s Cove.
Read and watch along from 7:30pm on Channel Nine as Bethanie and Tim live blog commentary and bitter criticism of the Logies Award Ceremony. It’s Australian television’s “Night of Nights”, they say. We doubt it.
When Gordon Gekko strode across our screens in the late 1980s, with his red braces and French cuffed shirts, Greed was Good. Close to thirty years later, there is a bleak and ugly conclusion to the mantra that fluttered its way into the hearts, minds, and souls of the men in the business of money.
When Christian Lander began his blog Stuff White People Like in 2008, he tapped into a cultural phenomenon of American “left-leaning, city-dwelling, white folk”.
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