 Looking at the current crop of entertainment personalities, you'd think Graham Kennedy never drew breath. In fact, you'd have to conclude that all evidence of Bert Newton's existence had been quietly thrown into a dumpster behind GTV9. For decades while our dramas were stodgy, our comedies were painfully broad, our news services one-eyed and out documentaries simplistic, audiences could at least rely on one thing: entertainment personalities who were good at their jobs. Not any more.
When it comes to Wil Anderson it's all so predictable now, isn't it? The weirdly sing-song delivery, the little smirk, the artfully styled hair, all working flat out to disguise the fact that there's nothing more to see. Why the ABC doesn't just stick a wig on his teleprompter and turn it around to face the camera remains a puzzle - God knows it'd display more humanity. And have a better sense of comic timing besides. There's nothing wrong with being unthreatening, but Anderson is little more than a white flag fluttering in the breeze issuing from Andrew Denton's buttocks. Guess it makes a change from trying to catch a gust from Ted Robinson's arse. The first rule of creating a comedy character is that he or she doesn't exist in isolation: they have to have something to react against. The character of Kenny - and Jacobson only ever appears as Kenny, whether he's called that or not - worked in his film appearance because this particular dunny diver was set against a variety of backdrops designed to throw his character into high (and reasonably comedic) relief. The fact that anyone thought he'd be funny without a context shows how dim-witted the Australian media is: hopefully Jacobson's acceptance of seemingly every hosting job and cameo appearance that comes his way is a sign that he knows there's still one joke left to be played - and it's on us. The ABC audience is clearly so starved of authentic emotion in their own lives that they fail to recognise smarm when it's tipped over their heads by the bucketload by Andrew Denton. Which is a shame, because if you tried to tell a teenager today that Denton was once a cutting edge figure of anarchy on the ABC, they'd think you had him confused with Michael Tunn or James Valentine. His devolution into the kind of beard-stroking twat that inevitably dominates the so-called liberal media in this country would be neither surprising or depressing if not for the fact that once upon a time he seemed to have a reasonable idea about what constitutes funny. And making people cry on a talk show wasn't it.
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