 In much the same way as "ethnic cleansing" means murder and "friendly fire" means murder, in Australia "entertainment programme" means murder - of the soul. To expect entertainment from an entertainment programme is a mistake on par with assuming that ethnic cleansing would get stubborn stains out of your jeans or that friendly fire had something to do with getting a nice card for your birthday.
At least Ten had the decency to admit that the only reason they were bringing the pungent comedy corpse of Good News Week back to our screens was because the US writer's strike meant they didn't have enough overseas dross to splash around. But had they learnt nothing from countless horror movies where morons stupid enough to disturb the monster's rest are swiftly torn apart, eaten, shat out, re-eaten, re-shat-out, then mailed back to their loved ones disguised as a DVD box set of the complete run of Mr Show purchased off Amazon? Because once this bubble of toxic marsh gas burst back upon our screens it became obvious that Paul "Frankenfurter" McDermott, The Ghost of Mikey Robbins and The Queen of the Harpies weren't going to lie down without a fight. Whether it was old jokes, older jokes, jokes so old they bore no relevance to anything actually taking place on the surface of the Earth today, and political references so predictable wacky weatherman Mike Larkin would include them in his seven day forecast, there was nothing this trio of terror would not stoop to. And the fat jokes. Oh, the fat jokes. So what if Mikey was no longer fat? So what if there were no-longer any fat politicians of any import across the land? So what if the jokes weren't actually funny? The entire point of Good News Week in 2008 was that it was a big comfy security blanket for the fans, one under which nothing ever changed, everything was safe, and everyone knew their place. And that meant making the same old jokes every single week until they were as cast in stone as the Latin Catholic Mass, only slightly less rib-tickling - hey, you were the ones who opened the grave in the first place. The house that Rove McManus built lifted its game slightly in 2008, which might have been impressive if there had been any other direction for it to go. No matter how good the creamy centre of the show might have been thanks to the half-decent efforts of Ryan Shelton and Kevin Rudd PM, it was still sandwiched between two giant slabs of proven turd in the form of Peter Helliar and Dave Hughes. And no matter how much air-freshener you spray on that particular cookie, you're never going to get a tasty treat. Triple J TV must have seemed like a brilliant idea to the accountants who thought it up: rather than hire some people with actual television skills to bring youth culture to the kids - well, the handful of kids not already getting all the culture they need from YouTube - why not just stick some $10 cameras into the Triple J studios and film the wacky hijinks therein? Unfortunately, the Triple J staff turned out to be physically unpossessing types hired entirely for their vocal skills and with musical tastes identical to the two kinds of song already well and truly covered on Triple J. And their idea of comedy turned out to be"jokes" involving people mispronouncing Marieke Hardy's name (seriously, how hard is it to pronounce "self-publicising hack"?), or Sam Simmons talking yet again about fucking ducks.
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