 "Now more than ever, radio is a personality-driven medium." That's a direct quote from some pointless newspaper story (read: re-written press release) published during the year. But if that's the case, why does radio persist in giving on-air time to people whose personalities aren't so much like fingernails down a blackboard as they are a six-inch roofing nail slowly driven into your skull?
Akmal Saleh has a "big" personality. He's loud and he doesn't keep his opinions to himself. In the real world, people like him are the annoying dickheads we learn to avoid. Why anyone would think we'd like to spend time listening to one of them on the radio is a complete mystery I dearly wish someone would hurry up and solve. Here's a message to Sam Simmons. Sam, if you're out there: turn back. You're going the wrong way. You might be a funny, likable guy in your daily life, but your comedy is only going to get worse. Sure, people are telling you that you're funny, they're even giving you work. But those people are just blindly following a trend they don't fully understand, desperately hoping that you'll deliver the YouTube random LOL generation of comedy fans to them. And maybe for a short time you'll succeed. But that kind of comedy is a fad in itself - the kids might be loving YouTube clips with PWNED! flashing over a kid riding a bike into a wall, but they're also watching well-thought-out comedy sketches and song parodies that are actually pretty good. Eventually the PWNED! kids will grow up and forget about comedy in the same way that the Aunty Jack and Con the Fruiter fans did. A new generation will rise who'll hate you because you're yesterday's news and the now grown-up kids who liked the good stuff...well, they hated you as kids and that's not going to change. But there's still time for you to turn back. There's still time for you to realise all you're doing is working a fad doomed to end sooner rather than later. There's still time to stop being shit. There is no reason why Helen Razer should be getting work in the Australian media in 2008. None whatsoever. Some people have vanished from the scene simply by falling out of favour with their employers or the public. Others never got the chance to show us what they were really capable of. Not Ms Razer. Time and time again when given an opportunity to entertain, inform or amuse the general public - an opportunity many others would all but kill for - she's lapsed into self-indulgence on a scale rarely seen outside third world dictatorships. Seemingly possessed of the utter conviction that reading her scramble through a dictionary to cram a column with five-dollar words to the point of incomprehensibility is the general public's idea of a good time, or that listening to her smugly condescend to her far more accomplished guests on radio is what she's being paid for, Ms Razer has repeatedly proven herself to be incompetent at a base level. Usually radio sackings are the result of a shift in station direction or the hiring of someone more high profile: Ms Razer's sacking in 2008 for displaying appalling arrogance during an interview with Stephen Berkoff - an interview, I'm proud to say, that was later highlighted on Media Watch - is an extremely rare example of someone being dumped for an inability to do their job properly. If only there was more of it. And if only there wasn't the nagging feeling that somehow she'll pull her head in enough to worm her way back to yet another high profile position and we'll start all over again.
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