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Consider the problems which beset today's executives: the press will jump on anything that even hints at a scandal, the political right will take any chance they get to knock you, audiences are deserting old media for that internet thingy, and the business model (or government funding) which kept you going for so long is about as reliable as a house of cards. This award acknowledges the worst of the panicky managerial blunders made to counteract these problems in 2009.
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A fairly predictable and richly deserving result here, because if there was any scandal - besides the Hey Hey... blackface incident - that tore the Australian comedy world apart, it was The Chaser's kinda amusing little sketch about cancer kiddies. It's fairly clear that this sketch became a pariah because of the anti-ABC ideology rampant in large sections of the commercial media. And as a point of view, being against the very notion of the ABC is not necessarily one which the majority of Australians hold. Nevertheless, when faced with outrage over the Make A Realistic Wish Foundation sketch the gutless ABC did what it always does in these situations: it caved in to idiotic, shit-stirring, self-interested right wingers - aka the sort of people for whom the two week suspension of The Chaser's War on Everything, the reassigning of a senior ABC executive, and the promise to subject all future comedy programmes to even more scrutiny than they were already receiving wouldn't be enough unless full privatisation of the ABC was appended to that list. Just once, when faced with such a crisis, wouldn't it be nice to see ABC head Mark Scott come out and tell the Murdoch press, talkback radio and Gerard Henderson to get fucked? It's not like it'd make things any worse.
Dreams came true for the 300,000+ members of a certain Facebook group when Hey Hey it's Saturday - The Reunion was announced. Many people who voted in these awards didn't want to see it back, but Hey Hey... was undeniably a successful show in its day and therefore worthy of some sort of retrospective. Where the problem lies is that it's coming back again - despite how bad it was - for a 20-part series this year. Now, Channel 9's been in trouble for some time, but is reviving a show which was quite rightly axed in 1999 really the answer? And will the almost 60 year old Daryl Somers have what it takes to get people of all ages watching TV again, week after week after week? Hey Hey it's Saturday - The Reunion was fair enough, but Hey Hey it's Saturday - The Revival is a sign of pure desperation.
Wow, I really was up for a lot of these awards, wasn't I? I can't really argue with that last paragraph, though. And you could say that in a media environment where being liked or disliked doesn't really matter so long as people care enough to click onto news stories about you, being such a polarising figure makes me the real winner tonight. Yeah!
Double Take's been up for a couple of awards tonight, and was the worthy winner of Worst Sketch Show. There's really not a lot more we can say about it other than to repeat the question "What the hell were Seven thinking?". Or to wonder what on earth possessed them to give it precedence over a far funnier, far more original, and presumably quite expensive to buy the format of, programme.
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Most Hysterical Tabloid Hate Campaign