| ||||
There are critics and then there are critics. Both groups are the kind of annoying, self-absorbed, conceited tools who foolishly believe anyone would want to read their opinions on a topic. Whether those opinions are plastered across the pages of a major Australian broadsheet or quietly posted on a blog in a dusty corner of the internet under a variety of fake names, they're treated with disgust and contempt by the creative community, and rightly so. But some critics at least manage to limit their garbled rantings and ill-informed pontificating to the subject they're actually meant to be reviewing: it's when a critic brings their own barrow full of extraneous personal issues to their reviews - whether it's simply a political bee in their bonnet or a conflict of interest so massive it threatens to block out the sun - that they come into the running for this particular award.
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Gerard Henderson has previously won this award for his attacks on the "lack of balance" and "leftist" bias in the ABC's satirical output (The Glass House, Clarke & Dawe), but this year he had a new target - The Chaser, farming out most of the Clarke & Dawe hatred to another conservative blogger with the same surname: Mark. But while Gerard managed to produce a staggering 18 blogs railing against The Chaser for what he saw as their anti-Christian bias and pro-left sentiments, Mark struggled to come up with four about Clarke & Dawe.
Of course, Gerard had the advantage over Mark as he seemed to hold a personal grudge against The Chaser (presumably because they pranked him once), and spent week after week hammering on and on about it, even organising a "Send the Boys to Mecca" campaign so they could correct their aforementioned anti-Christian bias by insulting some Muslims. "Body bags for the return trip home have already been secured" he gleefully announced on 10th July 2009.
Mark didn't manage to come up with an equivalent campaign against Clarke & Dawe - hell, he didn't seem to have even a basic understanding of what satire actually is - but he did have one tactic up his sleeve: photos of John Clarke. All selected in a completely un-biased manner from the many thousands available:
| |||||||||||||||||
But as brilliant a tactic as these photos were, it was Gerard Henderson who was really kicking goals against the evil leftist comedy of Messers Clarke & Dawe. In his final Media Watch Dog blog for the year, he criticised the final Clarke & Dawe sketch for the year, which concerned the recent crisis in the Federal Liberal party and ended with Tony Abbott and chums actually blowing themselves up. The suicide bombing conceit was a pretty obvious metaphor for the party's implosion, or so you might think, but not according to Gerard Henderson.
"John Clarke is now into murder as comedy" Henderson thundered. "Around the time that the 7.30 Report (sic) was going to air, a real suicide/homicide bomber murdered 19 civilians - including three Somali government ministers - during a terrorist attack on a medical graduation ceremony in Mogadishu. Murder may be suitable material for comedy at the ABC Studio in Sydney's Ultimo (sic). But terrorism is not a suitable topic for humour in Somali (sic)." Hang on one second - isn't this the man who spent large parts of 2009 making jokes about having The Chaser killed? Whether it was wilful misinterpretation or actual stupidity which prompted these comments - and with Gerard Henderson it's kinda hard tell - he is a deserved joint winner here.
3AW's Neil Mitchell is one of Australia's most notorious shock jocks, with the sort of politics and attitudes typical of his type. Whether he's genuine or just putting on an act barely matters - the key to his success is his ability to identify what his audience will think on a particular issue, and present it to them - but on the rare occasions when he expresses a view on comedy things tend to go wrong.
If you believe Wikipedia, Mitchell described awful Ian McFadyen-produced sketch show The Wedge as "one of the freshest things on TV", a statement only accurate if you assume that by "things" he meant "turds". So it's perhaps not surprising that upon hearing of Shaun Micallef signing an exclusive deal with Channel 10 in January 2009 he asked "Is Shaun Micallef funny?" Any sane person presented with that question would have answered "Yes" and moved on. Not Neil. He opened the lines to his audience expecting plenty of support, only to find that he was pretty much on his own. As caller after caller (and later, when it was uploaded to the 3AW blog, commenter after commenter) expressed their admiration for Micallef, Mitchell could do nothing but audibly shake his head and try to save face by, er, claiming that the last original programme on Australian television was The Footy Show. Nice save, Neil!
Marieke Hardy: what's she even doing here? It's hardly as if her column in The Age's Green Guide - where she playfully makes fun of bad pay TV shows while talking up her hipster lifestyle - counts as criticism, right? Maybe not. But it's not like The Age is overflowing with TV criticism (three columns scattered across seven weekly editions - and this is a paper that has three film reviewers, an entire supplement given over to live music, page upon page of book reviews on a Saturday, two pages of generic "arts" coverage each weekday, and so on) so presumably they figure it counts towards their critical coverage.
The real problem with Hardy's work for the Age isn't her flouncy girly-girl style - that's par for the course at The Age this century, and a perfectly acceptable approach to column writing - it's that The Age kinda sorta forgot to mention at the end of every single one of her little swipes at pay TV that the reason why she was mostly swiping at pay TV shows and not the prime time stuff people actually watch was because she was working both for the ABC (as a member of Triple J's breakfast team) and a commercial network (as a writer on Packed to the Rafters). This is a paper that makes business writers disclose their share holdings as part of their byline: why no mention of Hardy's conflicts of interest when it came to writing about television?
Judging by the way the Green Guide editor felt it necessary to make absolutely clear that Hardy hadn't been sacked when she announced she was leaving at the end of 2009, they didn't see her massive and on-going conflicts of interest as any kind of problem at all: if they had, they would have said up front and with pride that she had been asked to leave because any newspaper with an ounce of self-respect couldn't have continued to employ as a TV critic someone who was not only writing for Packed to the Rafters and Denton's pay TV sitcom :30 Seconds, but had her own sitcom Like a Virgin appearing on the ABC in 2010. Seriously, hats off to her for doing so well as a TV writer, but once you've got your name on a currently appearing TV series it's probably time to stop pretending you can say anything insulting about other people's shows with a straight face. Which means she should have done us all a favour and buggered off at least two years ago.
| ||||||
Most Useless Panel / Talkshow Guest