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EDDIE: And now we come to one of the most important moments in our show. A moment where we pause to reflect on the slow, steady demise of a once great comedian or show, and then plunge the knife in to ensure we never see their like again. This year's award goes to a programme particularly deserving of this award. That programme is...
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The original Hey Hey had a legacy? It's hard to keep in mind how much fun the show was in its early years when the horror of the late 90's and its recent revivals are imprinted on the national psyche. Hey Hey was a popular and significant programme in Australian broadcasting and its legacy deserved to be remembered in a reunion special or two, but giving it a return series was idiotic. The bits of the show we all loved back then - the wacky footage, the mistakes in ads, the crap novelty acts - are all on the internet now, and we don't need to wait until someone puts them on TV. And as for the bits you can't get on the internet, like the wacky banter between Daryl, Ossie, Blackers, Dickie and the gang, well, like most of the gags in this script, they aren't getting any fresher. It's time to finally lay Hey Hey to rest, not keep re-animating its corpse every time Daryl's in the mood to feed his ego again.
Since he went solo Charles Firth has managed to maintain a sort of aura of edginess and quality about him, while the rest of The Chaser team's reputations have become tarnished by media scandals, over-exposure and some poor TV work. That was until Charles Firth made WTF!, a programme so bad that had Hey Hey not been around, it could have won Charles Firth this award. Firth must be counting himself lucky that almost no-one saw it.
Shaun Micallef's nomination here is a reflection of the fact that for many of his fans his decision to do Talkin' 'Bout Your Generation was the wrong one. It's mainstream success certainly, but at what price? A decent counter-argument could made that without TBYG's success we would never have seen Shaun Micallef's New Year's Rave, or his book Preincarnate, or his stage tour Good Evening. Perhaps the real question is, how much longer can Micallef fans cope with their hero as the wacky referee of a show which is increasingly becoming this decade's answer to It's A Knockout?
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Most Disappointing Comedy