Twenty years
Twenty years seems like a lifetime when you are a child, for obvious reasons. My daughter’s only ten so its two of her lifetimes. Yet twenty years ago on Hey Hey it Saturday a red faces skit won something trivial for its rendition of a Jackson Five performance. It wasn’t funny then so why did the producers and players in the latest version think it was ok now given a. they had a high profile US celebrity on the judging panel b. the US has just elected Obama as president and c. what’s seen on Australian TV’s can instantly make its way onto the web and be seen anywhere by anyone.
Julia Gillard was forced into a public justification for the show while she was in the US. Daryl Somers apologised on air and later to Sky news. But despite almost universal criticism by people outside of Oz news.com.au is running with the fact that in an online poll with thirty thousand responses most respondents said –
it was neither racist, nor tasteless.
I think Kamahl’s observation that the skit was
really just a desperate attempt at notoriety and publicity
goes to the heart of the motivation and logic behind the public display of humility by Somers and Nine. The Hey Hey reunions were a deliberate test of the market and the audience. In the twenty years since the last Jackson Jive skit Nine has lost its number one position in the national TV ratings game to rival Seven, a position they desperately want back.
Hey Hey delivered, big time. On the night of the infamous Jackson Jive skit, Hey Hey blitzed the rating boxes scooping 2.3 million viewers. Somers and Nine can afford to apologise, it gives the appearance of being sensitive to public opinion, but deep down they must be salivating over the prospect of foisting more Hey Hey onto our TV screens. Sex, scandal, controversy are all fair game for “tabloid journalism”, Hey Hey’s formula is a similar base approach to the visual medium. Nine and news.com are simply trying to re-establish the old duopoly where the morning tabloid papers like the Daily Telegraph fed the evening tabloid TV of channel Nine.
Will Hey Hey return? Probably. will it do a Jackson Jive skit again? Possibly, but more likely it will attempt to parody itself and the reception to the skit. Have we as Australians, moved on from twenty years ago? After 14 years of John Howard and the neo-cons, are you kidding? Racist sentiment is so deeply buried in the general fabric of Australian society that we have to have a debate about whether or not the deeply offensive Jackson Jive skit was FUNNY! And a lot of people think it was…
Here’s an idea, Put Daryl Somers on a bus and send him on a tour of black australia. Take him to the territory and show him off to the local aboriginal communities. Let him apologise to them, face to face.
Tags: racism
