What A Difference a Year Makes
So today we woke up to this:
[Chris] Lilley has been nominated for a Silver Logie as Most Outstanding Actor for his performance as the snobby cashed-up bogan schoolgirl in Ja’mie King.
It is sweet redemption for Lilley who was devastated when the ABC made a huge gaffe by failing to put in a submission for his Angry Boys two years ago.
“Sweet redemption”? Let’s just wait and see if he wins before we start flashing our boobs around. And considering the “gaffe” around Angry Boys was – if, as they say, the rumours are true – more about the ABC hurriedly washing their hands of a proven ratings flop than an innocent mistake, it shall be interesting to see if the in-house promotional effort required to get Lilley over the line is forthcoming. Especially considering the Silver Logie is a peer-voted category, thus ruling out his teenage tumblr fanbase.
Wait, you do all know the Logies are – to some extent or another – at the mercy of network publicists, right? TV Week needs television more than television needs TV Week: the awards aren’t outright fixed… we think… but publicists have their ways of making sure they get the result they want at least some of the time. Sure, Andy Lee could have been nominated for a Gold Logie over 2012 winner Hamish Blake because he’s awesome and 2013 was his year. Or it could have been because the Nine publicists decided he was the horse they were going to back this year. Which seems more likely to you?
And don’t think we haven’t noticed that the Logies continue to have nothing but contempt for comedy, what with all the actual comedy programs dumped in the “Popular Light Entertainment Program” and peer-voted “Most Outstanding Light Entertainment Program” categories. As previously and repeatedly stated by us, this seems like a fairly obvious attempt to disguise the fact that the commercial networks don’t actually make any comedy (Hamish & Andy’s travel shows aside): can’t have a category where the commercial networks can’t win now, can we?
The upshot of all this is that somehow comedy has managed to become, like any drama more complex than Home & Away, “elitist viewing” on Australian television. Despite occasional attempts to claim otherwise, the Logies are a populist award aimed at “popular” shows on the commercial networks: that means bland mainstream dramas and rubbish reality television. Seriously, even in the peer-voted “Most Outstanding Light Entertainment Program” category somehow talent show The Voice gets a look in. Much as it must be nice to win a Logie, against this kind of competition it’s hardly something to be proud of.
Scott Ellis the national television editor for fairfax wrote an article all about how the most outstanding logies were decided by regular people and how Josh Thomas could get his twitter followers to vote for him. After I tweeted that the most outstanding category was decided by an industry jury, he quietly changed the article. Astounding that someone of his experience wouldn’t know the difference.
http://www.dailylife.com.au/news-and-views/dl-opinion/stephen-colberts-ching-chong-ding-dong-joke-20140330-35rpx.html
if this story gains traction, Chris Lilley might struggle against a backlash.
If you can’t win the viewers, trying winning over your peers.
The #CancelColbert story is interesting but only so far in the amount of backlash Colbert fans have created but it’s very different. #CancelColbert from what I see is putting forward the nuanced position that you can’t combat racist attitudes by espousing racist attitudes towards another group in jest as a way of analogy especially from a position of ‘white privilege’. Considering most people outside academia and the Internet ‘SJWs’ don’t know what that really is it’s not going to curry much favour.
Liley it’s much easier to label him as a racist since he does revert to racial stereotypes especially with his Asian characters. However he’d argue that these are caricatures and not supposed to be taken as representatives of their race. Or something. I mean the thing is his viewers are too low and too young to be taken seriously anyway.
These campaigns largely seem to come about against (very) high profile types, as the whole aim is to get attention for their cause and views. Lilley doesn’t have that kind of profile – whether “yet” or “ever” remains to be seen, but his star may have already peaked overseas – so it’s unlikely any serious backlash will be coming his way.
There is an argument that Lilley gave a pretty good performance. Terrible script and not many jokes but he makes a pretty reasonable teenage girl for a man pushing 40.
I believe BBC3 moved Ja’mie to Wednesday 10pm from Thursday 10pm. So it’s not like he sets the world on fire in the U.K