State the Obvious and Win!
From the department of No Shit, Sherlock, comes this startling admission from ABC chief Mark Scott:
Scott told Mumbrella’s sister title Encore: “One of the things we did with Randling that we learned from, and this was partly a budget thing, was that we locked all that away. It was all locked away before it went to air. If we had been broadcasting it as we were making it, we probably would have fine tuned it along the way and we weren’t able to.”
That said, unless the “fine-tuning” involved ditching both the host and the concept, we kinda get the feeling things would have played out pretty much the same. But aww, isn’t it nice that the ABC boss is willing to divert attention from the show’s many other failings and shift the blame for it tanking onto something that never gets mentioned as a plus or a minus for any other ABC show? Seriously, when a show rates its arse off does the ABC ever say “it should, we sunk a bloody fortune into it”? Has there been any other dud that’s received the “don’t blame the show, we should have spent more money on it” get out of jail free card in recent memory? Jesus Christ, that hold Denton has over the ABC must be one hell of a headlock.
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In further shocking news, today’s Melbourne Herald-Sun ran this in their “Confidential” section:
Matt Tilley and his popular “Gotcha” calls are no more, after the royal prank call scandal.
Wait, the royal prank call scandal killed Matt Tilley? YEEEEAAAAAA-oh wait, they just mean his prank calls are no more. Damn you, dead UK nurse, for depriving innocent fun-loving Victorians of Matt Tilley’s “popular” phone abuse. Let’s continue:
Fox FM will not broadcast the calls on its breakfast show this year, and probably never again. The dumping of the Gotcha pranks came after British nurse Jacintha Saldanha took her own life soon after taking a call from Sydney radio hosts Michael Christian and Mel Grieg … Tilley and Fox FM have been doing the calls for years, releasing a number of CDs that have performed well on the ARIA charts. Fox FM’s parent company Austereo announced in December that the company would suspend all prank calls. This ban now looks like being permanent.
And then, just when you think you’re reading a story that might as well be headlined “SYDNEY RADIO KILLERS MURDER MELBOURNE’S FUN”, there’s this:
Nothing has been heard from Grieg or Christian since they did interviews soon after the scandal broke in December. It seemed they were scapegoats in the affair, as little was heard from the content producers or directors who would have approved the prank call.
Which, by the Herald-Sun‘s standards, is actually almost insightful. Even if it is just calling for the real culprits to stick their heads up so they can have a kick at them.