Poor Pluto

How degrading! Literally. Poor old Pluto has been stripped of its planet status. All those years of learning about the nine planets in our solar system and now we find out that Pluto doesn’t count. Why? Because it isn’t big enough, apparently. Or more to the point it is as big as other stuff floating around which means if Pluto is a planet then other chunks of rock like 2005FY9 and Xena must also be classified as planets. So rather than add new planets to the solar system the ‘nerds in the know’ decided to take Pluto off the list.

Personally, I don’t really care. Maybe if I had intricately built a model of the solar system in school from polystyrene balls and coat hanger wire I might be a little pissed off that I’d spent all that time on a planet that didn’t belong, but fortunately I was too lazy in school to ever put that much effort into any project.

I guess my only issue is the new category that Pluto has been resigned to. Officially Pluto is now a ‘dwarf planet’. Now, that would be cool if it meant that Pluto was actually a planet inhabited by dwarves with miniature cities and little cars and nobody different enough to play Santa’s helper at Christmas. But it doesn’t. It just means that it is a small planet. I guess they thought that still having ‘planet’ in the title might appease the Pluto fans around the world. But really, if you aren’t a planet and you’re never going to be a planet, why rub it in? Why not come up with a cool new term? Start a new club that will make the real planets jealous and want to join. I’m surprised that the geeks didn’t think of that.

So, now all our space books and solar system charts are wrong and new ones need to be printed. I guess someone will make some bucks out of this. Let’s hope they don’t start re-classifying anything else that we learnt in school. I don’t want to wake up and find out that ‘X’ isn’t actually a letter or that spiders are really insects after all or that February is now a ‘dwarf month’.

I guess greater minds than mine are on top of these things. And apologies to the International Astronomical Union for calling them nerds and geeks. I’m sure they are all very interesting, cool and exciting men and women with great social lives.

And commiserations to Clyde Tombaugh who discovered Pluto in 1930. I guess he won’t care seeing as he died in 1997 but I’m sure his family is disappointed that their big claim to fame is now that their relative found a rock.

Until next time…

Trying to be positive.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I last wrote. I’ve been away visiting my parents and friends in Perth. I was hoping to come back with a new found optimism, especially in the light of my last few blogs that were all a little negative. I was also hoping that I could avoid talking about TV as that too has become a bit of a focus for my rants.

And so I return home and get ready to write again when I am confronted with all the TV programs that I missed while I was away. I’d like to ignore them, I really would, but they are so terrible that they must be commented on.

Channel 7 had been going so well this year. The continued success of Lost and Desperate Housewives and surprise hits Deal or No Deal and Dancing With The Stars helped 7 to topple the Nine Network’s long held reign. One could almost have been fooled into thinking that Channel 7 had finally worked it out. After years in the wilderness their programmers had finally got a handle on what viewers wanted and how to get them to watch. Then they pull out The Master, a cynical Millionaire rip off with nothing new to offer and certainly no interest to viewers. It was axed after one episode, proof positive that the programmers have learnt nothing and are still clutching at straws. Their other successes have been nothing more than dumb luck. Even the executives at 7 admitted that they were surprised at the popularity of Lost and Housewives. This proves that any hope that we might get anything worth watching on our screens in the future looks very unlikely.

Channel Ten have launched a couple of new shows in the last few weeks. The most hyped one being Tench Tonight. Tench had potential. It wins points for being an Australian innovation and an attempt at something different. The show has a ‘virtual’ host that interacts with its guests. Great idea! Except that they blew it. So much potential blown so quickly. Once again the powers that be have made fundamental errors in judgement.

The history of sassy and humorous talk show hosts is rich and deep. Real hosts Jay Leno and David Letterman to fictional interviewers like Norman Gunston, Dame Edna, Pixie Ann Wheatley and Ali G were all huge successes. Drawing from such great precedents the makers of Tench could have created a new TV icon, a character full of wit, audacity and wickedness.
Instead, they came up with a very boring and quite annoying creature. In an attempt to make Tench an amalgam of talk show hosts they ended up with a very bland looking pastiche that actually just looks like Tim Fergusson from The Doug Anthony All Stars. His wit is about as sharp as the class clown in a suburban primary school and his overall demeanour is that of a smart arse schmuck rather than a likeable or humorous interviewer. He fails to cleverly embarrass his guests or reveal anything new about them. Why hide behind a character if you aren't going to let loose and hit hard?

Above all else why on Earth would you, if faced with inventing a new computer generated character, create a generic looking male host? They could have made any living thing. Anything else would have been more interesting. An alien, a crocodile, a kangaroo, a robot… a woman???? If we really needed a new character to interview celebrities did we really need another slick haired male? Once again a lack of imagination and a complete lack of a decent sense of humour destroys an otherwise great idea.

What’s really sad is that Andrew Denton’s production team were responsible for this disappointment. I would have thought he’d have a better sense of what to do with this new technology. All that said the show will probably do OK. After all it’s only competition at the moment is Celebrity Survivor on 7. Faced with a choice I hope Australian viewers will turn to the ABC. But they probably won’t and we’ll have to put up with more promos, more non-celebrities facing 'challenges' and more pissweak comedies from the commercial networks.

Let’s hope the next week will bring me something more positive to write about.

Yasmin’s Getting Axed

At least we can only hope so. Channel Ten has finally outdone even themselves with a new low in cheap, exploitative TV. Yasmin’s Getting Married is a reality TV format purchased from Scandinavia (God forbid we could come up with a TV show format on our own) and has a simple premise: Find Yasmin a husband in 9 weeks by letting the audience vote on who she dates.

Question 1. Who the fuck is Yasmin?

Answer: Who cares?

Question 2: Why would we want to vote on who she marries?

Answer: If we vote for Idols and Big Brother contestants, why not this too?

Question 3: Why does the studio audience laugh hysterically at every inanely stupid thing Ryan Phelan says?

Answer: If you are stupid enough to want to be in the studio audience for this crap you are stupid enough to think that primary school innuendo can pass for wit.

Question 4: Why is this crap on five nights a week?

Answer: Because Channel Ten is so ludicrously tight with their money that they thought they could get away with making one program on a shoestring budget and still fill a week of primetime spots where they can charge lots of money for advertising. A great plan… in theory.

Ten has already proven that they don’t need to make many shows to fill their schedules. Big Brother, The Biggest Loser and Australian Idol are excellent nightly line-up fillers. You only need one set, one host, one cast (mainly unpaid ‘contestants’), one lot of titles, one theme song and from that you get 10 hours of programming that conveniently also fulfils the Australian content requirements. Added to that is the wonderful addition of SMS voting which generates millions of dollars and pays for the production.

Then along came Yasmin. I’m sure the executives were salivating at the prospect of success with this. The show has one very basic set (which looks pretty cheap and must be the only set on TV without a plasma display), it goes out live (no annoying editing or post production costs), it has no million dollar prizes, it has lots of SMS voting and it can go on every night in the lucrative 7pm timeslot. The holy grail of television production: no costs and lots of profit. But they forgot one very basic principle. Even though TV audiences are fairly dumb and will swallow most of what you feed them, they do still require some level of interest. If Yasmin had been a previous contestant on Big Brother, a celebrity or a sports star the audience might actually care who she marries. As it is we have no idea who Yasmin is and more importantly we don’t know if we like her.

I don’t know who OK’d this program but clearly they have no understanding of why people watch TV. Although it’s not surprising that they would be working for Channel Ten, after all, this is the same network that thinks we watch TV to see promos for other TV shows.

For a long time now Ten have seen fit to plaster annoying supers and scrolls across our screens during our favourite shows and over the credits to promote other programs but now they have taken it even further. In an astoundingly arrogant move they now bring up supers 10 seconds before the end of a segment that read “Don’t move. A Ten promo is coming up”. They actually think that viewers want to see a Ten promo. Apart from anything else we have probably already seen it fifty times today. This type of promotion is proof that the networks have lost the plot.

If the executives and producers really knew what they were doing they wouldn’t need all this intrusive promotion. If they put on good shows, people will watch. Harassment and bombardment might get people to watch once but they will only stay watching if the show has something to offer. And it’s not like Australian audiences have particularly high standards. If they watch Dancing On Ice and It Takes Two and as a producer you still can’t come up with something to capture their interest you really should be looking for a new job.

In the meantime, good luck to Yasmin. I hope she finds the man of her dreams. And if not, no matter, she might be called back for a new series… Yasmin’s Getting Divorced or Yasmin’s Up the Duff or perhaps Yasmin’s In a Loveless Marriage and Has Turned to Prescription Drugs To Help Her Cope. Actually I think even I might watch that.