Words Flail Me . . . So I'll Just Have To Talk Turkey

The Age

Saturday July 8, 2006

Jonathan Green

TAKE a platoon of barely sentient, fame-struck, vapid, post-adolescent wannabes, add alcohol, mixed quarters, 24-hour isolation and greed and somebody's going to get hit in the face with a penis.

The wonder is that it hasn't happened before really, but now, as its sixth series mingles sexual assault, confused notions of male assertion and female anger muddled with guilt, Big Brother has at last managed to approximate some semblance of the broadly pervading reality. Perhaps this is what the producers intended all along, for why should we have assumed that reality television would apply some gossamer filter to weed out all the ugly aspects of human existence?

This is warts and all. Only a fool would imagine that the suburbs of Australia don't ring on a nightly basis to the muffled struggles of restrained, confused victims and the thin slaps of flailing genitals. As might the darkened corridors of our state and federal democratic institutions. Who knows.

In the coming weeks of Big Brother, as television moves ever closer to perfecting its reality doppelganger - not for nothing is the show based at Dreamworld - we can probably look forward to bouts of only dimly comprehended ennui, spiralling consumer debt, obesity and painful terminal illness.

Or not. To judge by the week's uproar, Big Brother may have come close enough to the bone of existence's fundamentally mundane ugliness without having to go the whole hog. Stop it, said the Prime Minister. Disgusting said the Leader of the Opposition. You are awful, said Frankie Howerd. But there was nothing anyone could do. Nothing had gone to air that could be punished; the offence had been in what you might call pre-production. What were we doing creating such circumstances in which baser instincts might find unfettered play? Producing entertainment, that's what.

Oh for simpler times, when mass entertainment sought to do nothing more than aimlessly divert, most often through the selective deployment of Felicity Kendall or, at its most provocatively racy, Mrs Slocum's cat.

It is probably salutary to note that Bert Newton (pictured) has thus far produced seven months of Bert's Family Feud without once having to resort to sexual assault, Doona dancing or sub-aquatic onanism captured through the modern wonder of infrared night vision.

In fact, over better than 45 years of television, Herbert Newton, AO, OBE, has never seen fit to strike anyone with anything more salaciously suggestive than the tips of his impeccably manicured fingers . . . or perhaps a cream pie flung with the full force of vaudeville. And yet he has maintained a capacity to be considered moderately entertaining by several succeeding generations. Astounding! In 50 years, no male member has even raised its questing head on Play School. And still people watch!

Perhaps Big Brother's greatest sin was that anyone ever thought it was necessary in the first place: just because we are capable of grotesque miscalculations of taste and propriety doesn't mean we have to commit them to video tape. That said, this was the week that Shane Warne made a special guest appearance on Neighbours, cast enigmatically as "himself". But that was a turkey slap of another kind entirely.

Elsewhere it emerged that Schapelle Corby had cropped her hair in a style that hinted at something boyishly ala-Minogue, then buried the hacked locks before disinterring them and placing them on eBay. A mysterious ritual. Perhaps she wanted to claim that they were never hers in the first place. For herself, Kylie Minogue revealed that she has apparently been treated for breast cancer - who knew? - but placed nothing resulting from that process on eBay. Also for auction were filchings from the wedding of Our Nicole and Our Keith and while it turned out that Sydney radio host Alan Jones might be more jock than shock - with some even alluding to the possibility of, gasp, homosexual encounters - nothing had emerged on eBay by week's end.

Which was seven days in which Melbourne was again reminded of coexisting realms beyond the imaginings of the AFL, the case in point being rugby league, a code that, on the evidence of Wednesday night's repeatedly bruising encounter between two clashing ranks of superhuman hulks, does us all a service by keeping these men off the street through their most physically threatening years. After which they will be ideal fodder for the slowly evolving brutalities of Big Brother.

© 2006 The Age

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