The dumping of Amanda Duthie
The way the ABC is dealing with this Chaser sketch scandal is absurd. I mean, sacking the Head of TV Comedy because she didn't flag the sketch and refer it upwards for consideration? It's the kind of bureaucratic buck-passing you might see in local government. (Okay, not that surprising, since the ABC is a bureaucracy. Still, this was about entertainment, after all.)
Usually the ABC don't give a tinker's about public reaction, particularly when it relates to more serious stuff like journalistic ethics and standards. They're forever pissing people off as a result. Think of their relentlessly one-sided treatment of the climate change issue. (And just recently there was that dodgy doco about Phuong Ngo. No one lost a gig over that, as I recall.)
Whenever the stakes are really high, the fluffy wuffies at their ABC remain relentlessly wrong-headed and bloody-minded. They don't budge for anyone. However, they've made an exception in this case.
I mean, here's a "comedy" troupe whose whole stock in trade is going too far. Yet one time they went too, too far. So the big wigs have decided that at least one head will roll. Eh?
I never thought I'd be defending the Chaser team, because I've always thought they sucked the big one. Sure, the sketch was hugely unfunny. People were offended and upset. But it was meant to be a joke.
And the kids were actors, remember. They weren't dinkum terminally ill tots. It was just a really crap, unfunny sketch; one of countless crap, unfunny sketches they've performed over the years.
Some critics of the national broadcaster may think the axing is a good thing; a sign of some sort of cultural shift. Nup. It's just more of the same, I reckon.
Up until this particular stink there was a list of demographic groups that the ABC considered off limits as subjects for comedy for fear of being politically incorrect (unless it was made absolutely crystal clear that they were not the ones being mocked). These included Muslims, gays, Indigenous Australians. Whippersnappers-soon-to-cark-it were not on the list. Now they are. That's all that's changed, really.
The Chaser team are probably doomed now. But all that'll happen is that the next bunch of in-your-face ABC "satirists" will stir up a hornets' nest over some other demographic group that was previously deemed fair game - elderly women with dementia, perhaps? And we'll be back to square one.
I mean really. It's all just so bloody silly.
