I Do Not Like You, Sam I Am
Last week the Australian Communications and Media Authority declared that an episode of the AFL ‘Footy Show’ in which Sam Newman groped a mannequin dressed as journalist Caroline Wilson breached the television industry’s code of conduct. At the time of the incident, one year ago, ‘The Sunday Age’ commissioned Tony Wilson to write the following piece…but never ran it. It appears here for the first time.
I don’t like Sam Newman, and I particularly don’t like how much he likes the fact that I don’t like him. With each sentence I write here, I’m playing into his hands, digging a grave for myself and all the other people who don’t watch The Footy Show, but have to endure the scripted ‘controversies’ that are spewed into the news cycle whenever Australia’s tiredest, lamest, least talented squadron of ‘entertainers’ are struggling for a ratings point.
I’m a serial offender when it comes to falling for their sucker punches. In 2004 I spent a year of my life writing a novel about a footy show. I made the star a Botox-infused, chest-thumping fifty-something called Tickets Thompson. I called his lamentable, haranguing vox pop segment ‘Tickets and Dickheads’. The novel is Players, and the question I am most asked is whether Sam Newman has read it.
I once heard from one of Newman’s Footy Show co-stars that Sam hasn’t read it, that Sam never will read it, because Sam doesn’t read. The same co-star told me that when Sam wanted to fill up the bookshelves in a new house he had purchased, he rang a bookshop and ordered books by the metre. It’s this intellectual heavyweight who slouches back in his chair, feet practically on the desk, pontificating at the rate of about two garbled sentences per minute not just on the football issues of the week, but on the state of society.
Players was intended as satire, not as character assassination. I wanted to say something about tabloid television, and the way in which it spits out both its stars and its audience. Unfortunately, it has not yet spat out Sam Newman. Newman says that when he manhandled the crotch of a lingerie-clad mannequin in a Caroline Wilson mask, that was satire too. Apparently, the pillar of society that needed attacking was Caroline Wilson’s dress sense. Anyone who believes that this is a bogus cause, that the real target is any woman who dares to dip her dainty size 9 into the testosterone charged world of AFL football, you’re a — actually, I don’t know what Sam is going to call you. But I have heard a soundbite on commercial radio of an enraged Newman telling me to watch the show tonight to find out.
Newman, apart from occasionally hiding behind blackface (ah’ the Nicky Winmar sketch; I hope it made the ‘best of’ DVD) hides behind the defence that society has become too ‘politically correct’, that somebody has to have the courage to say the things that the guy in the street is thinking. The guy in the street likes a bit of irreverence. The guy in the street reckons that if you’re going to have a chick ‘on the couch’, you certainly don’t want her sitting upright talking about footy.
The trouble is that the guy in the street also reckoned it was okay for Monkhorst to racially sledge Michael Long in 1995. At the time, Long’s reaction was cited in many sections of both the public and the media as overreaction. But Long was resolute and the AFL eventually showed leadership, and now the average guy in the street doesn’t think that racial abuse is okay.
In the last five years, Four Corners have run a story on AFL players raping a girl, there was the Leigh Montagna-Stephen Milne bed-swap debacle, and Fraser Gehrig urinated on a girl’s leg (he claims it was just splashback from the carpet). Newman might say that political correctness has gone mad. I say that there is a cultural problem in the AFL when it comes to the issue of the treatment of women. Maybe if we try this so-called ‘political correctness’, even for a little bit, there will be a real attitude change. If even one fewer female leg is urinated on in 2008, it’s surely worth a go.
So far, the mannequin controversy has stretched on for three weeks. The letter from a group of prominent women in football will throw petrol on the conflagration for another two. It’s not that the women are wrong to react. Sam Newman is paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and his only real brief seems to be to provoke a reaction. For that money, you’d hope he’d be good at it. But by stretching out the controversy, The Footy Show gets more publicity, Channel Nine makes more money, Sam gets re-contracted, and in twelve months’ time, we have the debate again because Sam has donned a bhurka and dry-humped Gary Lyon’s leg. (Note to Footy Show producers: that’s my idea. I want to be credited if you end up using it.)
If objecting is what Channel Nine and Sam Newman want, then how can people express their disapproval? I’ve given this a lot of thought, and have decided that you can’t. It’s an unwinnable cause. You can stop watching, but I figure that most of the people who hate Sam already have. The sad fact is that everyone’s sense of humour is different, and Sam is a proven commodity. So is Kyle Sandlilands. There is a wad of the viewing public that finds meanness entertaining, and Newman and Sandilands are their figureheads.I’ve tried other tactics. I’ve written to station chiefs and said that I won’t buy from companies that advertise during these shows. I’ve written to the CEOs of companies that advertise during these shows — no more hot water systems for me until Newman goes. Unfortunately, the recipients of these letters take their polling figures from the ratings box, and not from invective-filled letters signed ‘Angry from Northcote’.
And so, I am now without hope. Certainly writing this column hasn’t helped. Although, not writing the column wouldn’t have helped either. I just have to face facts. When I’m seventy, going quietly senile in a home, Sam will still be on air, mocking women, demeaning replicants, flashing his ninety-eight-year-old balls for the entertainment of us all.
Tony Wilson is a Melbourne-based writer and broadcaster. He is the author of two novels, ‘Making News’, which is out now on Murdoch Books, and ‘Players’. His other books include ‘Australia United: Adventures at the 2006 World Cup, Germany’ and five titles for children. Visit his website.
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