Saturday - Critic's View
The Age
Thursday March 27, 2008
CRITIC'S VIEW REVIEWS: Australia's Funniest Home Videos; Top Gear.
Australia's Funniest Home Videos Channel Nine, 6.30pmIt's not brain surgery. It's not even an emergency appendectomy. In fact, if Australia's Funniest Home Videos were a medical procedure, it wouldn't be as serious as freezing off a wart. It's a fail-safe gig for new host Shelley Craft, who inherits the job description of giggling between videos of small children defying gravity, brides falling face-first into the wedding cake, and teenage boys copping one in the goolies using a variety of apparatus. There's blood on the Australia's Funniest Home Videos studio floor, however: longstanding host Toni Pearen, who was widely considered to do a bang-up job of looking simultaneously cute, amused and mildly shocked at footage of people incurring serious head injuries, was dropped at the start of the year to make way for the former Great Outdoors reporter when she jumped ship from Channel Seven to Nine. No real reason was given for the boning of Pearen although it's fairly safe to assume that it has something to do with the disposable nature of young women on commercial networks and that after five years it was considered time to freshen up the brand, which is shorthand for "give the dads a new bird to ogle at". Craft is cut from the same cloth as all of the former female presenters: Jackie McDonald, Jo Beth Taylor, Catriona Rowntree and Kim Kilbey (making Graham Kennedy at the inception in 1990 the sole masculine aberration). To wit: Craft is another of those irrepressibly bubbly personalities whose annual appearances at the Logies and in the Birdcage during the spring racing carnival provide the only proof of their existence beyond the eyes of the studio audience. Top Gear SBS, 7.30pmThe world's best show about carbon-spewing cars test-drives an environmental theme? Sounds like a great idea. Only, Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May spend most of their time denigrating anything that could be even mildly termed "green", including electric cars, diesel cars, LPG cars, the City of London's dedicated bus lanes, and celebrity drivers of the Toyota Prius. That it should end in a Clarkson diatribe (pie-chart included) about what he says is the minor contribution cars are having towards global warming, plus handy tips on how to snap up a bargain-basement new-model car before they have to be sent back to the factory for breaching emissions targets, is hardly surprising after witnessing the previous 55 minutes of rabid anti-environmentalism. But what is astounding about their conclusion that environmentalism is boring, unsexy, and makes you late for work is that it comes from three blokes who made their name popularising the car in the way that Mythbusters made science interesting. Leader-of-the-pack Clarkson might have the most questionable dress sense since Tom Selleck in Magnum P. I. but clearly he is not stupid despite his habit of salivating over anything that comes with the kicker "turbocharged". All becomes clear when Hammond makes a reference to the UK Government's freezing of the excise on LPG until 2004, which pegs this particular production to an era when global warming was popularly considered a minor inconvenience that might nonetheless prove a boon to tomato growers, and there was no Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change report to ruin the petrol-head party. Last year's polar special, in which Top Gear attempted to become the first adventurers/imbeciles to drive to the North Pole, showcased more of an environmental mindset (despite the obvious irony of using the method of transport that is irreparably damaging the ice sheet's chances for ongoing existence), and, while this episode remains utterly entertaining, it would be good to see them revisit the topic with updated views on our imminent car-fuelled doom.
© 2008 The Age
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