Rockheads on Parade, aka The Breakfast Show

I won't say that Fran Kelly has ruined the Breakfast Show (ABC-RN) by turning it into a petrifyingly boring competitive sports show, but she has. All by herself, in just a few weeks in the chair.

It's appalling. I'm almost speechless. This morning I was going to give her a bouquet, not a turtle (truly), then suddenly the program descended into rugger buggery.

It would help if she could do hard-hitting interviews, but to be perfectly francis they're never as good as touted by the Auntierati. Today she let John Stanhope, Chief Minister of the ACT, walk all over her while she hit him with a blancmange. One had the feeling she was dying to get to the News, or else to a "real" interview about competitive sports. Let's have stories about the negative impact of competitive sports on Australian society. Now that would be a scoop, but one feels it's way above Kelly's head.

Yawn!

Tagged: progressive, broadcasting, abc, radio+national, radio, sport, australia, competition, cooperation

Understated and understateder

Here at Sandy Beach I can hardly get reception of ABC News Radio, so I often listen in via the Wilson's Almanac Radio and TV portal.

What I like about that station is that you get a mix of much more than ABC, including Germany's Deutsche Welle, Britain's BBC and America's NPR. I don't know any other station in the world where one can get such a diversity of good news and current affairs programming.

I like the BBC segments, even though BBC correspondents tend to sing their reports. But other cultural traits are very interesting as well. The British tendency to understatement never fails to fascinate.

Today, a BBC reporter was interviewing a British museum official (perhaps from the British Museum), about finds of mummified human remains in Argentina (or Argentinia as the ABC presenter called that country). The interview was extremely odd. The BBC man asked the museum man a few questions and the museum man talked about how indigenous peoples worldwide often protest about the display of the remains of their ancestors, especially when those indigenous people have suffered at the hands of Western colonialism.

After this, the first odd question the BBC man then asked was whether this was happening a lot, to which the museum guy of course replied that it was. (I should have thought that this was common knowledge, and besides, the museum bloke had just said that it was.)

Then the BBC guy asked, and I think I have this verbatim: "Do you think that this has anything to do with post-colonial politics?"

The museum guy was as understated in his reply as the interviewer was in his strange question. But I bet he's still talking about it in the museum tea room.

Tagged: abc, australia, media, radio, postcolonialism, post-colonialism, bbc, museum, museums, indigenous

Sandy McCutcheon: Fearless ABC renegade

Sandy McCutcheon (Life Matters, ABC-RN), you're a little beauty! When the rest of the ABC crew gang up on you for covering a story ('Vincent de Paul opens Vinnies Supermarket in Melbourne') of direct interest to one-fifth of ABC's demographic, call me. I'll bring the boys.

Tagged: charity, poverty, saint, vincent, abc, radio, national, australia, supermarket, poor, social, issues

SCOSE: A toothless pussycat?

When a journalist at ABC-RN News tells you that "the baby died shortly after being delivered from a suspected blood disorder", all you can do is shrug your shoulders and mourn for the baby, the clot and the journalist (the latter two possibly being the same thing).

ABC has a thing called SCOSE, the Standing Committee on Spoken English, but it is assiduously ignored. Why this should be is a mystery to all.

It is not a difficult thing for someone who makes a living out of the spoken word, and for Australia's national broadcaster, to gain some sense of how to structure sentences -- how to put clauses and other parts of sentences into some kind of order that makes sense. I'm not calling for ABC journalists to be Shakespeare or Dickens, just for them to graduate from primary school.

Note to the ABC and SCOSE: the kind of writing referred to above is not unusual but can be heard on any day of the week. It has reached tipping point. No, it has reached chundering point, and once-proud ABC journalism has become a laughing stock. What on earth are you going to do about it?

Categories: scose, abc, australia, australian, english, language, radio, grammar, spelling, pronunciation