A Frontal Assault With More Than A Little Cutting Edge
The Age
Thursday July 14, 1994
CARTOONISTS prove it every day: you can say the toughest things if you dress them up as humor. So it is with `Frontline', the ABC's brilliant parody of current affairs shows on commercial TV. At one level, `Frontline' is very funny, though not like the sitcoms. No obvious set-ups to the punchlines. And no laugh track, which confused a few TV critics until friends told them it was all right to laugh without being prompted. The humor of `Frontline' flows out of the characters themselves, characters so well drawn, so ambiguous, they seem like ...
well, real life.
Mike Moore, the witless anchorman, is hard to dislike because he means no harm - which is precisely why he is a danger to the community.
Thommo, the executive producer, has the tender conscience of a tomcat in an alley. In the editing suite, the Emphysema Kid can crack you up with one cough. `Frontline' gets to you the way Barry Humphries does: part of you chuckles and, deeper inside, another part squirms because the gag is too close to ... well, real life. You titter rather than convulse on cue.
Because, at its second level, `Frontline' is very tough. It shines a light up a sewer. The current affairs shows it satirises are really misnomers. They devalue the first-rate news bulletins that precede them. They are mostly about two-headed calves, hidden cameras, shonks, losers, bought interviews, mock outrage, smiles, frowns and silly looks. Now they have been exposed. Sealed in a bottle like a virus and put on show. No one has been game enough to do this before.
And now the wall has been breached, will it be all right to parody other fields of journalism? Might the next wave of satirists look at, say, the coverage of Canberra politics? Not because it is bent like the current affairs shows - it isn't - but simply because it works to its own cliches and as a separate culture.
Part of the trouble is that the practitioners do not live in the world: they live in Canberra, even when they're not there. They can go to Rome on a prime ministerial junket and see no splendor: they scurry past the Arch of Constantine to attend a way-out Keating press conference on wage overhang. In Normandy for the anniversary of D-Day, they see no beaches, convey no pathos, but hint that Paul Keating possibly masterminded the invasion in a previous life. From anywhere in the world, they can write the same stuff they write from Canberra.
Upon finding Livingstone in the Congo, their first question would be: ``What's your plan for the economy?" There's also a theory they are frustrated sports writers. This is because many liken the political contest to a 1000-metre sprint at Flemington: Downer's come out fast after all those terrific public opinion polls ... Keating away badly, could be sore after that dust-up with Hawke at his last start ... Oh, Downer's blundered at the republic, took a bad prat from his stablemate Tony Abbott ... Keating coming from a long way back - he'll win it! Now that's just Tuesday.
One day is unconnected to another. So in Wednesday's race, Keating gets up after a drop in the current account deficit. On Thursday, he goes down on lousy employment figures and some say he'll never race again. But he does, and on Friday deadheats at question time.
Political life has no continuity. Each day a camera clicks and a winner is declared. Ironically, it's a bit like the TV ratings game.
And, as with TV, the personalities themselves are more important than what they say. You can win the day with a really dumb piece of policy, so long as you say it solemnly and the other lot doesn't come up with a snappy soundbite. There are no perspectives. It doesn't matter that the PM's economic miracles never happened. They were yesterday. Today he is a republican. Tomorrow he might be an Asian. Is he more Asian than Downer? That's the question.
A stoush between Conrad Black and Bob Hawke is fun. You don't spoil it by asking who gave politicians the right to nominate newspaper owners.
A stoush between Hawke and Keating is even more fun. You don't spoil it by asking whether a secret deal to hand over the prime ministership might be a moral fraud on the electorate. In Canberra, there is no subtext.
Much Canberra copy is commentary, but of a curious kind. The politicians are stick figures. The gallery spurns irony, humor, whimsy and shades of grey. It seldom looks for reference points. No Einsteins or Bradmans preceded these players. Everything is happening for the first time. Menzies and McEwen never took us into Asia. Henry Lawson never called for a republic. The world began in 1983.
Nor does the gallery much stray beyond official guidelines. There is an approved agenda. Today it might be Mabo and gay rights. Few wonder what it could be. Why is our unemployment rate nearly double that of the United States? Do we have a foreign policy? What happens when we run out of things to privatise? Ah, economics. Here's the big trouble. Journalists in Washington and London see economics as merely important. Canberra journalists see nothing else. A new stunt to save the economy is analysed with the rigor a more enlightened society might reserve for the second instalment of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Except most of the analysis is technical. Nowadays economics seldom connects to morality. At least the old class war was interesting. Economic rationalism is not big on soul.
No, I've changed my mind. A clone of `Frontline' wouldn't work. It would have to be about economics and viewers in search of the highbrow would switch to Rex Hunt. Anyway, who would you cast as the infrastructure?
© 1994 The Age