Sir Roger has been diligently viewing the latest outbreak of televisual experimentation, ABC News 24, and his verdict?

Erk!

It is a case of Form well and truly triumphing over Content. It is embarrassingly self-conscious in a way we haven’t seen since the worst, masturbatory days of the Australian film industry. The trumpeting self-importance of its pretentious grandiosity is a delusion that is not and cannot be supported by the actuality of its means, its reach and its influence. At least not yet.

Sir Roger would like to take a look at the résumés of the pissweak wannabes who are currently training ABC presenters on “How To Do TV” and the résumé of the numb-brain who decided to locate the presenters in the middle of what is apparently an empty A380 aircraft hangar. The producers seem to have derived their inspiration from, for example, CNN but to have unfortunately missed the point entirely by not actually having anything interesting in the enormously wide shot. Sir Roger has never seen such odd, twisted choreography and direction, such stilted, studied, wooden, unspontaneous performances from journalists and presenters since … well … this week’s episode of Catalyst. It is really difficult to make two grown-ups in a TV studio look as awkward as the opening night presenters did in their enormous barn. (The studio presenters, you might imagine, are required to clasp their hands in precisely the same way, being permitted, as they speak, only to twiddle their thumbs for emphasis.) At the same time, however, other reporters seem called upon to swing their arms wildly and disconcertingly so as to appear interestingly animated. Apparently the same TV trainer that made weird marionettes of the Catalyst presenters is also doing over the News 24 team.

The lighting and colour of the News 24 stories is below professional standards although it was impossible, according to Sir Roger, to concentrate on the stories because of the oddness of the packaging of performance style, visual style, sets, and graphic embellishment.

Sir Roger is, of course, happy to consider any reasonable offer from ABC to deprogram the desperately embarrassing presenters and reporters and provide coaching which will result in their acting almost like real and interesting people. He insists he could improve their performance at least to Jeff Bridges’ Starman standard.

“What an awful disappointment” (says Sir Roger).

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