Emails

My email to Alan Jones

Last week, the Sydney broadcaster Alan Jones told a gathering that the Prime Minister’s father, who had recently passed away, had “died of shame. To think that he had a daughter who told lies every time she stood for parliament.”

I wrote an email to Alan Jones:

Dear Mr Jones,

I am writing to you in the hope that you might make my day (nay, my year (nay, my life)) and humiliate my family on air  – or at a public/private function – via the medium of a preposterous fabrication.

I sent a similar request to your great FM-band (and intellectual) rival, Kyle Sandilands, and never heard back, but know that you won’t let me down.

I also know that you’re nothing if not a man of commerce, and I want to make this a transaction rather than a request for a favour: it’s only fair that if you are to make up something about me, I should make up some things about you first. Give and take, eh, Big Al? (Can I call you Big Al? I asked Margaret Court if I could call her Pastor Marg and she never replied, so I just went with it.)

So, Big Al, here we go:

Yours was an immaculate conception – of sorts. Your mother and father never had intercourse with one another. Your father got over-excited while out tending his cucumber patch one day, and sprayed his beloved fruit with a little bit of Vitamin Jones. Nobody knows precisely how your mother was inseminated. Most can guess.

Your face goes that unique shade of warm beetroot (I checked with Dulux) when you engage in vigorous physical activity (like not sneering, and knitting) because the blood has had nowhere else to go since you fell into that river of lava and subsequently had your entire lower body replaced with advanced cybernetic technology provided by the Institute of Public Affairs.

You never coached the Wallabies. The closest you got was being hit in the testicles by a rugby ball-shaped cow’s bladder while working as a tripe extractor in an abattoir. The bladder exploded out of a badly killed cow’s body and hit you very hard. It was while at the abattoir that you developed your obsession with chaff bags. You ate from them and lined your underpants with the hessian of disused ones because (a) you liked the feeling of the coarse fibres against your corporal javelin, and (b) you thought it might protect you from future cow bladder encounters. (You did coach rugby league and were shit at it.)

Early in your eighteen-year stint at the abattoir you once tried to extract tripe from a live cow – via its anus. It kicked you so hard there is a Big Al-shaped dent in the eastern wall of the old Toowoomba abattoir to this day.

You once participated in a game of backyard cricket at a Liberal Party barbecue and John Howard sent your middle peg cartwheeling.

You played the Smith’s Snackfood Company’s Gobbledok from 1987 until 1991. The character was originally going to be called Professor Henry Chipford, “the potato scholar”, but the whole concept changed when the advertising agency realised they had hired the wrong Alan Jones and instead of getting a slim, erudite, broad-shouldered ex-theatre actor, had got you. The name came from a misunderstanding: instead of hearing “What do you think the character should be called?” you heard the creative director ask “What did you do on the weekend?” Inexplicably, the creative director thought he heard you reply “Gobbledok” and the rest is history. (Contrary to popular belief, you wore no costume or mask while performing in the advertisements.)

You were accepted into Oxford University as a cadaver. (Imagine the look on their faces when instead of entering the venerable institution as a deathly white corpse on a trolley, you entered of your own volition as a warm beetroot coloured corpse.)

You once wrestled (in a cage match) Lord Christopher Monckton, whom you consider to be a socialist. He put you in a figure-four leg lock then tapped out before you had a chance to.

While playing Franklin D Roosevelt in the stage production of Annie you became so enraged by having to portray a famous communist that you fouled your underwear – every single night. The script never called for a wheelchair, but it became a vital prop. (The Institute of Public Affairs is still trying to work out how you managed to produce faeces when your entire bottom half is made of metal and you no longer have a gastrointestinal tract.)

Rumours about your sexuality are not only inappropriate but grossly inaccurate; you’ve always preferred the company of flying monkeys.

You can’t visit Victoria because the stench of civility triggers your gag reflex.

Unlike some cockatoo-voiced public servants, your father didn’t die of shame. He drowned in a gigantic spa bath filled with sago pudding and several dead dugongs. Your mother is still alive and works as a body double for Lady Gaga.

There you go. Nothing quite as witheringly cruel or outlandishly absurd as you’ll no doubt come up with, but I hope my quantity might come close to equalling your inevitable quality.

Awaiting your response with more anticipation than David Flint standing in line at your book signing (before realising you hadn’t written an autobiography and he was just confused and at a busy Woolworths buying Froot Loops),

Jonathan Rivett

I wonder whether he’ll reply or just cut sick on 2GB.

Haught fact of the day:

Everything above is, of course, totally untrue. Except the thing about Alan Jones being the Gobbledok. Chippie, chippie, chippiiiies.

Read more Haught emails

…or choose one that takes your fancy from the list below:

My email to Yarra Trams
My email to Metro Trains
My email to Facebook
My email to Microsoft
My email to Coles
My (unsent) email to the Victorian Department of Transport
My email to Alan Jones
My email to Kyle Sandilands
My email to Gasp Jeans
My email to Jim Beam
My email to Ben Polis
My email to Hoo haa Bar
My email to Weis ice creams
My email to some tobacco companies
My email to Margaret Court
My email to KFC