Today the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) said Kyle Sandilands’ November on-air ejaculation of bile was a little bit bad but mostly fine.
No idea which of the many many on-air Sandilands rants I’m talking about? Here’s a recap:
Last year about 1.7 million people said Kyle Sandilands’ new TV project was shit. A few of them said it publicly. One of these people was a journalist by the name of Alison Stephenson. Being a female weighing more than 50kg, Alison deeply offended Kyle. So Kyle decided to hit back.
I think ACMA took the soft option, because they knew I’d taken the hard option and Kyle had thus already served his penance. Here’s the email I sent to Kyle (via Austereo) at the end of last year:
Dear Austereo,
I’m writing to Kyle Sandilands, care of you, to see whether he might do me the great honour of abusing me over the air.
I am not a journalist, am not overweight, do not have any titty (to speak of), have never listened to his programme or any of its derivatives and, to be honest, if I was asked to point him out in a line-up of half a dozen other bearded, corpulent forty-to-fifty-year-olds with twenty-to-thirty-year-old-people’s hairstyles and the faint hint of minor chromosomal abnormality about their face, I would struggle.
That’s not to say I wouldn’t know him if I fell over him in the street, as the saying goes – I think I could do that. (Of course, that’s not saying very much because if I did bump into him in the street he’d undoubtedly burst into that inimitable high-pitched, nasal, the-world-owes-me-something-and-it’s-not-a-small-debt-like-a-missed-credit-card-payment-or-a-car-loan-but-more-like-what-Greece-Ireland-Spain-and-Italy-owe-combined drone, interspersing profanity with un-ironical references to the idiom of Valley Girls and 1990s black America. Then I’d know it was him straight away, even if I had been vacillating before he opened his unfortunately-toothed mouth.) That is to say I’m not a fan.
But when I say I’m not a fan, I just mean that I’m not across his entire ouvre. The section that I am familiar with I find not entirely disagreeable. For instance, there’s something profoundly heart-warming – hot-water-bottle-on-a-very-cold-night warm – about seeing News Limited get a little bit of inane, nonsensically personal, gutlessly targeted, outrageously hypocritical drivel sent back in their own direction from a D-grade media outlet. It’s like standing behind perspex and watching one repulsive, unctuous creature (let’s say a massive leech) violently attack another member of an equally repugnant species (let’s say, cane toads) – there’s no downside; it’s just wonderful theatre.
In any case, I want to be called fat in three or four different ways despite the fact I’m at least thirty kilos lighter than my attacker; I want my dress sense torn to shreds by a man who wears a tie and jeans at the same time; I want my vocation belittled by a person who gets paid millions of dollars to just shout the first thing that comes into his talent-free head; I want to be implicated in a paranoid delusion; I want to be told I am a mere rabbit in the eyes of the Sandilands falcon.
I know you’re currently “assessing internal systems and process” (and by the way, can I just say I bloody love it when companies really take their corporate social responsibility seriously and go hard on those bastard internal processes), so it doesn’t have to be anything more time-consuming than scrawling it down at the bottom of an existing list:
- Employ Kyle Sandilands – RETAIN PROCESS / REVISE PROCESS
- Employ vacuous, craven ditz as Sandilands’ foil – RETAIN PROCESS / REVISE PROCESS
- Austero executives must exhibit psychopathic/sociopathic tendencies – RETAIN POLICY / REVISE POLICY
- Serve full Devonshire Tea at morning meetings – RETAIN PROCESS / REVISE PROCESS
- Get Sandilands to abuse smart-alec nerd on air – ACCEPT PROCESS /DECLINE PROCESS
It would be like a value-added. I don’t know what that means, but you do, and you know it’s fucking great, going forward.
Just FYI (as the kiddies say these day), I sent a very similar request to Gasp Jeans a few months ago and never received a reply, so I’m kind of becoming desperate. I think my last email may have been too heavy on the sarcasm, which I know some people consider the lowest form of wit (we both know there are lower forms of wit, though, don’t we?). So I’ve taken a more straightforward tack with this version. Except for the bit where I called you D-grade – that’s preposterous; obviously you’ll never make it that high.
Anyway, even if, in an upcoming show, Mr Sandilands could simply deride the prolix nature of this email or reel my name off in a list of people he wants to bash, that would be beaut.
Also, if those blasted hippies and pinkos kick up a stink afterwards, I’d really appreciate it if his apology to me was more offensive than the original attack and was grammatically all over the shop.
I hope this email finds you well, (or, as Kyle would say “Fuck off and eat a fat one, sister, and you’re fat and I hate you and you’re a fatty and I question your choice of shoes, you piece of shit!” (LOL! The guy is brilliant.))
With the utmost fondness,
Jonathan Rivett
PS: What does the “tereo” in Austereo refer to?
No reply.
Haught fact of the day:
Ben Polis served as Kyle Sandilands’ apprentice for eight years before going it alone and forging his own career as a bigot.
You’re a bloody genius. I’m giggling like a loon on public transport.