Good satire is always close to the bone
(yes, it’s an Eddie story) and in the process it sometimes provides a genuine
insight about the target. So hats off to Glen Green’s Diary column
in the SMH‘s Radar section – the paper’s Chaser-influenced nod to Gen Y.

Diary is the imagined reflections of a
public figure. The latest effort, Eddie All-over-the-place, concluding with
this:

For
starters, I really believe we’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of what
this Footy Show concept can do — Beaconsfield, Germany, Guantanamo Bay … the possibilities are endless.

They’re
a great mob of fellas, and the plebs just can’t get enough of them. Their
roguish humour’s so Aussie. It should be extended to other programs.

Sam
Newman chairing A Current Affair. Matthew Johns to bring his hilarious
characters to the gloomy six o’clock news. Fatty and Sterlo would give that
bloody Today Show the foot up the a-se it needs.

We’ll
stick one of them in a dress. The whole panel can do 60 Minutes. The footy
network! Footy follies and CSI from a-sehole to breakfast time.

That’ll
get us back to Number 1!

Then over the weekend you read McGuire has
signed up the Gold Coast cabbie
who was the star of last week’s Enough Rope. The Murdoch tabloids quoted a Nine
spokesperson saying Gerard Donaghy would most likely appear on the NRL Footy
Show as the voice of the streets.

“Mr McGuire saw him on the
show and thought he would be good talent to talk about social issues,” the
spokesperson said.

And that’s when the Diary’s insight hits –
Eddie does see the world through Footy Show eyes, in which case the
world may
as well be the Footy Show. While he’s
following orders to slash and burn elsewhere, the few spends we know
he’s made
all seem to involve the Footy Show or at least his Melbourne “team”
mates. Yesterday Beaconsfield and Germany, today a Gold Coast cabbie,
tomorrow… Glen Green might be right.