Because Australia doesn’t cop enough flack for being a racist backwater, the good folk propping up the reanimated corpse of Hey Hey it’s Saturday decided last night that no nostalgia trip into the country’s murky cultural past would be complete without reviving some ol’ fashioned 20th century bigotry.
And so it was that, amidst three hours of tired puns, dubious puppetry and that very special Daryl Somers-brand of awkward ad-libbing, was this:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMAyGewq37w[/youtube]
Yes. They put on a Minstrel Show.
And it seems a few people got a little offended.
And by “a few people”, we do mean “pretty much the entire world”.
Naturally, the fallout started pretty early on the pulse of the people, Twitter. Ironically, Daryl Somers himself had anointed #HeyHey and #Plucka as the “official” hashtags prior to the show, which ended up providing a neat little way of collecting the world’s grievances over the stunt.
The show’s 10:30pm finish time (which was more like 10:50pm, because three hours just wasn’t enough time to contain all that fun) meant it ended just in time for those across the pond to wake up to clips of the “sketch” buzzing around the social media web. It didn’t take long for the outrage to begin — and it came thick, fast and dripping with scorn and sarcasm.
In The Guardian: Harry Connick Jr weirdly unimpressed by Australia’s blackface Jackson 5:
In Australia, of course, it is perfectly acceptable, and we thank the nation for yet another important contribution to the annals of human culture.
For The AV Club: G’Day, Blackface!
In case you were wondering what the country of Australia in 2009 has in common with fictional 1960s advertising exec Roger Sterling, well, apparently, they share an unbridled love of blackface. Really, they just can’t get enough.
Still Fresh And Funny In Australia: Blackface, scoffs The Awl:
You know what never gets old for the folks on Prison Island? Blackface! Oh, how they chuckle!
And you know you’ve really cocked-up when the world’s leading media industry gossip snarkers, Gawker, project some of their particularly acidic bile in your direction:
Wow, an American is being the voice of cultural sensitivity? Australia must be really messed up.
And the fallout continues, from the likes of New York mag, Movieline, dlisted and more.
For the 1980s anachronism Hey Hey, it was a harsh lesson in just how differently the media works in 2009: just because your target demographic is slack-jawed suburbanites and pensioners, the whole world is now watching.
And once again, the whole cringe-worthy affair has hammered home just how out-dated the show really is.
On the upside, the international scorn virtually guarantees this is the last time we’ll ever see Hey Hey rear its tired, shoe-polished face on our screens again.
I really didn’t equate the portrayal of black people as black as ‘racist.’ I know it’s easy (and common) to use the R-word towards almost anything that identifies anyone by race/nationality/religion, but then it’s also a mis-use which cheapens the examples of genuine serious racism which we may see around the world.
To me, the skit was no different than Robert Downey Jr doing the Blackface in the film “Tropic Thunder” – for which he received an Oscar nomination! No scream of “racist” there…
By logical extension, if it was ‘racist’ for some black people to portray black people as black by blackening their faces (the leader, playing Michael jackson, is Indian), it is also racist for actors to adopt foreign accents when playing foreign people. Meryl Streep in “Out of Africa,” for example, had her portraying a South African by assuming the appearance and accent of a South African…
In summary – overreaction?
This whole debacle must raise the question, who were the out of touch morons who filtered the acts to decide who would appear. It seems that there is an opening for cultural and racial sensitivity courses to be run at the channel.
“international scorn”
Gawker.
The Guardian.
Got anything else?
Seriously, I think the whole thing is being a bit overdone. I could see Harry Connick Jr was getting upset but he’s a yank and they’re all precious. The people doing the routine are not yokels, they are well educated doctors holding respectable positions in the community, and in fact, the group themselves are made up of a number of different ethnic backgrounds.
The sad part is this PC bullshit will overshadow what was two Wednesday nights of fun and nostalgia. They did the same thing 20 years ago and to be honest I thought it was a good flashback.
If you want to be mad about something be mad about the war in Afghanistan or the Bankers still collecting big bonuses with taxpayers money – don’t be mad at a little sketch on a one off show in a small, fararway land.
Yeah it was a lame sketch and shouldn’t have been chosen for the show, but for the love of christ, let’s not over-react with a political correctness sh*t-storm. Deal with it the Australian way and take the piss out of it instead!