An exhaustive survey of Aussie Rules fans by Melbourne’s Herald-Sun found that dumped football commentator Kelli Underwood was regarded as the most annoying caller on television by 39.5 per cent of respondents.
The survey could show two things. It could show that 39.5 per cent of people surveyed are football purists with legitimate concerns over Underwood’s grasp of the game.
Conversely, it could show that 39.5 per cent of respondents are sexist dropkicks who think footy is a man’s game and that girls should stick to talking about cosmetics and recipes.
Whatever the case, Channel 10 has responded to their concerns. After a two-year “experiment” – as it was so daftly labelled to capture the mind-blowing radicalism of letting a sheila near a commentary box – Underwood has been dispatched to the boundary where she’ll provide “special comments” rather than sullying the man’s world of commentary with her chirpy remarks.
There are enough women who’ve been relegated, rubbished and ridiculed in the world of sports broadcasting that they could get together and form their own network.
Underwood has been labelled a trailblazer but there are plenty who have fallen before her, the first being Kate Fitzpatrick, the talented actress who in 1983 joined Channel Nine’s cricket commentary team. Her arrival was about as popular with her colleagues as if Germaine Greer had rocked up for a sherry at The Adelaide Club; the (male) viewers didn’t like it either and by the end of that year’s series between Pakistan and Australia Fitzpatrick was free to resume her full-time career in the theatre.
The Age’s Caroline Wilson might be one of the best football writers of all time but that hasn’t stopped her being the source of mindless low-rent comedy on The AFL Footy Show, which reached a squalid apex when Sammy Newman stapled a photocopy of her face to a lingerie-clad mannequin and man-handled its bum on national television. Nine forced Newman to apologise and he only did so after saying that he had nothing against women, after all he’d married plenty of them, he just didn’t see what they could ever bring to any discussion of football, and why for that matter would any football club be so stupid as to appoint one to its board.
News Limited’s Rebecca Wilson was drafted to The NRL Footy Show in 2005 and lasted one show after having to endure the lip-curling, arm-folding surliness of Fatty Vautin and Peter Sterling, who looked like a couple of stroppy high school boys who’d just been told by the teacher that they had to let girls play on their team.
When Four Corners’ Sarah Ferguson went after the wholly valid issue of group sex in the NRL and exposed the Matthew Johns case, and when Nine’s Tracey Grimshaw followed it up with a one-on-one interview with Johns in which no punches were pulled, there was a widespread view among men in sporting circles and media circles that a bunch of mad women had somehow been let off the leash and that these poor, poor men were being unfairly maligned for stuff which had been going on for years and was usually just a bit of fun anyway. Anyone who saw Fairfax’s league scribe Roy Masters trying to rationalise group sex as a male bonding experience would get the picture.
Underwood should regard her shafting not as a reflection on her own talents, but as the supine capitulation of a TV network to the less bright but more vocal percentage of the AFL’s fan base. It does men in general a disservice for anyone to suggest that she was uniformly disliked by us; most blokes I know who share a passion for this great game are much more interested in what’s happening on the screen, than the person in the box who’s talking about it.
Underwood might not have been a future Dennis Cometti. But I don’t think she was any more annoying than many of the blokes who continue to flourish in the world of broadcast. Bruce McAvaney knows his stuff but I know plenty of people who think he’s become a bit of a caricature of himself. Indeed Bruce can get so giddy with excitement that he actually sounds more like a girl than Underwood ever could, best evidenced when he memorably declared of Hawthorn’s Cyril Rioli “What a delicious young player he is!”. Anthony Hudson appears to have spent much of his life trying to look and sound exactly like Bruce McAvaney. Robert Walls regards Australian Rules as such a profoundly serious pursuit that he sounds more like he’s commentating on the fraught path to peace in the Middle East than a forgettable minor round contest between Fremantle and Essendon. At the other end of the spectrum, we continue to endure the absurdity that is Rex Hunt, whose call on any given game is often so incomprehensible as to be useless.
There is of course one thing these people share which Underwood lacks. In Rex Hunt’s case, he used to wave his about in Melbourne laneways. Other than that there’s not really any logical explanation for why she’s been sacked, and it’s a real pity that the one code which enjoys genuine mass support among women will not allow a single female voice to be heard on match day.
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