Jackie O

Nearly a decade ago, Channel Seven programmers were keen to give a stunning Gold Coast girl air-time. Jacqueline Last, nowadays better known as Jackie O, soon proved the point that being photogenic doesn’t mean you’ll be good on TV.

Screen presence, that certain je ne sais quoi, is an indefinable quality that draws the viewer in and makes you keep watching. The weird science of video lens calibration that captures you in a sequence rather than a single shot is a unique beast.

Audiences can smell a dud a mile off. No matter how stunning or controversial someone might be, if they don’t have screen presence the viewer will revolt. As they did in droves, when the initial audience of 1.2 million watching Jackie O and Kyle What’s-his-name’s first TV show diminished to just 200,000 near the end of the show. That, after a 1.4 million lead in. Apparently Channel Seven have short memories.

Continue reading "O what a TV flop!" »

Kyle Sandilands is such an inconsequential waste of space that I would normally be reluctant to expend a single millilitre of ink or pixel of web space on his unfortunate existence.

This week I made an exception, in the first instance because of the remarkably vile nature of his attack on one of our young female staff, a sexually threatening rant where he called her “a fat slag”, talked about her breasts and her hair, and issued the creepy pledge: “Watch your mouth girl, or I will hunt you down”. All this because she wrote a completely unremarkable news piece about the unpopularity of his new TV show.

I’ve decided to saddle up again today because there is an interesting broader lesson from the Sandilands episode. Not to put too fine a point on it, the long-overdue commercial destruction of Kyle Sandilands shows that it is no longer OK to be an abusive, hate-filled arsehole without facing serious consequences.

Continue reading "How the public took charge of a deserved flogging" »

Dear Jackie O, what a bugger of a week!

Did you have time to read the Sunday newspaper between changing nappies, feeding your baby, changing another nappy, washing up bottles, having a shower, changing another nappy, eating some Weetbix, getting ready for work and cutting your baby’s fingernails?

I hope you did. The message was clear. Most women want you to know – you’re a good mother.

Continue reading "O, what a feeding frenzy over nothing" »

So, radio personality Jackie O crossed a quiet, leafy, Double Bay pedestrian crossing while bottle-feeding her six-week-old daughter and made the mistake of being photographed.

Mothercraft and Nannies director, Jenni Waldron, tut-tutted in the Daily Telegraph that “it would be best to sit comfortably in a chair and hold your baby correctly while feeding”. She was probably caught off guard too.

Jackie felt compelled to explain herself on air: ‘I was running late and Kitty was screaming…’. Yes.  I feel like doing that myself when I read stories like this. 

Continue reading "The perils of breasts, bottles, and babies" »

A radio personality returned to the air this week after time out to recover from an unfortunate incident arising from a social disability before now not previously categorised – he is, I have concluded from the incident and his lack of remorse, ‘civically challenged’.

The ‘civically challenged’ person is so self-absorbed or insensitive as to be oblivious to the social and cultural impact of his or others’ egotistical or crass behaviour.

He or she behaves in a way that weakens civic virtue and sensibility. A pattern of such behaviour can desensitise others to the harm being done, normalising what in a moment of shared reflection would obviously be deemed unedifying at best. 

Continue reading "What Kyle says about the death of our civility" »

Confined to a wheelchair and wearing a pith helmet and an American flag fashioned into a nappy, shouting obscenities at the justices of the United States Supreme Court, pornographer Larry Flynt was a massively flawed hero for the cause of free speech.

This morally bankrupt hillbilly was famously sued for defamation by the Reverend Jerry Falwell, who in a fake advertisement for Campari published by Flynt’s Hustler magazine recalled how he lost his virginity by sleeping with his own mother in an outside toilet on the family pig farm.

It’s hard to imagine a more egregious slur. Nor a more unbelievable one, which is one of the reasons Flynt ultimately won his defamation battle, reinforcing the free speech protections afforded by the First Amendment.

Continue reading "I’m glad that this shocking drongo is back on the air" »

Kyle Sandilands is copping it from all angles and the moment, having just been dumped from Australian Idol over the terrible stunt he and Jackie O pulled last week with the 14-year-old victim of sexual assault.

Yes, his co-host Jackie O has also been put “into recess” by 2Day FM, but it bothers me she seems to be missing out on a large portion of the heat.

The only difference between O and Sandilands during the sketch that went so wrong last Wednesday, was he made that idiotic remark about it being the victim’s “only experience”.

Continue reading "Where’s Jackie O in all this?" »

The puerile stunt by Sydney radio jocks Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O (Wednesday, July 29) in which a 14 year girl was strapped to a lie detector and interrogated by her mother about sexual matters reveals more than just the nation’s shock that the distressed girl revealed she was raped as a 12 year old.

The stupidity and crassness of Sandlilands and Ms O aside, the incident amplified another more disturbing and sinister aspect of disclosure by children. 

It is the agony and terror faced by many child victims of sexual violence who find the courage to disclose to an adult, only to have that adult fail to respond with any shred of justice or decency. 

Continue reading "The deeper issue raised by sick radio stunt" »