Last night the first of two ‘Hey Hey It’s Saturday’ reunion shows was screened on Channel 9 to terrific ratings. It was the number one show around Australia with over 2 million Australians tuning in, but already some people have proclaimed it as being lame and daggy and are hoping that it won’t return permanently next year. From what I can tell most of these people are Gen’ Yers like MX’s Anna Brain, who would know a thing or two about being lame, since her column revolves around reporting on the twitterings of Z-grade celebrities and other such rubbish. Brain said that she liked Hey Hey for the nostalgia trip that it provided her with, but preferred watching Celebrity Masterchef, even though the celebrities it featured were a washed up musician, an Indian chick who used to read the news on SBS twenty years ago, and some dude who is supposedly famous but I’ve never heard of.
The truth is that I do not understand why Hey Hey was axed 10 years ago. I do know the reason for its axing, that James Packer thought that it was too old fashioned and daggy and wanted to replace Daryl Somers with someone younger and trendier such as Mick Molloy or Rove McManus, and because Hey Hey was deemed too expensive for Nine. Ten years later Mick has unfortunately had a couple of failed shows on Nine but has seemingly found his niche as a second banana on Channel Ten’s football show Before The Game, while Rove was sacked by Nine less than a year after they recruited him from community television, and he has made his name with Channel Ten.
The must watch Saturday evening timeslot that Hey Hey once occupied is now the home to the daggiest and lamest show on television, Funniest Home Videos. Arrrgh!!! At least this show is much cheaper to produce than Hey Hey considering it is entirely made up of videos of kids kicking their father’s in the balls. And Anna, if you thought that Daryl Somers’ jokes were lame you obviously have not heard the gags that the various female hosts of Funniest Videos have told over the years. Daryl would not touch these lame arsed non-jokes with a ten foot barge pole! Then there is 20-1 with Bert Newton making way lamer jokes than Daryl ever did while Z-grade celebs talk knowingly about some crap or other that no one really cares about. These shows are cheap and they may rate but they don’t entertain in the same way as Hey Hey used to. Heck, I have watched episodes of Funniest Home Videos and 20-1 and they don’t entertain in any way at all.
I realise that Hey Hey cannot come back and if it does it will not be as it once was, but the reason why there was such a demand for the show and that the ratings were so good last night is simply because there has been such a lack of funny variety shows over the last decade. Instead we have had so many mind numbingly stupid reality shows such as Big Brother and other shows where people with no talent end up on TV that the viewing public may now want a show that is entertaining and not just people standing around. I think that an updated version of Hey Hey could once again be popular. Perhaps some new faces could host the show while Somers produces it, but whatever happens it couldn’t be worse than the crap that TV networks have been dishing up for the last decade.
