Over the years it has been fascinating to see what kind of fan mail on-air personalities at the Australian Broadcasting Commission get from your average “Joe or Jill Blow” punter in suburbia. Below is one such paean of praise received by the popular ABC Television personality Tim Bowden in the early 1990s. Included also is the program team’s deeply meaningful and well thought-out reply to the writer on behalf of the venerable Tim.

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25th February 1992

87b Worthog Road

CAREY GULLY SA 5144

Mr Tim Bowden
Presenter, ‘Backchat’
ABC
GPO Box 9994
SYDNEY NSW 2001

Dear Tim,

I am writing to the ABC because I know that the National Broadcaster (trademark copyrighted) is just as committed to critical environmental issues as is the present Commonwealth Government(?). I am making my concerns on this matter known in the hope that the ABC, through the intervention of your own cutting edge, “finger on the pulse of the nation” [insert additional preferred cliche here] feedback mechanism, will take the necessary steps to preserve a vital endangered species in this country.

The species in question is the Shakespearean Teledrama! This threatened creature, so important to the intellectual and cultural ecosystem of the country, has not been spotted on Australian screens for bulk aeons of time! It was last sighted on Oz TV in the late 70s and early 80s when the ABC ran several episodes of the brilliant and highly ambitious BBC Shakespearean production which set itself the task of bringing all 37½ of the Bard’s plays to the small screen in one series.

Since then the ABC Drama Department has obsessively overdosed on contemporary crime and police shows, meanwhile archetypical dramas in the shape of the great, classic tragedies (Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, etc) have been driven to the point of televisual extinction. I am outraged at the ABC’s flagrant and criminal neglect of the much-beloved ‘Shakes’. I am so ropeable that I could happily strangle the Head of Programming with the ABC’s own Lissajous curves! The ABC has a duty to protect this globally-imperilled species and not let it disappear without trace, denying Australian taxpayers the enrichment to be had from such magnificent Shakespearean fauna.

I must warn you that if ABC TV does not rectify this deplorable omission, I am quite prepared to discipline those responsible for this monumental neglect! If Commission Masthead, Lord Talbot Duckmanton, is not willing to subject himself to a humiliating public act of retribution, I am willing to accept a token proxy in his place, someone sufficiently symbolic of the organisation’s ethos but none the less highly expendable. Tim, I believe that’s your cue to take one step forward …

Yours in good faith, flage-u-later,

SS

Mistress Sloane Snodgrasse
Dominatrix-General

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March 14th, 1992

‘Backchat’,

ABC-TV,

GORE HILL,
Sydney, NSW

Miss Sloane Snodgrasse,
87b Worthog Road,
CAREY GULLY SA 5144

Dear Miss Snodgrasse,

Tim is very busy at the moment, being tied up with various projects including writing his book on WWII, Hitler: South Hobart RSL’s Part in his Downfall, but he asked that we pass on his best wishes and commends you for your enthusiasm as an obviously avid viewer and supporter of the ABC.

Tim would like you to know that the National Broadcaster always appreciates any correspondence it receives from a fawning public and that every letter is valuable to someone, somewhere, at some time.

Yours sincerely,

D. Hemingway-Browne,

Personal Assistant,
‘Backchat’

 

 

Making news at the United Nations General Assembly 10 years ago today!

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P.I.R.I. News Archive

News Headlines in Thu 31 January 2005

Despotistan

Depotistani President Abudullah Mutawwa address to the UN: “We have no Homosexuals in Despotistan”

Depotistani President Abudullah Mutawwa in an address to the General Assembly of the United Nations vehemently denied that homosexuality existed in his country.

The announcement was met with a hushed silence from members of the Assembly, punctuated only by Mutawwa’s immediate follow-up: “They are all dead”. “We kill them all!” he somberly proclaimed with a deadpan face. Mutawwa instantly broke into a chuckle and apologised to the Assembly for making what he called his little “infidel joke”!

After an uncomfortable moment, Mutawwa added “Of course I did not mean it”, as if to reassure his audience. The President went on to say that, quite simply, such a thing as homosexuality did not exist in his devout Republic, stressing that it was totally alien to both Islamic and Despotistani culture. “We don’t have this problem in our society” he affirmed, adding, “This sort of thing happens in weak, decadent places like Texas and London … people like George Bush do that with other degenerate leaders from the West, especially Irishmen and Australians.”

“Despotistan is very liberal, peace-loving and tolerant society” he said. “In Despotistan, it is acceptable to have sex with a cat!”, he told the startled General Assembly, “as long as it is a Persian cat … but you cannot perform the “Beast with Two Backs” with members of your own genital group. It is forbidden. Allah would kill the offenders, and those members would have their members cut off! The God of all Gods would have them hanged, brought back to life and then torn apart limb from limb by rabid, frenzied wild camels!”

The Despotistani President rounded off his UN speech by chanting the mantra “God is great, God is merciful” two hundred and fifty times in Ancient Akkadian.

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Email the President: goattorturer@repgov.dp

A look back at one of the big rating stories pulsating the length and breadth of the Primorsky Krai in 2005.

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Vladivostok Examiner

The World through the prism of the Far East

(English-language version)

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“Yes, I do read!” Cinnamon Girl protests

09:00 RFET Thu Sep 1 2005

NUUT – Metawati Semicomatoes, perhaps better known under her stage moniker, Enigmatic Cinnamon, is exasperated. She doesn’t understand why people say she is dead ignorant. She does read books in point of fact, the estranged wife of el bizarro boss of Mammoth Books Edwin Droog told the Examiner yesterday. “It’s only that as a young mother of three, I usually can’t finish them”.

“I often start a book but then I always get distracted by Romper Room or Late Night Poker, or its time to groom the boys, so I never seem to get the time to finish a book. I’m sure all mothers with three growing boys know where I’m coming from”, she confided in a revealing, exclusive interview.

“Of course we do read books together at home as a family. My two older boys, Hedwig and Caligula, both love reading stories about capital regrowth accounting, and I often read them fables at bedtime about the dangers of overreliance on long-term investment strategies”.

The Droogs’ third son, Kruiselnitski, who at six months of age is considered by his mother to be too young to get into books. “I might get him straight on to the iPod instead. Someone in the family needs to learn how to use this damn technothingamee gadget, coz I ain’t got a clue!” the eloquent Metawati gushed.

Semicomatoes was a member of the mega-popular late 80s and early 90s heavy metal C&W girl rap band, the Cinnamon Girls. The question of her reading tastes came up recently when the Examiner’s sister newspaper, the Nuut Daily Soporific, quoted Metawati as saying, “I haven’t read a book in my life”, and going on to indicate a preference for listening to ambience music and reading 1950s American tractor repair manuals.

The busy single supermum went on to say that those people who think she spends all of her day provocatively walking round in high heels and fishnet stockings are dead wrong. “Trust me”, she added, “at home with nobody else around, we are just so incredibly normal!” In a rare moment of philosophical contemplation the aromatic former singer said, “All day long I always find myself just flat-chat, doing all the everyday stuff – supervising the maid’s duties, checking the answering machine and adjusting the temperature on the jazucci. Its just boredom, boredom, boredom, which fortunately for everyone is interrupted by the occasional outbreak of tedium!” she added cheerfully.

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