Image: Costa Georgiadis (Gardening Australia, ABC), winner of the Most Popular Presenter Logie.
Hundreds of screen execs, producers and creators gathered together as warm props for the Logie telecast on Channel Nine, and played their confused part in the death of television as we know it.
The political anger about journalistic independence cropped up on Todd Sampson’s T shirt which read ‘FREE SPEECH’ in large confident letters. Kerry O’Brien’s induction into the Hall of Fame gave him free rein to reflect on present times. Beyond these moments of truth, the evening piled meta on meta.
The night began well with Tom Gleeson’s opening standup, pungent with put-downs, as he cruised like a champion darts player. Even the cutaways were jovial, with wincing meeting laughter as victims shook their heads and chuckled, and then flashed glances round the table to see if they got away with it.
While the rival AACTAs pretend to be an actual entertainment for the audience in attendance, the Logies has no such inhibitions. The intros and shtick pieces were directed straight at the home audience, who were probably recorded for another episode of Gogglebox, which won its fourth Logie for Most Popular Entertainment, so the cast may soon be seen contemplating themselves contemplating their own victory in a show where they watch… and so on. The various throws and intros were made in the auditorium as crews rushed between the tables. The guests were lucky the food was real. Well, we never really looked closely at the plates.
Going meta
After the traditional comedy, the evening got weirder. Peter Helliar turned up as a life-sized Gold Logie and explored the outer edges of self pity in a rant that just refused to end. Amanda Keller, dressed in silver as his foil, looked like a socialite whose husband has been arrested as a bigamist.
Then staff munchkins put a table with guests on stage, plus a camera, and Hamish and Andy demonstrated just how an audience cutaway is created to con the audience at home. This was really too meta and the atmosphere changed. For the rest of the evening the cutaways had a stunned edge, caught between self parody and fake excitement.
This is not just a bunch of competitive awards where dentists profit from teeth gritted so hard they shatter. The numbers and business models speak of the future. Last year Nine and Seven won a couple of Logies between them. This year it was none. Ten, the joke channel bought on a whim as a checkout bargain by CBS, grew to eight from four or 4.5 (some winners shared broadcasters which leaves some floating halves). Stan gained from one to two; SBS lost three to reach one, Foxtel dipped a bit and the ABC came out on top. From 3.5 to ten wins counting the Gold Logie. Seven of those won the audience vote.
Those changes are all within the vagaries of circumstance, and two years is a very short run of numbers. But we can say that the two networks with the biggest audiences utterly failed to convert them into Logies in either a popular or industry category, and minor players like SBS with the World Game brought the biggies undone.
If the Logies mean anything, Ten is hanging on, Foxtel remains robust, and Stan is doing surprisingly well. All of which tells us that the smaller players in the fragmentation dance are doing better than their larger cousins. That makes sense because niche audiences will be more loyal. Ten’s base audience, for instance, remains very stable. Foxtel, which only has a third of the total audience anyway, provides an ecosystem which its subscribers are attached to.
Arguably, the smaller players have loyal audiences who have learnt to connect via social media. It seems they are turning tribal and fighting to protect the brand by which they define their media choices.
Campaigning to distort the results
In 2016, SBS’s magical presenter Lee Lin Chin ran a rogue campaign to win a Gold Logie and opened the door to a whole new level of fun. In 2018, Tom Gleeson ran an informal push for his friend Grant Denyer, who did win a Gold Logie.
This time, Gleeson campaigned for himself, with a series of attack ads on social media, like this one about Amanda Keller. There was more rage inside the industry about this than the Liberal’s campaign about death taxes before the election. Again, the strategy has its meta-level, as Gleeson walked a fine line between simply turning his audience off and revealing the use of fake news.
But the relative scales of the audiences for the various shows is pretty obvious evidence that Gleeson is only running an extreme version of the campaigns which underlie the whole competition. It is looking more like professional wrestling than a genuine class of reputations. The cat has never really been in the bag but it is truly out now.
Gleeson took the stage to accept his Gold Logie, with a speech which was really a serious piece about the nature of comedy.
‘It turns out I am just really good at manipulating people with the media to get people to do things for me.’ Tom Gleeson
‘I’m in a tricky spot,’ he said, ‘because I like it and hate it at the same time. I can tell you this, I’m not the most popular person on Australian television, it’s just basic stats … But I can tell you this, I do host the highest rating game show in Australia. So somewhere in the joke people forgot this is mine. It turns out I am just really good at manipulating people with the media to get people to do things for me. Which if you think about it is why we are all here. So maybe I do deserve this award…’
The whole speech is wonderful.
What does this mean?
We are living in a society which is becoming more and more tribal. Sky viewers and Murdoch readers live in a different world from people defining reality through the ABC and Fairfax. Our political spectrum is going the same way.
Arguably, the Logies is now tossed around tribal audiences who have learnt to connect via social media. It seems they are more and more determined to protect the brand by which they define their media choices. Down on this level too we are separating into parallel universes. This has gone on for at least a generation, but this is much more intense.
A moment of truth
The full list of winners is on the ABC.
