Every line makes him stronger
(no, not those sorts of lines)

This piece was commissioned for the Sunday Age on 4th May 2008, but didn’t run because too many other people wrote their Sam Newman articles first.

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I don’t like Sam Newman, and I particularly don’t like how much he likes the fact that I don’t like him. With each sentence I write here, I’m playing into his hands, digging a grave for myself and all the other people who don’t watch The Footy Show, but have to endure the scripted  ‘controversies’ that are spewed into the news cycle whenever Australia’s tiredest, lamest, least talented squadron of ‘entertainers’ are struggling for a ratings point.

I’m a serial offender when it comes to falling for their sucker punches. In 2004 I spent a year of my life writing a novel about a footy show. I made the star a botox infused, chest thumping fifty-something called Tickets Thompson. I called his lamentable, haranguing vox pop segment, Tickets and Dickheads. The novel is Players, and the question I am most asked is whether Sam Newman has read it.

I once heard from one of Newman’s Footy Show co-stars that Sam hasn’t read it, that Sam never will read it, because Sam doesn’t read. The same co-star told me that when Sam wanted to fill up the bookshelves in a new house he had purchased (query whether it was the one sporting Pamela Anderson frontage) he rang a bookshop and ordered books by the metre. It’s this intellectual heavyweight that slouches back in his chair, feet practically on desk, pontificating at the rate of about two garbled sentences per minute not just on the football issues of the week, but the state of society.

Players was intended as satire, not character assassination. I wanted to say something about tabloid television, and the way in which it spits out both its stars and its audience. Unfortunately, it has not yet spat out Sam Newman. Newman says that when he manhandled the crotch of a lingerie-clad mannequin in a Caroline Wilson mask, that was satire too. Apparently the pillar of society that needed attacking was Caroline Wilson’s dress sense. Anyone who believes that this is a bogus cause, that the real target is any woman who dares to dip her dainty size 9 into the testosterone charged world of AFL football, you’re a — actually I don’t know what Sam is going to call you. But I have heard a sound bite on commercial radio of an enraged Newman telling me to watch the show tonight to find out.

Newman, apart from occasionally hiding behind blackface (ah the Nicky Winmar sketch, I hope it made the “best of” dvd) hides behind the defence that society has become too ‘politically correct’, that somebody has to have the courage to say the things that the guy in the street is thinking. The guy in the street likes a bit irreverence. The guy in the street reckons that if you’re going to have a chick “on the couch”, you certainly don’t want her sitting upright talking about footy.

The trouble is the guy in the street also reckoned it was okay for Monkhorst to racially sledge Michael Long in 1995. At the time, Long’s reaction was cited in many sections of both the public and the media as overreaction. But Long was resolute, and the AFL eventually showed leadership, and now the average guy in the street doesn’t think that racial abuse is okay.

In the last five years, Four Corners have run a story on AFL players raping a girl, there was the Leigh Montagna-Stephen Milne bed swap debacle, and Fraser Gehrig urinated on a girl’s leg (he claims it was just splash back from the carpet). Newman might say that political correctness has gone mad. I say that there is a cultural problem in the AFL on the issue of treatment of women. Maybe if we try this so called ‘political correctness’, even for a little bit, there will be a real attitude change. If even one fewer female leg is urinated on in 2008, it’s surely worth a go.

So far, the mannequin controversy has stretched on for three weeks. The letter from a group of prominent women in football will throw petrol on the conflagration for another two. It’s not that the women are wrong to react. Sam Newman is paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and his only real brief seems to be to provoke a reaction. For that money, you’d hope he’d be good at it. But by stretching out the controversy, the Footy Show gets more publicity, Channel 9 makes more money, Sam gets re-contracted, and in twelve months time, we have the debate again because Sam has donned a bhurka and dry-humped Gary Lyon’s leg. (note to Footy Show producers: that’s my idea. I want to be credited if you end up using it).

If objecting is what Channel 9 and Sam Newman wants, then how can people express their disapproval? I’ve given this a lot of thought, and have decided that you can’t. It’s an unwinnable cause. You can stop watching, but I figure most of the people who hate Sam already have. The sad fact is that everyone’s sense of humour is different, and Sam is a proven commodity. So is Kyle Sandlilands. There is a wad of viewing public that finds meanness entertaining, and Newman and Sandilands are their figureheads.

I’ve tried other tactics. I’ve written to station chiefs and said that I won’t buy from companies which advertise during these shows. I’ve written to the CEOs of companies that advertise during these shows — no more hot water systems for me until Newman goes. Unfortunately, the recipients of these letters take their polling figures from the ratings box, and not invective filled letters signed ‘Angry from Northcote’.

And so I am now without hope. Certainly writing this column hasn’t helped. Although not writing the column wouldn’t have helped either. I just have to face facts. When I’m seventy, going quietly senile in a home, Sam will still be on air, mocking women, demeaning replicants, flashing his 98 year-old balls for the entertainment of us all.

Harry Highpants

Harry Highpants was selected for the White Ravens stand at the 2008 Bologna Book Fair and as a notable book by the Children’s Book Council.