Quadrant covers the story lines of a new ABC series....plenty of content for at least 3-4 series!
Episode 1. A Q&A Conundrum:
The show’s producers are in full-panic mode when a work-experience intern makes a total mess of the usual left-wing stack and invites a second conservative guest instead of the intended talking head, a gay and disabled environmental activist with a nuanced reluctance to condemn ISIS out of hand.
For the very first time the panel is in danger of striking a balance between conservative and left-wing representatives, but host Tony Jones rises to the challenge, even though he must now interrupt two conservatives, rather than the standard one, just as each is about to make a point. There is much hilarity as Jones’ efforts grow ever more desperate, climaxing with his impromptu exercise in interpretative dance inspired by an audience member’s query as to how much of
his $355,789 salary he is prepared to forego in order to save Pepa Pig.
The episode concludes with the intern being fired for similarly neglecting to stack the audience with the requisite number of Greens, shoe-tossing militant vegans and modern-as-tomorrow Muslim women in burqas denouncing Tony Abbott for misogyny.
At
the Catallaxy blog, where they run
a weekly competition to guess how often Jones can interrupt in the space of a single hour, civil war breaks out amongst would-be winners debating whether Popper or Say would be more scathing in classifying Jones’
grand jette-with-splits as a full-blown interruption or, more fascinating, if it was the manifestation of an externality borne of the national broadcaster’s lavish and largely unsupervised budgetary allocations.
Episode 2. Worlds apart.
The ABC seeks to add a new reporter to its environment team. The assorted candidates all demonstrate impressive credentials, but the field is winnowed to two: a former Fairfax Media “climate economy” roundsman who refused point-blank to report a word about the Climategate scandal and a neo-animist lesbian witch from Newtown whose partner, already on the ABC payroll, put in a good word for her.
When one of the job candidates finds the squirrel alive and thriving in the High Country and attempts to report this scoop, his rival, the Newtown witch, is immediately hired. The science is settled, announces Williams, who rejects the furry evidence chittering in its cage on his desk with the explanation that it is not a squirrel at all but
a chipmonckton and must therefore be ridiculed when not ignored altogether.
The failed candidate is not deterred, however. The episode fades to black with images of the ex-Fairfax staffer donning a burqa, brandishing a copy of Richard Dawkins’ collected works and being hired as the ABC’s religion correspondent.
Episode 3: The well-earned break.
The ABC is thrown into chaos yet again, this time by a clerical error that sees all but a handful of radio and TV hosts and journalists ordered to take their holidays at the same time. The most senior ABC staffer still on the job turns to her Twitter and Facebook friends to fill the reportorial void created by a depopulated newsroom.
That evening’s news broadcasts lead with the scoop that Tony Abbott cannot tell the difference between a burqa and a niqab and is therefore irredeemably opposed to every woman’s right to be oppressed in a liberated, post-modern sort of way.
A running gag in this episode features supremo Mark Scott, who learnt his journalism at Fairfax and bills himself as the ABC’s editor-in-chief. Eager to help out during the staffing crisis, he sets out to report a story on how the Navy is waylaying ships loaded with live cattle in order to torture their crews with hot engine parts. Sadly, just as he is about to start calling favourite
refugee advocates, the plumbers arrive to install a 14-carat executive toilet, obliging him to file countless Twitter updates on their progress.
The odd thing is that no viewer notices the slightest difference between normal ABC news coverage and the stream of undiluted social-media ranters that replaces it.
Episode 4. Well-worn media.
When Paul Barry succumbs to food poisoning caused by a dodgy salad from the ABC’s $18 million organic permaculture rooftop garden at its sustainable Ultimo HQ, the job of hostingMedia Watch falls to the broadcaster’s newest recruit, gun reporter Fatima el Baksheesh-Namatjira.
An Indigenous transgender Muslim and stellar graduate of Wendy Bacon’s University of Technology journalism course, she ignites controversy by wearing a burqa while lambasting News Corp.’s opinion-page lamentations about the slow pace of Islamic integration. Arranged marriages, along with bookshops
selling Mein Kampf and
Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
are part and parcel of multiculturalism’s rich mosaic and therefore to be treasured, she asserts. To represent the Jewish perspective,
the ABC taps Anthony Loewenstein.
Subsequently criticised in an
Australian editorial, Baksheesh-Namatjira is backed by the ABC’s feminist collective and their XX-chromosone staff representative on the board, who don the burqa
en mass to protest unenlightened Western attitudes toward every woman’s right to wear whatever her man tells her. Anne Summers sends a message of support, but regrets she is too busy penning
an updated version of her sermon on the injuries inflicted by male-mandated high heels to take up the burqa issue.
All ends happily when when Baksheesh-Namatjira and the ABC win a global media award sponsored by Saudi Arabia’s minister for media and seventh-century couture. At an awards ceremony televised by SBS she denounces Rupert Murdoch as media revellers dine on Pygmy Squirrel au jus avec artichokes au Jerusalem occupe.
Episode 5: Not-so-settled science
Shocking news! The scientists at Bolivia’s Climate Change Research Institute for Appropriate and Sustainable Excellence check the data and discover that the global climate’s sensitivity to carbon dioxide is less than a hundreth of that assumed by the IPCC. The ABC’s enviro desk goes into meltdown, too shocked at first to make mention of the breakthrough. But when even Fairfax Media makes passing mention of the research — a tweet dismissing the report as the mischief of scientists who cannot even tell a burqa from a niqab — the ABC is forced to act.
One of the offending scientists, relentlessly grilled on camera, is confronted by evidence sourced to an NGO, but never identified as an activist NGO, that leaves no doubt he was once observed standing next to a man smoking a cigarette. As a known lackey of Big Tobacco, he is asked when he stopped beating his wife?
The scientist seems poised to answer the charge, but is interrupted just in time by Tony Jones, who dances in tights and overstuffed-sausage mode across the set, rendering the guest speechless. Turning to the camera, Leigh Sales, brow creased with concern, reads from a script provided by Tim Flannery’s Climate Council, which has discovered a new threat — and a fresh theme for direct-mail fund-raising campaigns.
“You may never have heard of
Dihydrogen Monoxide,” she gravely intones, “but the CSIRO certainly has and its experts are worried, very worried, that the Abbott government will cut funds for the front-line PR operatives promoting this new peril and the needed increases in the agency’s budget.”
On Twitter, Flannery endorses Jones’ taste in leotards and suggests, courtesy of
his new girlfriend’s former occupation, that dress-up games are a carbon-neutral way of adding some spice to ho-hum boudoir antics. Mrs Tony Jones,
aka Sarah Ferguson, tweets back that she is one jump ahead, and has already bought a burqa to make for a really swinging evening.
The episode concludes with
Q&A plant and proud Muslim woman Rebecca Kay tweeting that Ferguson is a racist for not knowing the difference between a niqab and a burqa and, by logical extension, must be another of the ink-stained
shaytans on Rupert Murdoch’s infernal payroll.
