HOT WEDGES!
KING CRAB ATTACK! (Mon Jul 5, SBS- 9:20pm)
Bizarre, fun little French comedy-horror short (10 minutes) in which giant Tasmanian King Crabs are fed up with being fed upon and rise up against the unwary patrons of a seafood-dependant community. You’ve got crabs – run!
THE GRAHAM NORTON SHOW (Fri Jul 9, ABC-11:15pm)
Queer antics abound as the gay comic Norton (FATHER TED, ANOTHER GAY MOVIE) is unleashed upon the chat show format with outrageous results that are camper than a caravan park at Christmas.
NIP/TUCK (Mon Jul 26, GO! – 10:30pm)
New episodes of the deceptively shallow series about plastic surgeons, in which ex-pat Julian MacMahon continues to get naked so often per-episode his butt deserves its own screen credit. Good series, but nothing beats the heady joys of the homoerotic-fest that was season 4 (Julian, Bradley Cooper, Mario Lopez and er… Rosie O’Donnell… nuding up for their art – and yes, often together!)
STALE CHIPS
THE MOLE (Fri Jul 23, Seven- 12:15am)
What’s the point of showing old episodes of this guess-the-backstabber-and-win-cash-monies reality TV show if it’s a) a repeat of an old episode, so the audience already knows who the Mole is and b) Hunky host Grant Bowler doesn’t even get naked? (soon to be remedied in series 3 of TRU BLOOD…)
AUSTRALIA’S FUNNIEST HOME VIDEOS (Sat Jul 24, Nine- 6:30pm)
Amazingly, this bottom-of-the-barrel-scraper just recently celebrated its 20th year on air. I wonder if, when Graham Kennedy presented the very first episode back in 1990, they reckoned that endless videos of toddlers whacking their dad in the gonads with a cricket bat would have such a bafflingly long shelf-life?!
JUICY JACKETS!
THE GRUEN TRANSFER (Wed Jul 28, ABC- 9pm)
A very funny show about the trials and tribulations of advertising, not only airing on the ad-free ABC but also saddled with an incomprehensible, impossible-to-market title that suggests something Dan Brown might have come up with after ingesting a wonky omelette. The show looks at all manner of tricks used by advertising companies to get us to buy their products even when we don’t need them, from (supposedly) banned techniques like subliminal advertising, where subtlegivemeapayrise suggestionspayrisenow are interspersed surreptitiously plusSamWorthingtonsphonenumber within text or images, to less subtle techniques like just screaming at you to buy something (such as on every carpet warehouse ad ever).
Gavin Pitts
