If there's one show I was really hanging out for a second-helping of over the dread non-ratings period, it was ABC's surprise hit,
The Gruen Transfer. The show that not even Auntie expected to be a success was a winning mixture of smarts (provided mostly by the panelists, skimmed from the cream of the advertising - sorry, "communications" - industry) and entertainment (a combination of watching stupid advertisements - which hasn't been harnessed as an audience pleaser since the salad days of late-'80s commercial network "world's best ads" shows, in essence hour-long parades of advertisements - and a hitherto slackly-written-for Wil Anderson).
The show's exploration of such advertising concepts as using shame to sell tampons to young girls terrified of standing up in class with a stained uniform, the hilarious 'How Do You Sell...' segment (I'm still wracked with giggles over the "100% There For The Taking" ad convincing Australians to invade NZ) and a revolving cast of panelists who were as entertaining as they were astute turned out to be one of 2008's greatest televisual pleasures.
What I
wasn't expecting when the show returned this year was the simmering tension between regular panellists
Todd Sampson (aka "the hot one", if you ask most viewers) and
Russel Howcroft (aka, er, the balding one?).
My memory of the panel minutiae of Season One is hazy at best, and 2009's effort started reasonably well, but once episode two rolled around, the grease-fest began in earnest (NB, all eps can be viewed
here). Right after Anderson introduced Sampson, he turns his attention to Howcroft, who offers a barely-noticable glare in the vague direction of Sampson before turning away:
Compelling, I'm sure you'll agree (at the very least I'll have a red hot go at any tabloid/gossip magazine photo editor gigs that come up, so I can go through reams of photos to try to find one that makes it look like John Mayer and Jennifer Aniston are fighting). In any case, before too long the tension between the two was shooting back and forth at such a rate it was in danger of taking over the show.
Things started to fall apart for Sampson and Howcroft over the viral YouTube campaign featured in Episode Two; Sampson took umbrage with the fact that the actress in the online "I found your jacket" ad lied on morning television, and that the agency followed suit (ho ho). Howcroft couldn't believe Sampson could look at the video and not know it was an ad - bad idea. Sampson brought out the "oh no he di'n't" fingers:
Howcroft retaliated:
And so on. The tension has continued to such a degree, with both panelists regularly sniping over differences of opinion, that by last night's episode, Anderson was making gags about the sparring pair.
What's the opposite of that '90s favourite, 'unresolved sexual tension'? 'Unresolved punchy tension'? Did one of the guys steal a client from the other? Is Howcroft annoyed that Sampson gest the pin-up treatment?
I'm not the only person who has noticed the pair's frequent head-butting; in mid-March this year, a feature on the two read like a transcript from a high school debating championship. At the time, Sampson said of his on-air adversary, "[Howcroft] has got this private schoolboy look that just sends me off and he knows it. I see him and he's looking at me and I know he's setting me up to have a go at him. And I still have a go anyway, because we are similar in our end-thinking but very different in how we get there."
But has the show lost something in allowing what was once a barely perceptible sense of contempt/competition to boil over?
I can't help but feel that what was once a healthy amount of debate (after all, there's nothing more tedious than a panel show with too much "yes, me too" about it) has degenerated into a game of spotto; our house tunes in each week to see what Sampson and Howcroft are going to spit at each other this time.
It was clear throughout the tail end of the 20th televisual century that allowing URST to be resolved generally spelled the death of a show (or at least any reason to watch it), but I feel that perhaps the same is not necessarily true when it comes to Unresolved Punchy Tension:
in a vat of Bam Easy Off, using only Colgate Flurogard and Uncle Toby's Muesli Bars as weapons, with the Brand Power lady as referee, film the lot, and then leave the laser eyes in the past.