stoush.net

Wed, 18/04/2007 - 1:30pm — arleeshar

This morning I watched Kevin Rudd attempting to lay bricks while wearing what looked like a plastic raincoat over his suit. I didn’t like it.

It was a brave decision of his, to co-host the Morning Show with Kerri-Anne Kennerley; at one point she walked over to a pre-prepared wheelbarrow full of cement, dragged through it with her perfectly manicured hand and unearthed a pair of steel-capped boots, then proceeded to chivvy Rudd about the ‘cement boots’ he had apparently applied to Mark Latham.

I felt a small pit of despair forming in my stomach, as I watched him attempt to laugh it off while moulding what looked like a massive turd with an inexpertly wielded cement trowel.

Now, you may have gathered that I am quite the fan of Rudd’s Sunrise moments,possibly because they roughly equate to political reality television. I love reality telly, and Sunrise has made me love Rudd. This has clearly been the design, and yay Team Labor for realizing that the sorts of genre-standards and clichés produced by half a decade of Big Brother and Australian Idol can be utilised as a short-cut to electoral popularity. I can’t see Kevin Rudd refusing to appear on Rove Live, for example.

However, key to the success of contestants on reality telly is the way the footage is cut; what sort of negative or positive outside information is brought to bear on the contestant’s inside career (hence contestants’ strategically released sob-stories or carefully-hidden dark pasts on shows like the Biggest Loser or Big Brother, the release of which information is designed to manipulate audience support); and thus how the audience views the contestant.

In addition, a very popular contestant can lose favour with the audience merely by featuring over-much, showing hubristic tendancies, or just because it becomes clear that everyone wants them to win and the boredom backlash starts. Tim Brunero, the compassionate lefty runner-up to Big Brother in 2005, is widely tipped to have suffered such a loss.

Rudd’s clearly well aware of this, as reports of his maniacal media management style have hit the front page recently, and his subsequent apology at yesterday’s Press Club luncheon signifies a tandem realisation that this behaviour is starting to form one of those pieces of ‘outside’ information that may impact upon his soft television popularity. Rudd has made his run about ‘personality’, placed himself as a third-way politician and inhabited the space of reality television to get his message out. He’s shown that he is well aware of how the reality television character arc works and should be aware of when to pull back and get off the boat.

However, what I saw on Kerri-Anne was clearly over-exposure by reality tv standards - especially after the 60 minutes extravaganza on Sunday, which featured old photos of him with a horrible little moustache - and I believe it may mark the beginning of a slide in Rudd’s soft-tv appeal. Instead of short, carefully-managed segments of him making jokes and being personable, a la Sunrise, I saw a longer segment, one of many that morning, in which he was confronted by a simple task at which he would not excel and forced to be pleasant while being taunted with references to his ‘dark past’. While moulding a turd in close-up and wearing a raincoat. Where a true reality contestant would have earned brownie points for turning around and dumping the cement on Kennerley’s head while releasing a stream of graphic sexist invective, that thankfully would not work out well for Rudd, and without all of the weapons in the reality-tv arsenal he’s at a disadvantage in the game play.

As an experienced and avid voyeur, I say: GET OUT NOW, before you end up desperate and posing nude for Playboy. Get back to the ABC where you belong, at least for the time being.