When Erin Molan joined The Footy Show a few years back, I was the happiest NRL fan alive. She was lively and loved rugby league, the game I’ve followed since I was a girl. Bunnies4lyf. Also, she was not a, what’s the word, dropkick. But last Thursday, when I should have been glued to the show, I was not. Just over 700,000 people watched that episode and I was not one of them.
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Here’s why. The Footy Show was locked into an '80s entertainment format that was already out of step by the time it began in 1994. Just five years after its first broadcast, the ANU’s league-loving historian David Headon wrote: “Not for us the embarrassing drivel, cross-dressing and scarcely-veiled racism of Channel Nine’s Footy Show.” It took another 19 years for Nine to catch up with what the rest of us want.
Insiders tell me that The Footy Show appealed to men in their 60s – but of course, that’s not the main audience any more. The rest of us don’t find racism or sexism funny. We don’t want jokes that belittle and humiliate. And we don’t want men droning on about the sporting love of their lives because we can usually get that at home, or so other women tell me. Molan couldn't save it, although she tried.
Instead, we want to be entertained, surprised and sometimes even moved. And it needs to be 100 per cent footy. Which is funny because Nine actually has a program like that. It costs next to nothing and it’s at a god awful time – but it’s NRL to its marrow and the hosts are glorious. In particular, let me introduce you to Ruan Sims, World Cup winner, footballing family, footballer to her roots. She's not the main host of 100% Footy but she should be. Serious, warm, can be funny and – I’m sure – does not cost nearly as much as anyone on The Footy Show.
And even though her program is in the middle of the night, without the stars of The Footy Show, without much promotion, it’s rated on average 100,000 viewers an episode over the year. That’s half what its over-promoted older brother rated on average; at about one-tenth of the cost. Nine could also check out The Front Bar, which is currently destroying the AFL Footy Show.
Nine will try to build a new program around Molan – so it should take some lessons from the ABC and listen to two podcasts run by women: Ladies Who League and the Outer Sanctum, downloaded hundreds and thousands of times a year. The Outer Sanctum’s Kate Seear, says you can do humour without being demeaning. Seear, who is bicodal, says any footy show needs to include everybody. LWL’s Mary Konstantopoulos (tragically a Parramatta fan) says it’s about getting people who love league to talk league, who want to be more than just folks sitting around humiliating others. And she’s an Eels supporter - believe me, she can take humiliation.
The rest of us, not so much.
Jenna Price is a Herald columnist and an academic at the University of Technology Sydney.
