As you will no doubt remember, the first time we had Craig McLachlan in the studio we were all so impressed, charmed and generally gooey about the experience that we had to invite him back to:

1. Finish examining his career thus far; and
2. See if multiple exposure to his delightful personality returned us to our jaded and cynical usual selves.

Join us for an episode of Boxcutters no hipster should miss.

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Send us all your winter olympiad thoughts by sending us email or send us an SMS on 0458 288 837 (0458 CUTTER). And don’t forget to invite all your Facebook friends to become Boxcutters fans.

Longtime Boxcutters listeners will know that I have never been one to watch much live TV. When we started doing this show, I had three video recorders hooked up that I would variously record on or try to work through the previously recorded shows while juggling the physical tape space on multiple VHS tapes. I still have episodes of Jake in Progress and Caroline in the City I’m sure I’ll get to one day… Anyway, I digress… The reason I was a power user level time shifted viewer from way back was so as to have a ready reserve of quality viewing available at a time convenient to me, rather than the time and day convenient to the networks, and to waste less of my life waiting for the show to come back after the ads. With more than 25 years of experience, I’m a veritable guru when it comes to readying the zapping finger over the remote buttons at the first sign of going to a break and getting the right count to come back to normal speed.

So it takes something really special for an advertising campaign to start to piss me off consistently. Congratulations channel 10… You’ve done it. Continued inside »

This week we speak at length to Craig McLachlan. He tells us all about Neighbours, the record industry, the wilderness and Alan Dale.

He’s a wonderful guest. Listen to it.

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We have a week full of broken rules of time and finance with:

Tom Elliott inventing the flux capacitor giving us some rational explanations for the asset writedowns and massive profit downgrade at 7 and how hard 9 and 10’s parent companies are doing it;

a preview of Flash Forward, coming to our screens on the 7 network after the ultimate conclusion of Lost; and

The Lost Room from the SciFi Channel in Things You May Have Missed.

Pick up your very own copy of The Lost Room on DVD from Amazon.

Contact us by sending us email or send us an SMS on 0458 288 837 (0458 CUTTER)

The following, in a different form, was used as a rant on John Richard’s excellent The Outland Institute radio show. In case you missed it, which you shouldn’t have because it’s an excellent show, as I previously stated.

This week’s television controversy surrounds MasterChef. We’ve been sold a bill of goods. We’ve invited into our homes a Poh-faced liar.

From the very beginning Poh has been shown favouritism by the judges. How many other people had the opportunity to go home after failing the audition and return to cook another dish?*

Poh not only failed once, but twice. Poh was eliminated from the competition and then, with no reason given, allowed to return along with some other, seemingly randomly selected contestants. No one else in the MasterChef competition has been given as easy a ride as Poh and that is outrageously unfair.

It’s true that Julie also received some leeway with the rules of individual challenges. Out of the last three challenges in this week’s finalist series, Julie failed to finish her dish all three times: twice serving raw food and once just failing to plate up all the elements of her dish in the allotted time.

Many times in the last 18 hours people have told me via twitter and sometimes even to my face that Julie only ended in the final two because they want to publish her cookbook.

The night before, after Justine lost, Matt Moran went to her house and offered her a job. We all felt wonderful because it worked out well for Justine.

Couldn’t the same thing have happened to Julie? If Julie had lost the competition last night but her pitch for a cookbook so overwhelmed Donna Hay that she offered her a publishing deal on the spot, we would feel joy and heart-warming tingles because Julie was well on her way to success.

There was no sensational coda for Chris last night.

And so it comes down to the internal logic of the show. Like any good story the characters need to live by the rules of the story’s universe. Despite the real-person/contest nature of the show, it’s still telling a story. In last night’s episode the rules were laid out in the beginning: make a dish that would look good on the cover of a cookbook.

When it came down to judging, though, the aesthetics of the dish were largely irrelevant. Suddenly it came down to the flavour. The judges said that Chris’s dish didn’t taste good.

Somewhere along the lines they changed the rules without telling the contestants or, more importantly, the audience.

A good TV show has turned into a farce.

* In a moment of subtextual racism the judges sent Poh home to gather the ingredients to create a Malaysian dish. The implication that she was unable to create modern Australian cuisine because of her ethnicity should have been seen as a slap in the face with regard to her skill as a cook. Instead the judges somehow made it seem like they were encouraging her. Would they expect a Cajun to only make craw-fish gumbo? Would a Jew only be rewarded by making gefilte fish and matzo ball soup?

It’s unfair to everybody that she was given a second chance AND told what to make. It’s unfair to her that they did not judge her ability on the merits of her first dish. It’s unfair to an entire race of people that we should expect them to only be good at cooking one type of cuisine.

Freeview have a new ad out and we don’t buy it. Also we look at why television of yore might not stand up to today’s viewers. There’s some CrapTV from Channel 10 and we (try to) tell you what to watch

Ooh look:

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You can help support Boxcutters buy buying yourself something pretty from the You Don’t Buy It stores.

Also, we’ve got new t-shirts! You can buy them, wear them and have people ask you what the hell it’s supposed to mean.

Boxcutters: Now shamelessly trying to sell you crap to cover our costs.

Gillian Bartlett and Donna Lyon from Bam Boom! Entertainment join us to talk about their very unique television jobs. Also there’s a review of the new Underbelly season premier, and the new US show Lie to Me. Also we look at coverage of the Victorian bushfires in a special Raywatch.

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