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Dame Edna has the royal approval

Unlike The Chaser, Dame Edna is ok with the Royals, with Barry Humphries AO even invited to the wedding ceremony.

Judging by the reaction online, many Australians were shocked to learn that The Chaser’s Royal Wedding commentary was out of favour with Clarence House, the official residence of The Prince of Wales.

After all Prince Charles spent some of his formative years in Australia. Has he forgotten about our sense of fair play?

While the Chaser boys, who say they were planning to make fun of the media circus, are out of favour, Nine’s broadcast with Dame Edna Everage remains unchanged.

Nine’s Director of News and Current Affairs Mark Calvert told TV Tonight, “There’s nothing in the restrictions which will alter our coverage. Dame Edna will be with us before and after the ceremony. But during the actual nuptials, she’ll be dashing to the Abbey to take her seat as a guest of the happy couple.

“Dame Edna is Australian royalty, so we’re honoured that she’s agreed to juggle her commitment to the Windsors with her love of Channel Nine.”

Whether Dame Edna’s contributions are pre-recorded or live is unclear, but they won’t appear during the Wedding Ceremony itself, meaning they don’t transgress the restrictions.

Would Sir Les Patterson have been as welcome?

TEN’s coverage with Fitzy, Wippa and Lucy McDonald will also go ahead because it isn’t planning to be strong satire.

A TEN spokesperson said, “We are proceeding as planned with our Royal Wedding programming. Our coverage will be respectful though light hearted.”

If the Royal Family has issue with comic interpretations of the William and Kate romance, they ought to take a look at last night’s telemovie, William & Kate: A Modern-Day Fairytale.

It was hilarious.

18 Responses

  1. We were going to watch Channel 9 coverage – until we found out Dame Edna was going to be on. Channel surfing, we did come across her on occasion but couldn’t stand the inane comments and promptly switched over. She/he’s an embarrassment – well past use-by date. Thank goodness for the BBC and ABC coverage.

  2. Disappointed with nine’s coverage. Dame Edna was annoying and monopolised the commentary. Poor James couldnt get a word in. We changed the channel.

  3. Aside from the joke about being half Aborigine (because she threw the boomerang and it didn’t come back), what were the “derogatory” comments?

  4. Digusting coverage from Channel 9. Dame Edna is past used by date. Why make comments about Aboriginal people when we are working so hard to be a reconciled nation???????/

  5. The Chasers are an over-rated under-talented bunch of has-beens who have had their day. Their ‘satire’ has never been particularly clever – usually resorting to ‘gotcha’ style stunts that get noticed. They are not clever – period. That said, I don’t think ‘Fitzy’ and even Edna will be watchable for the length of the coverage either.

    If you want to see clever satire – watch anything by Chris Morris – ‘The Day Today’, ‘BrassEye’, ‘Four Lions’. Or other Very good examples like ‘The Thick of It’ et al. And the Working Dog team. Even John Clarke and Brian Dawe – far more clever than anything I’ve seen from the Chaser. I must admit I cringed when I heard they were doing a commentary – a bunch of moderately-talented guys trying to out-do each other in the tasteless stakes for several hours would be a massive turn-off.

    Hey, there’s a Space Shuttle launch on Saturday morning – I bet if the Chaser covered it we’d have several hours of Challenger and Columbia ‘going off with a bang’ jokes. Good on the powers that be for reigning in these wannabes.

  6. I think they may well be aware of the the dreadfull security debarcle the Chaser boys caused here in Australia……and were not prepared to risk something like that again…..

  7. @Buddha is making sense. It seems a bit odd that they’ve seemingly singled out a comparatively small production in a distant country, and so close to the date as well.

  8. “TEN’s coverage with Fitzy, Wippa and Lucy McDonald will also go ahead because it isn’t planning to be strong satire.”

    As if it could be.

  9. @Buddha: Interesting suggestion. I’m sure it wouldn’t be unheard of for a commercial network to make secret complaints in high places to try and rain on an opposition’s parade.

    @Moanique: Apparently Barry Humphries is invited, not Dame Edna. Will be some quick costume changes on the day I imagine!

  10. Oh well instead of watching ABC2 I will be watching ABC1 for the coverage. As much as I could rely on Nine and Ten, I feel the ABC to be the best choice due to being the most trusted network and ABC is taking the BBC feed which is the UK’s best broadcaster. Where I am 7 has AFL so why bother with them and who knows which one of their annoying personalities will pop up.

  11. Reading in today’s The Australian and other newspapers online, some of the papers go into a fair bit of detail about how the ban was communicated to the ABC over Easter. Whilst there is nothing to suggest that other international networks’ satire shows weren’t also targeted, it does seems that the Chasers may have been the sole target.

    Does make anyone out there in TVTonight Land not wonder how Clarence House got to hear about a satire show on a secondary digital channel way out in Oz?

    Clearly, AAPTV or BBCWW would normally monitor license holders for unauthorised or out-of-context use of the live telecast material in their home markets – but, for me anyway – Clarence House’s involvement adds a different slant on the story.
    It’s not as if the ABC was not promoting the ABC2 Chaser show. From what I’d noticed the promos seemed to be in fairly high rotation.

    Is it not possible that Nine or Seven might have tipped CH or someone in a high place off?

    After all, by having a parallel coverage (albeit satirical) of the live telecast on ABC2, could the two channels combined not add to the overall rating for ABC TV on Friday night?

    With all the money being spent by Nine & Seven on their hyped-up coverages and celebrity presenters, maybe they’d think that for ABC (which hasn’t spent up big) to win the night, even narrowly, would not be a good look publicly back home.

    If it was the case – that CH was somehow tipped off about ABC’s plans (no matter how remotely), my money would be on Nine to have played dirty rather than Seven.

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