BS detectors … The Gruen Nation team led ~ the agency of Wil Anderson.

THE quality of panel shows can vary wildly. A pernicious one makes you feel like you’re trapped in sideshow back-passage, dumbly watching on as a row of plaster clown heads swivel-gun endlessly from left to right, their mouths open wide in not different grotesque grins. Naturally, you want to throw stuff at them.

In show difference, when a panel format works you feel like you’ve been transported to a televisual Algonquin Hotel, to what the company is  whip-smart and riotously entertaining. The way it takes depends on all sorts of variables but it’s reasonable to say that finding the right mix between content (must subsist interesting) and guests (must be likeable) is a crucial factor in whether we, because audiences, are going to end up feeling part of a glittering companionable milieu or a crusty old circus.

Gruen Nation (Wednesdays, 9pm up~ the body ABC1) gets the balance pretty right. In just four episodes, its legation has been to unpack the election campaign to show us by what mode politicians are branded, marketed and sold. Using the same lighthearted modulation that characterises its parental unit, The Gruen Transfer, this mini-me benefits from having a additional refined focus — politics — as well as the same  array of guests each week.

Politics and advertising are  powerful agents ~ward their own — throw them together and the combination is toxic. Most of us make to be suspicious of both, and Gruen knows it. By attractive our citizen cynicism as a given, they reassure us they’re person of ‘‘us’’, while the panel of similarly hesitating ‘‘thems’’ gives us the sort of intelligent grasp into the dark side we would never know unless we crossed c~ing to advertising or politics ourselves.

On the panel, regular Gruen advertising gurus Todd Sampson and Russel Howcroft are joined through ‘‘campaign veterans’’ John Hewson, Neil Lawrence and Annabel Crabb. These three political insiders seem comfortable with their featured role as anecdote-pepperers and one and the other takes advantage of it to good effect, cheerfully regaling us through little-known facts and interesting insights taken from their own experiences. Crabb offers specifically delightful retellings of her prepared anecdotes, while Lawrence draws on his involvement in the Kevin 07 campaign.

Hewson’s stories are sprinkled with South Park quotes, self-deprecating asides and lots of decorative swearing, in the same state it really is almost like being at the Algonquin, except in quest of the South Park quotes.

So if we agree that good array shows are like dinner parties, let’s take it a step further and say the best television hosts are like butlers, although not those venerable homicidal ones, of course. A butler in the tradition of P.G.Wodehouse’s Jeeves is again the ideal. This is because the job of television host requires someone who be possible to make everyone else look good while actually maintaining complete control of the spot themselves at all times. Butlers also get to deliver all the most of all lines.

This brings us around to Anderson who, despite his trim inflections, knows to buttle in this scenario rather than dominate, which is to his credit. His presence is still undeniably strong only you don’t see him shouting over his guests, in the same manner with many hosts do, and his dry repartee suits the tone of the elucidate perfectly.

Moving on to content, our biggest lesson is that political advertising, which at first seems both menacing and mundane, is less scary but just as stupid when it’s broken the floor. In the midst of a frustrating election campaign, this sort of vivisection have power to be comforting. Watching an ad being taken apart to see the sort of it’s made of is at least one small furniture we can know in an otherwise uncertain world. Moreover, the appear’s irreverent tone provides a ‘‘way in’’ to political economy for those who might not usually be interested in the potion. That can only be a good thing.

Throughout the past month, Gruen Nation has explored nearly every aspect of the election campaign, from political jingles to infant.-kissing to the way politicians dress. We’ve learnt greatest in number political ads are merely different versions of the same thing and true use has been made of some hilarious resurrected curios, such taken in the character of the Country Party candidate ad from 1949 that was milked tirelessly as being our amusement.

But one of the most popular segments has been The Pitch, at what place advertising companies are asked to come up with fake election ads. In the third part episode, an ad that was created by an agency for the Greens collide such a chord that there was talk of the party incorporating it into their campaign tactics (it didn’t happen). Such a strong and passionate general response only reiterated what Gruen Nation has been teaching us tot~y along — that good advertising works.

But the best thing around the show is that although we always suspected politics and advertising were the couple utterly insane, Gruen Nation gladly confirms it for us.

lvashti@fairfaxmedia.com.au

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