0 - Eureka Street

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busters, you young expletive.'
THe ReMOn.
You've made me miss Myth-
'In a minute.'
'You arc flicking between hip-hop hoes and the ninth repeat of
Seinfeld. Come on, be fair.'
'Well, what about the Osbourncs marathon on MTV'
'Only if you don't flick to Family Guy in the ads.'
'You 're such a TV nazi, Mum.'
There just isn't enough angst in modern domestics. Aeschylus
would have known how to put it. Dissension in the home was his
thing. How might he have framed such conflict
Enter Clytemnestra, mightily fed up.
Clytemnestra: Orestes, by the Fates, where is the Zeus-damn
remote!
Orestes: Chill out, Mum. I'm watching South Park.
Clytem: Not that crypto-fascist neo-con misogynistic bullshit
again! By Hera, it must be the 17th repeat. And you've been swigging
milk from the amphora again instead of using a goblet.
Orest: Aw; Mum, don't keep going on and on.
Clytem: Ju st wait till your father gets home. It 's nearly time
for Oprah. And have you been pinching my fags again!
Enter Agamemnon, pursued by a Fury.
Agamemnon: Gimme that remote, oh son of my loins. I want
to watch The Footy Show.
Chorus: Oh rash words, Agamemnon! The house of Atreus
needeth not footy, but Oprah, and possibly even Dr Phil in such
perilous times. Restore to thy spouse her rightful remote for she
doth get right narky about it.
Clytem: Shut up you lot. Oi, Fury-hand me that axe.
Tastes differ: ask anyone you know what their favourite TV
program is, and you will probably strain the relationship. No, you
say, scandalised. You're not telling me you actually watch The Apprentice
Well, says your ex-friend, you did watch Big Br-
I know, I know. Gawd, do I ever have to live that one down!
But surely there has to be a bottom line, a measure of quality
that goes beyond brutal self-interest and solipsism. What have
you really got in common with someone who prefers The Don
Lane Show to Four Corners and scores Graham Kennedy's obscure,
forgotten Coast to Coast higher than Media Watchl These
were the measured judgments of the pundits at Nine who made
a league table of Australia's 'best SO programs' over the 50 years
that TV has been in Australia. And as they carefully pointed out,
it was not the current Media Watch that gained their accolade.
No, indeed: they praised mightily the erudition of its past glories
under Stuart Littlemorc, that excellent pedant. With David Marr
and Liz Jackson the program has been far more than the scourge
of the slack subby. Those two splendid journalists have from time
to time pulled down the mighty from their seats and made them
Pass the remote
answer a few hard questions. Which is possibly why the powers
at Nine who made the list felt more comfortable with the older,
less spiky format.
There were some curious choices in Nine's honour roll of the
50 top Australian programs: it was done by some process that
wasn't made plain to me.
It was not really a trip into nostalgia; the really old excerpts
were far too short. There was real gold in the tiny snippets of B &
W early programs-bits and pieces of Picl