Obscure Box

ING Direct's decision to dump comedian Billy Connolly for an orangutan in its new marketing campaign is a puzzle.

Connolly is instantly recognisable. He's world famous, he's very funny, he also admits to being well off and is Scottish so comes from a nation with a reputation for looking after the money.

A perfect ambassador then you would think for a financial institution.

So why replace him with an orangutan? It's not even a real orangutan, it's someone in an orangutan costume.

Read the end of this entry ...

The whole world seems to know of the blunder on Fox8's Australia's Next Top Model final show when host Sarah Murdoch announced the wrong winner to a live pay-TV audience.

Sydney's Kelsey Martinovich, aged 19, had just delivered her acceptance speech after being told she'd beaten the Gold Coast's Amanda Ware, aged 18, to the title.

But then Murdoch told the live audience: "Oh my God, I don't know what to say right now."

The gripping moment is captured on videos posted on many news stories including The Australian's "Wrong model announced as Top Model contest winner" (Wednesday 28 September 2010).

Murdoch continues...

"It's Amanda, I'm so sorry. It was fed to me wrong. Oh God. This is what happens when you have live TV, folks. This is insane. Insane, insane, insane."

Thankfully Martinovich was gracious in defeat and has come out of all this with Foxtel sending her to New York and awarding her $25,000 as a prize.

She also gets to feature on the front cover of Harper's Bazaar with the publisher announcing it will print two editions - one featuring Martinovich and the other featuring Ware - so says The Sydney Morning Herald's "Harper's Bazaar to print Kelsey and Amanda covers" (Wednesday 28 September 2010).

What caught my eye though in the SMH's report is the typo blunder in the blunder report.

It's always the danger when you report on the mistakes of others, that you end up making a mistake yourself. Sure, the SMH's is minor compared to the Fox8 show, but it still shouldn't have happened.

I can hear the online subs now: "This is what happens when you have online news, folks."

Reports from the US that a van carrying two metal bands has crashed, as reported in "Van carrying bands crashes in Ore, vocalist killed" (Tuesday 3 August 2010) from Associated Press.

The name of the vocalist: Makh Daniels.

The name of the band he was in: Early Graves

The Aussie pop-diva is busy plugging her new album Aphrodite so it's natural then to take a look at her website to check out her past.

Plunge in to the About section and there's some interesting reading about her career.

Those of a certain age will remember her most for her character of the blonde bubbly Charlene bursting in on the TV series Neighbours. (Of course she'd been on other TV series before but this show was the one that really shot her to TV stardom.)

What kind of TV show was it? A "soap" according to the Kylie website.

Does "soap" need the quotation marks?

To me those marks tend to imply some doubt about the description.

I know it's not soap as in the cleaning product, but surely soap is also a recognised description of a serialised radio or television program characterised by the likes of Neighbours and the rest.

The phrase soap opera is in my Macquarie dictionary with the accepted alternative of just soap.

Out of interest the term soap opera for a TV series first started back in the 1930, according to the The Museum of Broadcast Communications.

The "soap" in soap opera alluded to their sponsorship by manufacturers of household cleaning products; while "opera" suggested an ironic incongruity between the domestic narrative concerns of the daytime serial and the most elevated of dramatic forms.

Kind on ironic that the entry also uses the quotation marks around the word soap, but only in the first paragraph.

However, the rest of the entry is peppered throughout with quotation marked words such as "open", "closed", "women's", "housewife", "Hollywood", "addiction" and so on.

Are they all really necessary? I "think" not.

I know MasterChef is popular but I'm thinking someone's cooking the numbers a bit too much on who's watching the Channel 10 series.

The Australian's Lara Sinclair tells in "MasterChef sparks Coles sales surge" (Monday 21 June 2010) of the shows success and the impact on sales for sponsors.

While advertising has boosted sales, it's the products and ingredients featured on the program that have famously caused runs on the goods. Sales of everything from rabbit to certain spices and even lamb brains have gone up after being featured on the program.

So who's watching the program?

Dr Huntley's research shows 70 per cent of Australians credit the show with making them more interested, experimental and enthusiastic about food, while the split of female to male viewers is surprisingly balanced at 64 per cent to 58 per cent.

Sorry? Run that by me again.

Dr Huntly is described as "Social researcher Rebecca Huntley, who conducts the annual Ipsos Mackay report into the mindset of Australians..."

I'd like to know more about the Australians she is studying. If 64 per cent of the audience is female and 58 per cent is male, that adds up to 122 per cent.

Uh?