 It's a lot easier to ship an idea overseas than it is to ship a person. Which is good news for the following, because transportation would be too good for the lot of them.
Kate Langbroek is a weed. If she'd been left in her original environment - cult 3RRR presenter and hack TV writer - she probably would have done no harm. Even when Working Dog transplanted her to TV on The Panel, she was merely annoying. There at least she was kept relatively in check, surrounded by A-grade chatterboxes who for the most part ensured that she was merely just another annoying yammerer in a field of blather. But once she got away from Working Dog's control, her worst qualities ran riot and we're all the poorer for it. It's traditional when leveling insults such as "loud" "feisty" "self-opinionated" and "incapable of having a thought that doesn't spill half-formed out of her perpetually gaping maw" at a woman for the woman's defenders to counter with something along the lines of "yeah, but they'd be good qualities in a man". In this case, they'd be wrong. A male Kate Langbroek would be Kyle Sandilands or Matt Tilley: a blathering, strident, painful tool concerned solely with ensuring that they were talking the loudest the longest about the least. Gender doesn't come into it; an inability to shut the hell up does. Langbroek's reached the stage now where there's simply no point in continuing to watch a programme on which she appears. No-one else will be allowed to get a word in edgeways, no-one will be allowed to discuss a topic she's not interested in and no-one else will be allowed to get away with diverting attention from her in case they take the conversation down a path she can't follow. Mick Molloy had a character on Martin/Molloy called the Fully-Grown Baby: if he ever wants to revive it, Langbroek would be perfect for the part. On Salam Café, Dave Hughes briefly revealed himself to be a human being rather than some kind of recording of the high-pitched whine coming off an industrial drill. Then the whine started up again, and that was pretty much the end of anyone's interest in anything he had to say for the rest of his life. Denise Scott seems almost old fashioned these days, what with her occasional pauses to let the other person speak before talking over them yet again. It doesn't make what she has to say any more interesting or anything, but it does remind you that, before the rise of the Langbroeks and the Sandilands, a slightly less annoying breed of annoying performer ruled the airwaves.
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