Once upon a time, radio comedy crews would release a CD at Christmas collecting all the highlights of their efforts over the past year. But sketches aren't being done these days - seemingly they require more effort than saying "OmiGawd, Amy Winehouse is such a skank!" - and even the on-air chats are often down to a minute or so, which hardly seems worth preserving forever when the only insight that comes out of them is "Let's go to the callers - what would you do with Amy Winehouse's liver?" So we get podcasts. It's all we deserve.
The only people who would buy a CD of prank calls are morons who find prank calls funny. The only people who find prank calls funny are the kind of morons who deserve to have their money taken away from them before they donate it to Pauline Hanson. So in a way, everyone's a winner as long as Tilley keeps pumping these CDs out. Over in the world of podcasting, Nova Melbourne's Hughesy & Kate serve up around 20 minutes of supposed highlights from that morning's show every weekday. Great! Everyone likes free content...except that the Hughesy & Kate podcast is just a condensed version of their in-no-way-unique mixture of stories from that day's papers (or, latterly, Twitter), dull personal anecdotes, cod-sociological insights, interviews with crap guests and self-obsessed whinging. And no one sane person wants to waste their download limit on that! It's easy to see why Triple J fans are so dismissive of commercial radio. Commercial radio is constantly throwing together three strangers in the hope of generating some kind of comedy chemistry: Triple J would clearly never do such a thing. And they'd never let the horrible, misshapen creature stagger on for a good two years after it became obvious to everyone listening that while two of the on-air team were roughly on the same wavelength, the third was just making semi-insulting comments no-one really cared about.
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