Mercado on TV: Rich pickings on the ABC include a party and a farewell

Plus new offerings from Apple TV+, Stan and Prime Video

Next week is a huge week for our national broadcaster, with ABC 90 Celebrate (Thursday), The ABC Of … with David Wenham (Tuesday) and Farewell to Leigh Sales: A 7.30 Special (Friday). So many clips to choose from, and yet the ABC archivists and librarians who know about this material are about to lose their jobs.

 

Leigh Sales

 

The ABC Of … is hosted by David Wenham and his first guest is Ita Buttrose. She is defending the archive cuts as a consequence of digitisation, but he disagrees, saying the show could not have been made without those staff. Happy Birthday Aunty, be careful about who you put out to pasture. 

 
David Wenham
 

ABC 90 Celebrate couldn’t have picked a better host than Tony Armstrong, now hotter than ever thanks to a Most Popular New Talent Logie win. At this rate, he will be hosting the Logies next year, and that might be a very good thing. This year’s ratings may have been solid, but the show was dull and interminably long. 

Keep Tony Martin and Stephen Hall’s obscure TV voiceover gags, but blow up everything else. Never again should the TV Week Logie Awards be so lazy as to not even update the end credits, meaning they named the editor of TV Week from 2019, instead of the current one. Yep, the magazine that started the whole thing. 

 

Hamish Blake with his Gold Logie

Don’t get me started about the disrespect shown to Neighbours, with the devastated cast sitting in a separated section at the back of the room, with two giant cameras obscuring their view of the stage. The Logies ran for over four hours, but they wouldn’t give the cast a couple of minutes for what would have been a standing ovation. 

Chilling new true-crime documentary Revealed: No Mercy No Remorse (Stan) is about the Frankston serial killer, with police tapes revealing the casual way in which he placed himself at every murder, but always with a too-detailed explanation. It’s creepy as.

If you like Maya Rudolph, Loot (Apple TV+) is a lot of fun, especially with a cast that includes Fire Island’s Joel Kim Booster, a cameo from Adam Scott, and the fabulous Michaela Jay Rodriguez, the Emmy-nominated trans actor from Pose.

New BBC drama Chloe (top image – Amazon Prime) stars Erin Doherty (The Crown’s Princess Anne) as a demented office worker who spends far too much time stalking people on social media. When one of her favourites dies, she brazenly assumes a new identity to infiltrate the grieving group of friends. Please, can someone now infiltrate the Logies. 

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