Pay TV - Friday, November 27
The Age
Thursday November 26, 2009
The Daily Show with Jon StewartComedy, 6.30pmTAKE the Jon Stewart Challenge. It's just like the Special K Challenge, except there's no small print explaining that you have to exercise for 30 minutes a day and eat potato-and-lentil curry for dinner. Any roughage you consume will be purely intellectual. What I propose is this: for the next two weeks, instead of watching Today Tonight or A Current Affair, simply flick over to Comedy and watch Jon Stewart (pictured). If, at the end of two weeks, you don't feel a little bit smarter, more media savvy and enormously entertained, well ... at least you'll have missed a fortnight's worth of beat-ups about petrol prices, wonder bras and the number of germs on your shopping trolley. The Daily Show looks like a current affairs show, smells like a current affairs show and kind of is a current affairs show but with a seriously satirical bent. Stewart and his multi-Emmy winning team of writers analyse each day's news footage, pick out the most surreal and cynical performances by politicians and other news makers and serve them up deadpan €” at least, for as long as Stewart can keep a straight face. A lot of it focuses on American politics but the way in which the subject matter is vivisected should delight viewers anywhere. Strings of sound-bite clips show politicians, pundits and newsreaders parroting the same cliches and Stewart goes into rants that perfectly capture the mannerisms and rhetorical techniques of Fox News presenters such as Glenn Beck. Meanwhile, reporters in the field chase down the big stories, such as the effect the government's "cash for clunkers" car trade-in scheme is having on the demolition derby industry and what this might mean for the car-eating monster machine known as Truckasaurus. (It was priceless to see the Obama Administration's economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, defending the program on the grounds that it immobilises rather than destroys old cars and that "the car doesn't need to be moving when Truckasaurus feeds on it".) The calibre of the studio guests is great, too €” in recent months they've included everyone from Bill Clinton to Hugh Jackman. If you don't get Comedy you can still catch The Daily Show: Global Edition on Sunday, 8.30pm, on CNN.Naked & FunnyE!, 11.30pmA HIDDEN-camera prank show from Ukraine. Almost every scene involves a woman exposing her breasts to unsuspecting men.Worth a lookClose to Home (13th Street, 7.30pm). Legal drama series starring Jennifer Finnigan.25 Biggest Real Estate Mistakes (How To, 7.30pm)The Biggest Loser UK (LifeStyle You, 7.30pm)
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