Seguimiento de la implementación de las recomendaciones formuladas en la Segunda Ronda

Since going to air in 2009 the Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA) – charged with overseeing the broadcasting standards regime in New Zealand – have received multiple complaints about 7 Days’ content with five of these investigated by the authority’s board. Of these five the authority upheld only one. In 2010 the Broadcasting Standards Authority received a complaint from Ralph Gordon of Dunedin in regards to TV3’s 10pm broadcast of 7 Days on 25 September 2009. Gordon was particularly concerned about the segment’s linking of a young primary school child to adult sex, albeit in the defence of humour. Before closely examining the specificities of this one complaint and the satire’s ‘misfire’, it is first important to contextualise this episode within the frame of satire as a discursive practice.

Firstly, the show was in its first series and this was only the sixth episode. 7 Days was still finding its feet, and the comedians were testing the boundaries of taste at 10pm. With its AO ratings and pre-show disclaimer - “the following show contains bad language and is for adults only… just a moment… the Prime Minister’s overseas, oh fuck it then!” And in accordance with its late time-slot, it would be reasonable for the producers to assume the majority audience was in fact adults. During this episode the teams played the game ‘My Kid Could Draw That’. This particular segment parodies the visual aesthetics of the news, specifically the deployment of visuals to give greater authenticity to a story, and the way in which the news only ever presents a select few facts to represent the wider story. Moreover, you are about as likely to listen to a beautiful news anchor as you are a ‘cute kid’. The hailed genre markers are weak,

7 _{See Shahira Fahmy’s article on the toppling of the Saddam statue (“They Took It Down”: Exploring}

Determinants of Visual Reporting in the Toppling of the Saddam Statue in National and International Newspapers, 2007)

109 but they are there to a small degree. The topic itself is located in the political realm, clearly locating this segment in the frame of satire.

In the segment a young girl, introduces herself as Raelene from Owairoa Primary School and holds up an A3 drawing. Owairoa is a in the affluent suburb of Howick in Auckland, a far-cry from the prison life depicted in Raelene’s drawing.

Raelene had drawn a picture of an unidentified news story and the teams were challenged to decipher her scribbles. After some banter by the teams, team two offered their answer and a clip of the girl explaining her picture was shown: “since the prisons are overflowing with prisoners they’ve thought of an idea to have all of the prisoners in one bed, oh, two prisoners in one bed, and this is a jail and up here there’s already two prisoners sleeping. No money plus a lot of prisoners equals a lot of grossness up ahead”. Host Jeremy Corbett then joked about the common assumption that prisoners engaged in sexual relations with one another: “The number of prisoners in New Zealand has reached an all-time high this week meaning some jails are resorting to double-bunking to manage the overflow. Now I’m married, so if I have to share a room with my sexual partner, why shouldn’t they?” Team 2’s Madeleine Sami then said, “I think the sign should have read a lot of grossness and a lot of head”. Team 2 leader Dai Henwood said “I like the fact that when the prisoners went to bed she drew them with little stripy Noddy hats” to which Paul Ego retorted “it’s nice that they had their little sleepy hats cos then the big guy comes in and goes ‘ooh. Can’t bugger him it’s nigh-nighs’” and Rove followed with “or, thanks it gives me something to hang on to”.

Gordon’s complaint was upheld for the BSA agreed that the segment breached standard 1 of the BSA’s guidelines: good taste and decency. The BSA said that the segment unnecessarily linked a child to a series of denigrating sexual innuendos and was thus exploitative. TV3 argued that the programme was aired at 10pm and therefore it was unlikely that children were to be watching, and furthermore that sexual innuendo was “common fodder” for comedians (Broadcasting Standards Authority, 2010). Despite upholding the complaint the BSA did not make any orders to TVWorks Ltd on this occasion. Instead, this particular incident was deemed a “novel situation” and the broadcasters simply informed of their breach to thereby provide some guidance toward their future content choices (Broadcasting Standards Authority, 2010). Here the satire has misfired for Gordon; he reads its truthiness as inappropriate and therefore not set for opposition in the second phase. According to Gordon, the juxtaposition of a young girl with criminals and prison sex is not a claim to seriousness. The BSA however have

110 recognised both phases of the satire, and read it to completion, affirming Gordon’s reading but also the intended target of the satire (the Justice system in NZ, criminals who disrupt the social order). The misfire here is not that Gordon ‘didn’t get it’ but instead that he read the set up as inappropriate and ill fitting. Here Gordon is choosing not to ‘get it’ because of the distasteful violations this humour invokes, a threat to universal claims of morality is made by this segment when it brings a little girl into graphic descriptions of heterosexual and homosexual sex acts. Here Gordon’s claims about appropriateness superseded the intended critique of poor Government funding to the justice department.

As such, it is naïve to suggest that ‘not getting it’ is always a mis-matching of hailed schema and the audience, but rather it can sometimes be a ‘choice’, a pointed omission. As Simpson puts it “it is one thing to recognise and redeem the claim of insincerity but another entirely to endorse the claim of appropriateness. Satirical uptake, as the foregoing discussion should underscore, inheres in a structured framework of interpretive positions… Uptake is thus grounded in decisions about whether or not to participate in the pragmatic framework of humour and about whether to allow in or to block the variables which influence and shape humour processing strategies” (Simpson, 2003, p. 174). Satire requires an underlying ironic disposition in order to ‘fire’, and this depends a great deal on the disposition of the satiree and to what level they will participate in the humour making process. Irony is a pragmatic process that bears many connotations. Here 7 Days’ attempt at satirical discourse is weak and the reception accordingly divided.