You have to chuckle at the ludicrous three-way ping-pong being played between Channel Nine, News Limited and Gordon Ramsay. No greater triumvarite of self-promoters ever crossed swords, yet since the weekend they seemed to have captured the attention of the gullible masses. We’ve had parental complaints about Ramsay’s bad language in front of their children at his live Melbourne show (a bit like going to Perisher and complaining about the snow). We’ve heard to-and-fro-ing between Ramsay and Tracy Grimshaw, the mournful talking-head who is the ‘victim’ of Ramsay’s ‘attacks’. We’ve seen the ubiquitous Youtube footage and tut-tutting from just about every rent-a-quote in Melbourne.
It’s my contention that this whole thing is an American wrestling-style beat-up, dreamed up on-the-wire by Ramsay’s agents, PR suits and Channel Nine. It is all geared at whipping up publicity for Ramsay and his programmes, once hot property for Nine but since flagging in the ratings. Others with a working knowledge of the media concur. Ramsay’s public persona is that of a crass, boorish and foul-mouth yobbo, but he is nobody’s fool. Grimshaw, once a real journalist, is now little more than a network puppet. If she was truly aggrieved by Ramsay’s ‘attack’ then she should raise the question of why her employer ran two hours of his TV shows last night – after, of course, yet another ACA re-hash of Tracy vs. Gordon – when Nine might instead support her by suspending them Chaser-style.
Today the Herald Sun went even further with a gutter-delving implication that Ramsay might well be gay. The ‘evidence’ of this, says the Spun, is a 15-year-old caution stemming from drunken nakedness and tomfoolery in a Tube station toilet – because as we all know, every canned-up young bloke who gets his kit off or flops out his shrivelled manhood must “bat for the other team”. For additional confirmation of Ramsay’s dubious sexuality they went to his embittered, press-savvy former lover – who is, wait for it, female. Further comment was also sought from two of Ramsay’s arch-rivals, who had nothing of note to add other than that noting that Ramsay “looks like a cross between Patrick Swayze and a ventriloquist’s dummy”. A very shaky house-of-cards indeed and one that would, on any other day, never get past Murdoch’s in-house lawyers.
None of this concerns me too much: commercial TV and its stars will always play contrived games of cross-promotion and draw in the celebrity-obsessed masses when they do. What bothers me is the completely inappropriate involvement of our political leaders. Kevin Rudd, now so populist that he comments on just about every non-political matter raised at pressers, referred to Ramsay as “low life”. Julia Gillard more pithily advised him to ”stay in the kitchen” and make “nice things for people to eat” - good advice that Jules and Kev might want to follow themselves by confining themselves to matters of government. Their attempt to extract votes by tapping into a public ‘issue’ that is, at best, wildly exaggerated and, at worst, fabricated cheapens politics and insults those whose concerns run deeper than a foul-mouthed chef and a nondescript TV host.
