Content warning: This article contains a mention of suicide.
The general reaction to the accusations of assault levelled at comically handsome Australian actor Jacob Elordi appears to fall into two categories — international audiences genuinely concerned by the allegations, and Australians who think it’s basically fine given the person on the receiving end was representing The Kyle & Jackie O Show.
Joshua Fox, a producer for the worst Australian export this side of climate change, described approaching the actor outside a pub and asking for a jar of his bathwater (a reference to a scene in Elordi’s recent hit film Saltburn). The conversation allegedly turned nasty after Fox refused to delete the footage he was taking — no longer a failed prank, now “evidence” of the intimidation Fox was feeling. At this point, according to Fox, “Jacob flips and he kind of pushes me against the wall, and his hands are on my throat”.
According to Fox, he’s not pressing charges, and according to the police, no one was injured.
Elordi’s celebrity ensured the allegations made international news — but almost no coverage, whether in NBC, The New York Post (which took its copy from news.com.au), The Cut, BBC, Variety or The Hollywood Reporter had anything to say about the show’s history or reputation.
“The problematic The Kyle & Jackie O Show” is how Jezebel, one of the few publications to chuck the program’s title into Google and see what came up, describes them:
… the Kyle & Jackie O Show has had its share of controversies throughout the years — most famously, during a 2009 on-air lie detector test prank that culminated in a 14-year-old girl’s admittance that she’d been raped. In response to the incident, the shock jocks simply offered free counseling to the girl’s family.
What makes this particularly surprising is that many of these publications wouldn’t need to look beyond their own archives to find stories about the show. The BBC last covered Sandilands during the 2015 stoush over then-agriculture minister Barnaby Joyce’s threat to euthanise Johnny Depp’s dogs after they had been snuck into Australia:
Kiis FM ‘shock jock’ Kyle Sandilands told Joyce in an angry telephone interview on Friday that he sounded ‘like an absolute clown’ who made Australians ‘sound like a bunch of hillbilly redneck losers’ by publicly threatening the life of someone’s pets.
The Post listed the show’s various crimes against decency in 2012, as did the Financial Times and US network ABC, after Kyle and Jackie O’s stablemates Mel Greig and Michael Christian blagged their way into a phone call with a nurse treating Kate Middleton, shortly after which, the receptionist who had put them through took her own life.
It says something that at the time, while invariably these lists mentioned the lie-detector debacle, the attack on journalist Alison Stephenson and various forms of bullying posing as pranks (convincing a woman her mother was seriously injured and needed an ambulance, bringing a woman to panicked sobs with the threat they would send her niece back to their native Cambodia if she failed their game show format), only the ABC found space for the spectacularly, bafflingly awful “joke” Sandilands made at the expense of Magda Szubanski. Szubanki’s weight loss would be improved by a stint in a concentration camp came the jocular argument of a man who, to this day, is one of the richest and most powerful figures in Australian media.
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