Ya gotta wonder!
Years ago, at someone else’s (OK, my ex-wife, but people get upset when I mention my ex-wife so I’m just going to say “someone” and hope nobody asks who) insistence I watched the first episode of an Australian soap called “Chances”. When it was over, she said that it seemed better than your average soap. I didn’t agree, but I said nothing. Anyway, we started watching it on a regular basis. By week four, she no longer wanted to watch it, but I was hooked. Each week had managed to hit a new low in television writing, and I was of the belief that they couldn’t do worse. Each week, they’d proved me wrong. Surely, week five couldn’t deliver something worse.
Ah, it did!
In the end, I couldn’t decide whether the writers were doing some sort of limbo – “how long can we go?”! Or whether they were using the money for drugs and alcohol and with each passing week, they were consuming more substances and deciding that they might as well turn something in and have one more party before they were sacked, but unfortunately nobody actually bothered to read the script before they started shooting.
What’s this got to do with “continuity and change”?
Well, I guess most of you heard that the Liberals “continuity and change”…
Hey, remember when we hoped that Turnbull would replace the three word slogan? No? Neither do I!
Anyway, I guess most of you heard that the Liberals “continuity and change” was stolen from “Veep” – a comedy starring Julia Dreyfus – about the US Vice President.
To be fair, she does say “change with continuity” while the Liberals used the word “and”, so any suggestion that their speech writers were guilty of plagiarism can be defended on the grounds that only two thirds of it was plagiarised.
However, the question for me is simple: Are the people who write the Liberals three word slogans like the writers of “Chances”? Are they just seeing what they can get away with?
But I guess that for others the questions will be such silly ones as:
1. Did the talking point writers know what they were doing in stealing from a TV show, or where they like Scott Morrison and just out of the loop?
2. Will Tony Abbott claim credit for the fact that Turnbull is just a continuation of his three word slogans, prompting Mr. Turnbull to tell us that his three word slogan has no verb, leading to many expressing the view that similarly, Malcolm lacks “doing words”?
3. Will the next thing be to borrow Obama’s election slogan of “Change you can believe in” and turn it into “Continuity you can believe in”? Or will they try: “Change we don’t believe in”. Or better yet: “Climate change we don’t believe has continuity”. Before finally settling on “Continuity you can’t believe in”…
4. Will the writers of “VEEP” sue the Liberals for a copyright infringement, or will they be happy just to steal ideas from them for future programs?
Whatever, there’s never been a more exciting time to be a writer of satire!
