Watching a Month's Worth of 'A Current Affair' in One Day Was Pretty Dark

You never really notice how weird A Current Affair is until you accidentally watch it. It's actually a lot more like porn than journalism, because it exists only to arouse a single, primal emotion in the human brain. In the case of ACA, that emotion is outrage.

More than a million Australians tune into Tracy Grimshaw every night, whereas only 700,000 of them watch 7:30 on the ABC. Last Thursday, it was actually the fourth highest rated show in the country, just behind The Bachelor. To me this seems appalling, but then maybe I have a stunted emotional range. I tend to avoid dodgy reports on landlords and dads who won't pay their bills and diet pills because they make me angry. And maybe this thinking is wrong.

So I sat down to reconnect with the common man and my own lost sense of fury. In a single day, I watched a whole month's worth of Channel Nine's A Current Affair. That's 30 episodes, which roughly translates to 12 hours. During that time, I stress-ate my way through an entire box of cereal and nearly went insane with restlessness before becoming completely numb, which was probably for the best. Here are some thoughts along the way, on both the show, and the experience.

There Are Only Five Stories

I sat down the living room, so I could at least look out the window when things became grim. Did you know you can watch every episode of ACA online? You can.

I soon discovered that the majority of ACA can be divided into very distinct categories. There's the Celebrity Special, which usually takes the form of a painful and humorless interview hosted by Tracy herself (although not even she could balls up a beautiful, half-hour interview with Don Burke and his inspiring wife, Maria). Then there's the Sob Story, filled with emotional twists and turns, and preferably involving a terminal illness. Then there's a reverse to this, which is Dream Come True, which often means Lottery Win. And then there are the Blatant Ads, before finally, The Name and Shame. More on that in a moment.

Everyone on the Show Is Nuts

This is Tracy Grimshaw. She is beautiful in many ways, but with a look of weariness, like she's tired of this idiotic world. Perhaps this weariness is the reason she sees everything in black and white, without shades of grey, and she's never afraid to go abruptly and directly to wherever her celebrity guests won't. But if ever there was a show that needed a strong leader to reign in all its wacky journos, it's this one.

Of all the kooky, TV-type personalities at ACA, Martin King was my favourite. He may look like a troll, but he has the heart of a poet. In one example, he hosted a truly tragic story about a child's body found in a suitcase. It was clear Mark was trying to be sensitive, and for the most part he got away with it. But at the last minute his compassion got all tangled up with his instinct for theatre, and he came out with this:

"So who are you, little one? With your quilt and your butterfly tutu. We know you were beautiful and pure and innocent and full of the wonder of life, because all children are."

There Are Some Real Shitheads Out There

By midday I was about a third of the way through. I must've watched a hundred conmen get cameras shoved in their faces and asked over and over, "Don't you feel bad? Aren't you going to give the money back?" I was struggling to focus on the stories; I wanted to quit and worst of all my mind kept on wandering to, well, anything else. But the conmen just kept coming, and I started bingeing on cereal to anchor myself.

Of all the Name and Shames, my favourite was about a hairdresser who never delivered on haircuts. I know this sounds unlikely, but the guy convinced customers to pay a hefty fee guaranteeing them six months of fabulous hair, only to vacate his shop, and set up somewhere else for a new bunch of fashion-frenzied idiots. At the end of the story the journalist even accused him of stealing the bike he was on.

It's strangely cathartic to see these faux-criminals brought to "justice", because despite everything else, you can never argue with ACA logic. It's like a fairy tale world. Good is good, bad is bad, and there's never any doubt about which is which.

You're Paying too Much for Everything

You have to hand it to a show that takes everything big, nuanced, or esoteric, and squashes it into a moron dichotomy of yes and no. Such is the complex world of product pricing. Things don't cost money because of the principals of supply and demand, they cost money because of bad people.

Supermarkets are run by bad people, and especially when it comes to those petrol discount vouchers where the petrol still ends up being more expensive than at non-supermarket stations. ACA alerted me to this, but they also have my back when it comes to bargains. For example, did you know that there is a price war happening between butchers and supermarkets? Armed with this knowledge, you can get cheap lamb shanks. There's also a skirmish between Aldi, Coles, and Woolworths over who has the cheapest fresh fruit. By the way, it's Aldi.

Real Aussies Have Real Aussie Accents

Even my dog seemed over it. I was two-thirds of the way through my A Current Affair odyssey, and the numbness was sinking in. But then I did start to notice something outrageous. And it's not that A Current Affair is explicitly racist, but if you happened to be racist, ACA would be the most comfortable, stigma affirming thing on TV.

The problem is that bad guys are nearly always foreign. They're the ones who are doing shonky, foreign work on Aussie building sites. Or inundating our classrooms with weird children and denying local kids an education. No one ever says anything bad about these foreigners, but you know they're bad because they're subtitled. Even if they speak perfect English, they'll have little subtitles under everything they say. Now I was feeling the rage, but I wasn't angry at the conmen anymore. I was angry at this dang program and how much of my life I felt like it had consumed. I started to despair for the nation we live in. Was there any good in it? Was anything worthwhile and real, or was it all just a puddle of cheap crap?

I Laughed, I Cried, I Took a Side

Amongst all the mildly racist, reactionary, and sometimes downright ridiculous scandal mongering on A Current Affair, there was the occasional nugget of gold. Towards the end I found myself yelling at the screen at a pub that wouldn't pay a granny her pokie jackpot. They claimed the machine was faulty and offered her $27 instead.

In this moment I finally saw the show for what it is. You see, ACA exists only to take your unfocused discontent, and blast it at a whole range of predictable targets. You're not cold because it's winter. You're cold because supermarkets rip you off and you're not in Phuket. And you're not tired because that's how life feels, you're tired because you haven't bought a ground-breaking new type of pillow. This is the tacky brilliance to A Current Affair: It takes your most lazy thinking, and validates it with TV.

In the end, the most frightening thing of all wasn't about some ripped-off pensioner. It was how many people watch this show every single weekday. It's been going for almost 45 years, and shows no signs of slowing, which says something about this country. What that is, I'm afraid to say.

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