DAVID PENBERTHY

band and father himself.

Barnes’ description of his stepfather, Reg, from whom he took his name, and how he arrived in their lives is especially poignant.

He says he believes that Reg basically arrived to save him, his siblings and their mum.

“It was an act of love,” Barnes says, in the same way that his own belated but successful conversion into a great husband was also an act of love.

I reflect on these two programs because I have spent much of the past week being seriously puzzled by the national outcry over what was an apparently seismic moment in the history of Australian television.

A former footballer has committed the cardinal sin of breaching the unwritten rules of a dopey game show, by failing to pretend that he was in love with and wanted to spend the rest of his life with one of its female contestants.

His transgression was so serious that a TV network even deployed a “news” crew to follow him on an overseas holiday with his mates where he was bailed up as if he were the late Christopher Skase hiding out in Majorca.

The best way to keep yourself abreast of every moronic development in television programming is to watch the excellent show Gogglebox to see the manner in which other normal people react to having their intelligence assaulted by a steady stream of garbage.

There is always a place for escapism but programmers seem to have forgotten there is also a place for intelligence.

When you see the reaction of the Gogglebox crew to programs such as the McCartneyCorden outing, or Barnesy’s remarkable retelling of his life story, it does make you wonder why more TV producers don’t sit down and experiment with the following novel idea.

Here’s a plan: what about we just try to make something that’s really, really good? 33 million YouTube views for Sir Paul and book sales for Barnesy of more than 250,000 suggest there’s a mass audience for it.

David Penberthy is a News Corp Columnist. Regular Sunday Territorian columnist Hayley Sorensen is on leave