After raising public support for a return to weekly television and recording huge ratings with its first reunion special last week, Hey Hey it’s Saturday last night practically secured its own demise when it aired a tasteless blackface skit sendup of Michael Jackson and the Jackson Five, called Jackson Jive.
Visiting American guest host Harry Connick, Jnr was visibly dismayed by the act and awarded them zero points, claiming that in the United States the act would have meant “Hey Hey there’s no more show.”
After returning from an ad break, Daryl Somers apologised to Connick Jnr, the US and Australian culture, claiming “That last act was supposed to be an edgy young comedian who could juggle axes and babies while discussing existentialism, but just seconds before the routine the entire Hey Hey studio was engulfed in a rogue mini-blackhole. As we crossed the Singularity, we believe we were transported back to 1859 New York and got mixed up in the time/space matrix with the vaudeville act ‘Dan Emmett and his Virginia Black and White Minstrels’ who were playing on Broadway at the time.”
Connick Jnr – a world renowned physicist, jazz pianist and crooner – accepted the explanation, satisfied that it was “..certainly plausible, and well within the bounds of current theoretical quantum physics and the Kroitzfeld-Yakov Mad Universe Theory if you allow for collapsing wave distortion in the unified field structure of the 14 dimension universe. Yes, I can see how that racist minstrel act might have accidentally entered our segment of the time-space universe and made it to air in prime time television. I guess it was pretty crazy of me to think that the producers would have deliberately put such a racially insensitive act on air in this modern day and age when we’re trying to bring equality to all races around the world. What Australian would find that kind of culturally backward act funny? No chance. It had to be the space-time warp thingy. ”
Somers this morning admitted the prospect of the show returning to air was now very slim after the debacle.
“I admit that once we realised we were inside an unpredictable time rift we should have cut the television feed, or at least cut to Molly Meldrum making a vaguely homosexual joke, but the event was so surprising that we simply had no idea how to deal with it.”
“I guess we were all caught up with reliving our ‘heyday’, so to speak.” he continued. “On a more positive note, CalTech (California Institute of Technology) in the United States has offered to fund research into Hey Hey it’s Saturday’s ability to manipulate time and warp peoples perception of ‘comedy’ back to the 1950’s. They believe there might be military weapons we could develop from the show, making me richer and more dangerous than ever before.”
Channel Nine, in a brief statement released this afternoon, said “We really don’t know what we’re doing. Sorry.”
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