Aussie Bitch Fest Shocks Brits!

Viewers of Britain's Dancing On Ice 2011 are up in arms over Australian choreographer Jason Gardiner's remarks to contestants. Jason is a judge on the show.They reckon he's far too bitchy and mean. Some have even started face book pages to get Gardiner sacked although few people have joined.

While Jason makes panelists like X Factor's Simon Cowell  look tame, he's standard fare for Australian TV where he honed his art.

Visitors from the UK and USA are often shocked at the sheer bitchiness that passes for normal discourse between colonials.

Where this was inherited from we aren't too sure.  It's been speculated that  it developed in the first hundred years as working class Irish, East End and other British convicts developed a sort of secret language to speak derogatorily about their British jailers without them understanding.

Gardiner trained at the Australian Ballet School and New York's Steps academy and the Actor's Centre in London. He's choreographed West End shows and worked  with Kylie Minogue, Elton John and Shirley Bassey as well as appearing on dozens of English TV shows.

He's actually a nice chap off stage without a hint of the bitch about him and his act is pretty deliberate.
Producers must absolutely love him for the ratings.

Jason follows in the footsteps of local performers like the late Bernard King-one of the nicest and kindest people to meet in person but wow-could he dish it out when on the judging panel of a talent quest. Beneath Dame Edna's mega star exterior runs one of the most vicious and bitchy dialogues ever uttered by man.

Below are 3 videos- one is Jason Gardiner ticking of competitors. It's pretty tame stuff compared to local shows.

The following is the wonderful Bernard King who could talk through mud and have an audience collapsing in tears of laughter. He demolishes a hapless contestant on the 80's Pot Luck (fast forward is recommended)

The third is really how the contestants should settle matters - take a leaf out of broadcaster Ron 'Won'Casey page when he got stuck into former pop star Normie Rowe on the Midday Show.
(note the wonderful and very British Diana 'Bubbles' Fisher wife of Sir Humphrey Fisher-in the background saying "no no no!")

Dancing On Ice 2011 Jason Gardiner offensive comments to Karen Barber

Germaine Greer's Bra, Alice Springs and the Paparazzo

iIt was one of the tales told at the memorial service for the late photographer Peter Carrette who died suddenly last Sunday of a heart attack.

At least 400 gathered at the Bondi Pavilion on a sunny Friday-Carrette loved Bondi-to mourn the loss of the "grandfather" of the paparazzi.

Carrette , Germaine Greer and actor Jack Thompson were in Alice Springs to do a story about the local Aboriginals and had decided to camp overnight by a river. Peter awoke in the morning to find Germaine washing her bra and smalls in the river. He took some snaps that later ended up in a magazine. She never spoke to him again.

Singer Normie Rowe, broadcaster Holga Brockmann, actors Michael Caton and Jack Thompson-all got up to speak movingly as they recalled their good friend.
Holga spoke of Carrette's bold move in getting into Grenada in a hired smuggler's boat to greet  the invading US Army ahead of the world's media waiting in Barbados for official US Army transport.



TV host Mike Munro

 General Norman Schwarzkopf, leading the US troops assumed Carrette was the official army photographer and gave him carte blanch, earning Peter 2 Time Magazine front covers and the best world wide coverage of the war.

Caton spoke of the time Carrette was captured by Nicaraguan guerrillas and forced to photograph executions-"to show the outside world" how determined they were. 



Glen A.Baker & Normie Rowe

 Jack Thompson, unable to hold back flowing tears spoke of Carrette's devotion to the  Krousar Thmey Orphanage that he and Peter set up in Cambodia which has grown to a dozen homes and which both have almost raised a million dollars to keep going.

His 85 year old mother Gladys, unable to travel from her home in Epping in the UK had Thompson read out Peter's favourite poem that he had learnt by heart as a child-Rudyard Kipling's 'If' and Pete's daughter Madison sang the 'happy birthday' song she wrote for him when she was 12 years old.

It was a send-off Peter Carrette would have loved-good friends, celebrities, the media, a few curious gatecrashers followed by  lots of drinking later at the Bondi  RSL Club !

You can donate to the First Cambodian Foundation ( Krousar Thmey)  assisting deprived children here !