‘’‘I think people need to start understanding that it’s not easy to win an Olympic gold medal and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a silver medal,’‘ said the 24-year-old who took Australia’s tally of second prizes to 12 after seven days of competition. ’‘I was copping questions … (from the media) last night, and the first question I got was, ’‘is it a disappointing result?’'

‘'The team’s happy, I’m happy, the head coach is happy. I’ve got thousands of messages back home that they are happy. The only people that aren’t happy are you guys. So you need to wake up.’'

So as of today, Channel Ten will no longer be broadcasting The Circle.

And that is a pity, I think. The Circle was an engaging, warm, funny show hosted by intelligent, challenging, politically astute women. At the time of its ignominious death by axing it wasn’t necessarily setting the ratings world aflame, but it was never going to – not with its gentle mid-morning timeslot and cheerily awkward infomercials. It was what it was: a daytime television show with a passionate and devoted audience, and without warning it was yanked from air and replaced with overseas content.

Why?

The fault lies, more or less, with this gentleman.

For those happily unaware of his existence – and there are thousands of you out there, millions; the ratings for his inexorably awful breakfast television show currently number less than the population of Dubbo – his name is Paul Henry.

A radio and television host originating from New Zealand, Henry was sacked in a flurry of scandal by TVNZ in October 2010 after interviewing Prime Minister John Key about the then-NZ Governor-General, Anand Satyanand.

‘(Henry) asked, wasn’t it time to appoint a G-G ’‘who looks and sounds like a New Zealander’‘?

The racist subtext – that a dark-skinned man with an Indian name couldn’t be a real Kiwi – couldn’t be explained away. Henry’s mocking of Indian minister Sheila Dikshit’s name around the same time sealed his fate, and – after a public backlash – TVNZ pushed him off a cliff.'

SMH – ‘Australia, meet Paul Henry – He’s Your Problem Now’ 19/02/2012

The entertainment world often has a penchant for hosts who titillate and appall, who say things others dare not and thumb their nose at ‘political correctness’. Every time that irascible cockstain Sam Newman performs in blackface on The Footy Show, or pokes fun at mentally challenged or obese people in the street, or makes the sort of rapey innuendo that should more often than not be responded to with a swift kick to the penis, hundreds – thousands! – of Channel Nine viewers tut to themselves, throw beer cans at the screen, or simply huff indignantly into their telephones. They also keep watching. Newman is the sort of ‘love him or hate him’ character network executives fap off into their Kleenex over. He says something revolting and the letters of complaint are penned in a flurry of indignation and the op-ed pieces are printed in chest-beating orgies of sanctimony and nothing changes, not really, not ever, Newman and company just keep on keeping on (see: Jones, Alan).

Henry has attempted to set himself up as this sort of patented ‘outrageous’ character – he’ll say what he wants, when he wants, about gays, refugees, women drivers, stop me if you’ve heard this one before, to hell with the pious naysayers, edgy in-your-face comedic insights brings in the viewers, bitches! It’s an act that’s been done to death, usually by people smarter and sharper than Henry and, if those who come before are anything to go by, it eventually chips away at the soul. One need only look into the cold, dead trout eyes of ‘King’ Kyle Sandilands to see that a life lived being an obnoxious fuckbag in the public eye is a life spiritually unfulfilled.

‘Guess how many times I’ve cried whilst masturbating today, loyal subjects?’

No doubt when Channel Ten signed Henry as the host of their brand new Breakfast show they were hoping some of this gormless attention-grabbing would cause a charge of outraged audiences to shriek at their television screens and hover with breathless anticipation. The three-year contract was rumoured to be worth one million dollars per year, and Ten talked up the possibility of scandal months in advance. That Paul Henry! Whatever would he say next? Tune in tomorrow at 6am!

But nobody – nobody – watched Paul Henry. And as Breakfast continues its bedraggled, confused limp into obscurity that rumoured one million dollar a year contract is now the reason a lot of very fine Channel Ten employees just lost their jobs. Hearsay has it that Ten even tried to handball Henry off to be the face of panel show Can of Worms but those involved threw a grade-A shitfit, and like a scabies-addled pound dog nobody wants to claim Henry was shunted back to the poorly-conceived hosting position from whence he came.

Because Channel Ten don’t know what to do with their bad investment, they’ve garrotted a warm, funny, politically interesting, female-driven show and left it for dead. Because they pandered to a puffed-up testicular bubo of a human being and signed him for far more money than his half-baked brand of ‘infamy’ is worth they’ve decimated the public face of their morning lineup and left people far more deserving of a decent paycheck on the unemployment line.

And this new ‘improved’ Breakfast (just you watch) will duly poach segmenteers from The Circle, and offer them less money for doing a job they once loved, and they’ll obediently go and perform because nobody wants to get a commercial overlord offside.

And it’s not good, and it’s not right, and it’s about time someone pointed out the fucking disgrace of the whole affair.

“I don’t know why I like art. I don’t know why I like nature. I don’t know why I like animals. I don’t know why I even like myself.”

“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”

• F. Scott Fitzgerald

‘Rinehart aims to change the terms of debate in Australia for good. Her fellow Channel 10 director, “Hungry Jack” Cowin, the burger man, will likely join Rinehart on the board of Fairfax. Cowin has already made clear that the Fairfax Board has every right to set the editorial tone of the papers. And that Andrew Bolt, who already has the Bolt Report show on Channel 10, would be welcome at a Rinehart dominated Fairfax to “balance the message that’s being communicated to the community”.’

Cowin himself has said newspapers are businesses, not a public service, whose purpose is to ‘'portray the facts in a manner … to attract readership’‘.’

Which means, obviously, that as Age and SMH readers we can look forward to the following headlines:

I was in two minds about addressing Bob Katter’s pompous, unbridled idiocy on The Circle yesterday (watch from 6:30 onwards) as he is quite clearly batshit, though I do believe he raises some interesting points. Bob claims that the issue of homosexuals in Australia is ‘utter irrelevancy’ and goes on to do some very clever mathematical equations, deducing that ‘in a year I would meet seventy to one hundred thousand people…guess how many people…one person – one person! – in thirty-nine years has raised that issue with me.’

We can obviously assume from this statement that Bob is unable to read:

But that is neither here nor there.

To paraphrase some singing nuns, How does one solve a problem like Bob Katter? How do you make him see there is a world outside his electorate and, like it or not, he must at least acknowledge its existence?

I don’t think there’s much point marching up and down his electoral office shouting queer slogans as he’ll just pull his enormous hat over his ears or start cunningly pretending to read his own book right in a protester’s face, a device previously employed in a time of panic.

I believe the answer is simple, gentle, and to the point.

You be the second.

If you see Bob out and about (apparently yesterday he was enjoying a coffee in South Yarra, delish!) simply approach him, politely raise the issue of gay marriage, and be on your way. Don’t shout at him, don’t point your finger in his face. Just add yourself to that ‘one person’ apparently brave enough to suggest to Bob Katter there are real live gays in Australia. Bob prides himself on being a man of the people and has proven by now that he loves numbers.

Seventy thousand people in thirty-nine years.

One person has raised the issue.

You be the second. And the third. And the fourth.

Your move.

And so it ends. Six episodes of a black little weirdo dramedy series (I despise that word, but it does seem fitting in this regard), and perhaps more than one off-colour jest startling a few dazed audience members who had kept watching after Randling.

We’d love to show you what happens in series three of Laid, but that decision is out of our hands. If you want to show your support, send an email prod in the direction of the ABC. Or your local MP. Unless your local MP is Bob Katter, in which case – move.

You want to know where this guy ends up, right?

THANK YOU WE LOVE YOUR FACES.

(p.s. I must add – the only reason I am marching around with a big drum about all this is because I love writing the show, and being a part of something left of centre on Australian television is important. The landscape needs to be a balanced one, yes – but for every Voice we need a Lawrence Leung, for every Tricky Business we need a Myles Barlow. Let the mossy underbelly of the nation’s entertainment fester freely and with your support!)

I shouldn’t be encouraging this Gotye meme. But really IT IS TOO MAGNIFICENT TO QUIT.

P.s. Props to Jess McGuire for keeping the dream alive.

While I certainly applaud Pup for just fucking off and getting married in private like a normal person (see, Lara Bingle? It’s easy!) I could live without the SMH’s vaguely offensive precis of the newlyweds' achievements:

‘Both husband, 31, and wife, 30, have websites listing their key statistics. He has played 83 Tests, scoring 6097 runs at an average of 48.78. She has a 34B bust, brown/green eyes, and wears size 7½ shoes.’

You’re better than this, Sydney Morning Herald. At least, I’d like to believe you are.

At the age of fourteen I became helplessly and hopelessly smitten with the Beastie Boys.

Their music was the soundtrack to every iota of my adolescence and ensuing fawn-like stumbling into adulthood. I wanted to emulate them, marry them, be them. Everything they professed to admire I would eventually and ill-advisedly try my hand at – including skateboarding at the Prahran bowl and taking my ‘rhyme book’ to hip-hop open mic nights (I am currently thanking baby jebus that camera phones were not around at this time as I would almost certainly have become the inadvertent star of one of those ridiculous viral You Tube clips – ‘Midget Rap Lady’ or somesuch). I procured the heart of my high-school sweetheart in the mosh pit of the 1994 Hordern Pavilion show and snuck into the band’s hotel via the service lift after they played with Helmet at Festival Hall. In New York at age twenty I would look up from a cup of terrible coffee and somehow catch the improbable sight of Adam ‘MCA’ Yauch skateboarding directly past and spend the rest of the trip listening to my then-boyfriend marvelling that he could ‘barely believe that shit…I mean, Beastie Boys! Right there on skateboards! On the streets of New York!’

I met one of my best friends Megan on the dancefloor of a Beastie Boys tribute night at The Club in Collingwood, racing over to her with an awkward, sunshiney grin because she was the only other girl I’d ever met who knew all the words to Paul’s Boutique. We started a zine and clothing label together called B-Grrrl because we thought it would impress the band, and we flyer-bombed every room of the Rydges hotel after Summersault on the off-chance MCA would seek us out.

Eighteen years later I would have my hand on Megan’s pregnant belly in an apartment in Reykjavík as we reminisced about all the tousle-headed Dickies-wearing boys we’d loved in the Beastie Boys' absence, and three days after that conversation Adam Yauch would be dead.

Some time ago I wrote in typically understated show offy fashion about Adam and the many kindnesses he showed me over the years, though I was never anything more to him than just a wide-eyed, blushing idiot in an oversized beanie. He even took me to see Miss Saigon, an unlikely event that would have barely registered a blip on his multi-layered radar but stayed seared on my soul forever like a cattle branded memory.

Adam Yauch was the totem of my wild adolescence. I wish I’d been more eloquent and impressive when we met. I wish I’d saved the answering machine message he left me. I wish I’d been able to put into words how gargantuan a gesture it was on his part to bestow a modicum of affection to someone who adored him so completely and I wish I’d clasped his hands and sung every shred of my goofy soul right into his sweet face.

Mostly I will miss his gigantic heart.