Monday, 14 May 2012

The Bikie Wars Project

In one of the most shameless but predictable self promotions of recent tv times, tonight The Project has dished up a 5 minute advertisement for Channels 10's Bikie Wars, masquerading it as a legitimate news story.

The 'news story' was all about the Bikie Gangs in Sydney, and repeatedly mentioned one of the gangs depicted in the upcoming show - there was even and interview with their bossman. Add to this the numerous mentions of street shootouts, turf wars and gang members switching clubs, and we were basically left with a synopsis of the plot of Bikie Wars. The article was even called Bikie Wars!

The next news story was about a neurotic Doctor who can't sort out her love life.

In a desperate stretch to make the promotion seem newsworthy and relevant, the thinly veiled story mentioned something about a law that didn't get passed last year that may have affected the Bikie Gangs. That being all their researcher could come up with, the rest of the story resembled a school project on Bikie Gangs, with gems of information such as "there are x number of Motorcycle Clubs in Australia, and a total of x number of members". They even had graphics to go with these insightful stats!

This self promo had all the subtlety of an ex Big Brother contestant trying to convince bouncers to let him into a nightclub at 3am. You could even see the panelists cringing while they betrayed their high-brow stances to pretend that this was news. You could just imagine Channel 10's Head of Programming typing up the teleprompters. In what I'd like to think was a protest against this cheap promo, Carrie even refused to finish the intro to the story. Career limiting move from Mother Bickmore!

The attempt at the 'bullshit cough' didn't go unnoticed by network management.

If tonight was any indication, I cannot wait to see The Project panelists when they are forced to promote some of the gems that Channel 10 has coming up like The Bingle Show and the Jersey Shore rip off!

1 comment:

Janette said...

http://i948.photobucket.com/albums/ad327/JaneFrancis/Allen_and_Unwin_as_terrorists/BrothersInArmsBikieWarsAllenAndUnwin.jpg

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