Over the weekend the battle of the football codes was fought out in the twitterverse. Who would have the best Grand Final entertainment?
The commentary around the AFL was almost exclusively about the performance of Meat Loaf – which was universally bagged.
Typical comment - To be fair to #meatloaf, it’s very hard to sing and chew gum at the same time.
One of the problems of having a high profile (and extremely expensive) act is that the rest of the entertainment gets entirely overlooked.
So for my money, take out Meat Loaf and the AFL entertainment was well done.
Then on Sunday we had another overseas act in Kelly Clarkson (although probably not as expensive as Mr Loaf) for the NRL event.
However the NRL event suffered from gross over-commercialisation. Watching the channel 9 TV coverage was watching 30 mins of commercials being interrupted by crosses to the Olympic Stadium for even more ads for Toyota and Telstra.
This was also reflected in the Twitter comments such as - wish Ch9 would stop interrupting the commercials with bits of entertainment.
The most positive comments on the weekend were for Eskimo Joe at the NRL.
Let’s face it – outside Australia, New Zealand and New Guinea – the rest of the world couldn’t care less about our football, Grand Final or not. The entertainment has got to be for a domestic audience, a very parochial one at that. So stick with Aussie talent. Some of them in the past have been great – John Farnham, Cold Chisel and INXS to name a few.
I must also point out that not only am I a Meat Loaf (nee Marvin Lee Aday) fan I also own the Jim Steinman LP “Bad for Good” – tragic?
