Losing Sleep Over It
The Sunday Age
Sunday April 30, 2006
For the past six weeks I've been getting to bed awfully late on Friday nights - so late, in fact, it's the early hours of Saturday morning. Unfortunately, no matter how quietly I creep into bed, my beloved always wakes with the kind of start you'd expect had you set off a firecracker on her bedside table. "WHAA?! NGGGA?! WASSIT?!" she cries as I soothe her and simultaneously yank back the quilt she has annexed for herself. "Calm down, it's only me. Go back to sleep," I say. "Gnagh humpha," she replies before dropping off again as if from a cliff.
It's regrettable that I give my beloved such a fright once a week but until I get our VCR fixed, or until Channel Nine starts showing rugby league at an hour not renowned for hauntings, I don't have many options. I suppose I could just miss the game altogether or, less dramatically, sleep in the front room on game nights, but neither option has much appeal for two reasons: I like rugby league (GASP!) and it's getting cold. We had guests sleep in our poorly insulated front room last weekend and they snap froze like a couple of supermarket chickens. If Nine's programmers think I want a similar fate for myself, they're crazy.Of course my only sensible option is to get the VCR fixed. It's lamentable that in this day and age so much should rely on a VCR, a technology developed decades ago by conspiratorial governments looking to counteract overpopulation of the planet ("Not now, darling, I just got out Beaches on VHS!"), but what can you do? All I do know is that I simply can't continue to stay up until 2.30am on Saturday mornings waiting for the fulltime whistle. Not only is it making me sluggish on Saturdays when I'm supposed to be doing manly things around the house like lying on the couch and reading the sports pages, but it's exposing me to so many ads for "sexy" chat lines that I fear I may one day buckle under the weight of breathless suggestion and make a call. "Hi. . . Candy, is it? . . . What's that? You're feeling horny? Um, that's nice . . . I mean, I'm happy for you and everything, but I was wondering if you're watching the NRL on Nine? Can you believe how much ball the Dragons are coughing up?"Despite Nine having long ago set the precedent of burying rugby league on Friday and Sunday nights, it still bothers me. Not only is the Melbourne-based league fan barely catered to by the local media but the free-to-air station with the rights to the game seems to hold it, and its fans, in contempt. Melbourne league fans who can't afford to cough up for Foxtel see so little of the game, they could sit next to Andrew Johns on a Newcastle bus and not know who he is. I dare say they'd even struggle to recognise a Melbourne Storm player if he knocked on their door and introduced himself. And little wonder. In the past 38 rounds of NRL the Melbourne Storm have had only a single match on free-to-air. Think about that the next time you go to NSW or Queensland and think to grumble about the comparatively thorough AFL coverage. But you know all this. People like me have been moaning about it for years. Nothing has changed but questions remain. Why, for instance, can't Nine show NRL matches at 10.30ish on Friday and Sunday nights instead of some old movie everyone has either seen a dozen times or wouldn't want to see if you put a gun to their head? Surely the ratings wouldn't be so much worse for a 10.30pm NRL game if Nine promoted it and persisted with it long enough to establish it in such a reasonable timeslot. There is at least hope for the coming years in that after this season Nine will no longer have the rights to AFL. Surely then it will be in the station's interests to give league a better go in Melbourne if only for the fact it'll have nothing better to do and all that extra cash lying about. The sweet irony is that if Nine does finally get behind NRL in Melbourne, the man at the helm of the culture change will be Eddie McGuire, Nine chief executive, Collingwood president and AFL heavyweight. It'll go against the grain, sure, but Eddie's a professional and I'm sure when he realises he's improving the sleep patterns of Melbourne's disenfranchised league fans, not to mention their easily startled partners, he'll feel a whole lot better about it.
© 2006 The Sunday Age
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