THE NAKED CITY – with Miss Death, Jay Katz and Coffin Ed

A BELLY ACHE FROM UNDERBELLY

Last week we made the fearless prediction that Channel Nine’s new Underbelly series would be accompanied by a tsunami of cross promotion throughout the station’s top rating programmes. Needless to say we were spot on but the sheer voracity of the onslaught surpised even hardened media observers such as ourselves.

Firstly there was the National Nine News item about the young man in Queensland who had been bitten by a snake and had postponed a visit to the emergency ward to catch the opening night of Underbelly. Fortunately he lived to tell the tale as did thousands of others right across the country who had cancelled life saving surgery just to be at home in front of the tele.

Also incorporated into the nightly news broadcast were a number of “special reports” focusing on prostitution in the Cross – nothing we haven’t seen before and hardly unique given the rash of knock shops and massage parlours spread right across Sydney.

Then there was the insidelook at the St Vincents’ emergency department. Sydney’s own ER, complete with its nightly procession of drug and alcohol casualties and bashing victims, direct from the Golden Mile just about the road.

To top it all off, and further blur those lines between fact and fiction, there was the exclusive interview with former prostitute and police cadet Kim Hollingsworth on 60 Minutes. There’s no doubt John Ibrahim would have been first pick and who knows this shy recluse might still be persuaded to emerge from the shadows and go face to face with the 60 Minutes crew.

As far as gratuitous cross promotion goes that’s really only the beginning. Expect the Underbelly franchise to permeate every nook and cranny of Nine’s programming ouput and publicity machine in the weeks to come.

And what of Underbelly: The Golden Mile itself, trumpeted as the greatest drama series in the history of Australian TV. Frankly we were disappointed – a great story given a mediocre comic book treatment, full of jerky MTV style stop frames and pieced together with a clichéd pulp narration.

John Ibraham’s character was so sanitised he could have stepped straight off the set into a job with The Wiggles or a co-presenter on Play School. As for the Rick Baker style makeup on that over the top knife wound, it looked more like he’d been gored by a rhino at the Dubbo Open Plains Zoo than slashed on the Darlinghurst Road.

The recreated “strip”, shot in leafy Lane Cove had a cheap theatrical look and the recurring references to Kings Cross circa 2010 that crept into the street locations had us wondering just what decade we were in.