Not another bout of prattling Polonius ...

The pond's heart sank.

Not another bout of prattling Polonius's obsession with the ABC …on and on he bangs with his moralising choir, routinely hitting jarring notes, and yet for inexplicably perverse reasons, the pond stays loyal …

Why does he do it? Why does he carry on so? Has he ever thought how much his droning reminds the pond of the drone bee, which doesn't have stingers and doesn't gather nectar and pollen …

Sadly for Polonius the drone has only one important task, but in this case the drone seems to have mistaken the ABC for a queen bee, so forensically does he inspect his beloved, and the result is tedium beyond belief, and no new hive, just another example of the hive mind at work …

Well Polonius prattling on invites the pond to do a preamble. If he gets to prattle about the ABC, so does the pond.

Much of the ABC is now a distant memory for the pond. When they degutted current affairs on RN, the pond tuned out.

Oh they bleated about in Fairfax back in December last year, but so it has come to pass. Where one time the pond would contrive its schedule in such a way as to listen in, now it doesn't bother.

Back in the day, the pond had to mount significant hurdles to tune in. The merest hint of Scott Stephens and Waleed Ali blathering on was enough to induce a pond switch-off frenzy. Now RN is a memory, except for occasionally catching the Religion report as a way of keeping in touch with the outliers of Xian craziness …

The pond long ago abandoned ABC-TV.

24 is only useful for occasional field reports - who would have missed the sight of Barners looking patently absurd in his rustic hat, saying farewell to the front bench?

Much of the rest of it is unwatchable. The pond does appreciate the cleverness of having the male on the breakfast show as the brainless bimbo, all smiles and bubblehead thoughts, but truth to tell, a bimbo is a bimbo, no matter how it dresses ...

The rest of ABC TV is a desolate field of lost memories. They say it's ad free, but all the ads for apps and online access send the pond to the logarithms on YouTube just for a bit of relief …

Here's the thing. The pond can't be stuffed doing all the work downloading a show and listening to it, or becoming chained to iView or even worse iTunes … and the ABC has never gotten around to doing an app for the Shield, and now there are a zillion alternatives out there online ... 

Gone are the days of Rage … never mind intellectual property rights, almost all forms of music can be found online ...

These days the only show the pond will rearrange its schedule for is Mad as Hell, and not just to stay up to the minute with comrade Bill's latest zingers. In the usual way of comedy shows, there's much that hits and misses, but the hits compensate for the misses, and they keep it moving along …

It's a wonder that the ABC hasn't taken the show as a personal affront and taken it down, since its ratings are only middling ...

Effectively, the ABC has degutted itself, and still it manages to offend Malware, and the rest of the baying reptile pack, supplemented by the hardcore AFR Sicilians, and of course Polonius … who carries on his vendetta with the relentless intensity of a slighted Mafia don …

The Emma Alberici affair was a classic example. The time to have done anything was before publication. Then came the fuss, the bowing to pressure, the taking down, the putting back up, and all the questions that followed, as in the New Daily and The Graudian …

It was a classic ABC storm in an incompetent teacup … with only the cartoonists benefiting ...

The pond says all this merely as a disinterested, disappointed, defeated observer and consumer, with no particular axe to grind, though it has to be said that having third eleven ratbags of the Amanda Vanstone/Tom Switzer kind is another guaranteed reason to turn off the radio …

It's bad enough that Switzer should have sought refuge at the ABC after all his political wars, but even worse that the ABC should have given him a smarmy go at Sunday Extra … and so on and on …

But enough, the pond is beginning to ramble and rage in a way that puts prattling Polonius to shame, and we haven't even had the first gobbet …

Uh huh. Sorry, there's no way around it, what a boring, tedious, relentlessly dull, hopelessly obsessed cultural warrior this drone is …

Fancy a man not known to readily admitting errors or making corrections having the cheek to chivvy others about it …

He's such a pompous twit, and he never takes no for an answer … just look at some of his recent correspondence …

What a humbug. What a rectitudinous up himself drone.

As for the stench of hypocrisy surrounding Qantas, take the pick of your headlines …

By the way, as the pond mentioned that you can find many things on YouTube, it's recently been back on a Vaughn Williams jag …

Worried about enduring a second gobbet of Polonius? There are alternatives… once you get past the talk fest, you can get the Scots doing the 6th for the Proms …

Well don't say the pond didn't provide an alternative to the final Polonial gobbet …you see, the dear old humbug mentions the Scots, as well as chanting his usual mantra about there not being one conservative presenter, producer or editor on any of the ABC's outlets …

So much for Tom Switzer. He's even useless as window-dressing.

And even more amazingly,  Polonius in the gobbet below reverts to a Jensenist, as a reminder to the pond that the complimentary conspiratorial Jensenists were once a Sydney and a pond thing ...

If there's one thing more tedious than a humbug pedant of the Polonial kind, it's the sight of such a pedant quoting another humourless humbug pedant of the Jensenist kind …

Michael Jensen is such a comprehensive goose it's probably to be expected that Polonius would quote him. But much humour has had a satirical, political or moral point, and you don't have to go as far back as Aristophanes' Lysistrata to find it …Dickens, Swift, etc etc, yadda yadda ...

But then came the astonishing discovery that such is his obsession that Polonius willingly sits down and endures Mad as Hell simply so he can show he has absolutely no sense of humour when it comes to the Catholic church …

It was much the same in Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell program last Wednesday when there was a rant mocking the Catholic Church concerning the sacrament of confession. Micallef and his team seemed unaware that few Catholics go to confession these days.

Talk about sublime stupidity of a tone deaf humourless kind.

Polonius seems unaware that few people slip on bananas these days, but you can still find a lot of people laughing at slapstick banana jokes …or at least at cops in ancient uniforms riding a bike into a pole…

It's true that Father Beamish has an unnerving resemblance to a platitudinous Jensenist, or to Polonius himself, but the pond would possibly return to the ABC to watch Swink's brave struggles …

  

As for the rest, how many times will the pond line up to discover that Polonius is completely and utterly lacking when it comes to a sense of humour?

It must be agony for the old humbug to watch all of Mad as Hell, and not crack a smile, let alone a laugh, but instead frown and make notes for his next dose of moral outrage … you know his role in that moralising choir that always manages to hit a jarring note …

It would be wonderful if the Mad as Hell team rose to the bait and gave Polonius what he craves … a little attention, and perhaps a joke, so that next week, he can scribble furiously in a moralising way about jarring notes …

But the pond suspects that the Mad as Hell team recognise that you can't make comedy out of a lemon, and even lemonade is a struggle if there's not enough sugar in the house …

And now for those who didn't bite on the previous clip, how about a bit of Shostakovich? Forget the toothpick, that's just a Gergiev affectation up there with Polonius being a ponce …