I don’t know who was more breathless: the excited TV guru Adam Boland as he announced that McDonald’s was to be the major, on-set sponsor of Ten’s forthcoming breakfast show, Wake Up, or the collective audience of Australian mothers who now realised they would have to deal with kids nagging for Maccas from sunrise to sundown.
The groundbreaking sponsorship deal will see “the smallest McDonald’s in the country” installed on set, not for the public, but to serve breakfast items to hosts Natarsha Belling, James Mathison, Nuala Hafner and Natasha Exelby and their guests.
Nutritionists such as Rosemary Stanton slammed the idea, and you don’t need me to tell you why. But the network couldn’t see the problem. “McDonald’s is not in the main shot of Wake Up. That is, it is not part of the main set, it is part of the studio.”
Was this an elaborate hoax? A fast-food outlet, and one of the most controversial, installed on a TV set? Is life so hard in commercial TV these days you have to sell real estate to the sponsors?
Now before everything I’m about to say here is dismissed as the piety of an anti-commercial, publicly funded broadcaster, let me remind you that I come
from commercial journalism, that this column is written for a commercial venture, and that it has been of no concern to me that my work has been run alongside advertising for most of my working life. I have no problem with advertising.
But as a presenter working in the very particular, rather strange idiom of breakfast TV, this decision seems to be a grave error of judgment. Family, health, medical and food stories are the staples of our kind of television: not a week goes by without a discussion on them, and I can’t see how you can have any credibility in discussing childhood obesity, the staggering rise in
type-2 diabetes diagnoses or healthy eating with a fast-food outlet on set.
In breakfast TV, if the set is on at home then children are invariably running around it at that hour, and the prospect of being nagged by the kids for Maccas must
be horrifying for many mums: “But they eat it every
day, mum …”
I can’t know for certain, but I’m going to go out on a (very skinny) limb here and suggest that there’s no way someone such as Natarsha Belling would allow herself to be served hash browns and McMuffins for breakfast any day of the week: that’s not how you manage to stay slim and camera-ready. Believe me.
If, as I imagine, the glowing and healthy looking presenters continue to eat good food while their show pushes fast food on their viewers, then the petard of hypocrisy will await their hoisting: did no one else notice that Boland, just hours before the news broke, retweeted Oxfam Australia’s World Food Day tips for eating sustainably?
Let’s wait for the hard-nosed ad guys and gals of Gruen to dissect this for us: the financial gain of the big-brand signing versus the loss of goodwill through a fast-food association, but I have a fair idea about where they’ll end up.
We’ll have to see how my old mate, Russel Howcroft, now general manager of Network Ten, navigates the landmines of this discussion.
But finally, most importantly, and on a genuinely, deeply felt note, let me offer my sincere sympathies to the cast and crew of Wake Up, who now have to present two hours of smiling, laughing live TV every morning surrounded by the smell of deep-frying oil.
