I know the show isn't doing especially well in the ratings, but you've got to love this line from the animated host on tonight's David Tench Tonight interview with Shannon Noll: "Guy Sebastian is a very religious young man, and yet you've sold more albums. Why does God love you more?"

With just 3000 tickets to be distributed in lots of up to four at three venues this morning, I hope the queue for tickets to next week's Steve Irwin memorial doesn't get heated. Also, I hope we can all move on after the service. For Irwin's family and the other people at Australia Zoo, I guess that's going to be a bit more difficult than the people who didn't know him personally. (And I must say I've found some of the reactions of some of those strangers who've been interviewed on television a little disturbing, bordering on creepy.)

It's hard to know exactly what's going on between Today Tonight and A Current Affair - especially if, like me, you prefer SBS's World News Australia over both of them. As I see it, though, it boils down to this:
Naomi Robson has entered Papua on a tourist visa when she's really there to film a story and "rescue" a boy from being eaten by cannibals. The story about the boy originally screend on Channel 9, which is saying that it wanted to rescue the boy but was advised attempting to do so would only make things worse. (I'm not sure what's worse than being eaten alive, but that's what the Nine people are saying.)
What it comes down to is that both TT and ACA are driven by ratings and neither of them by a desire to really make a difference or to serve their viewers with an actual news story.

On 612 ABC today, Spencer Howson and I spoke about the war between Today Tonight and A Current Affair, Bernard Fanning's ARIA nominations and coughers and tall people in the theatre.