Australia's Naughtiest Home Videos (found cancelled Australian mid-aired comedy TV special; 1992)

This article has been tagged as Needing work due to its plagiarism.

This article has been tagged as NSFW due to its sexually explicit matter.

The show's title card.

Status: Found

Date found: 28 Aug '08

Australia's Naughtiest Home Videos is an Australian television special showcasing home movies that were deemed too sexually explicit to air on Australia's Funniest Home Video Show. Airing for one night on September 3rd, 1992, the show was pulled from the air midway through the broadcast due to complaints from the late Kerry Packer. Australia's Naightiest Home Videos had remaind lost until 2008 when it was rebroadcasted.

Background

Australia's Funniest Home Video Show premiered in 1990, and was similar in concept to the television show America's Funniest Home Videos; viewers would send in amateur-shot videos that were unintentionally humorous, and the video deemed the "funniest" by the studio audience was awarded a prize at the end of the show. The producers often received racy or risqué videos that couldn't be included into the program due to its family-friendly nature; however, since the show's policy stated that videos sent in by viewers couldn't be sent back, videos that didn't make it to the program were still kept by the station. The producers decided to compile the more risque videos into a one-off special aimed at an adult audience.

Content

The special followed the same structure of Australia's Funniest Home Video Show, in which the videos were shown in short blocks, interspersed with humorous monologues by Mulray, who wrote all of them himself. Mulray often poked fun at the content of the videos. Mulray also did humorous voice-overs as the videos were shown, similar to Lisa Patrick's on Australia's Funniest Home Video Show.

Some of the content of the videos that were shown in the special included shots of animal genitalia, humans or animals humorously engaging in sexual intercourse, people accidentally getting disrobed, and other situations that often relied on ribald humour, such as a child grabbing a kangaroo's testicles, a man lifting a barbell with his penis, a man getting his head squeezed between an erotic dancer's large breasts, an elderly woman removing an envelope from a stripper's undergarments with her dentures, two people running into water with flaming pieces of toilet paper hanging from their buttocks, and two people filmed having sex in the middle of a park.

Cancellation

The technical-difficulty card shown when the special was pulled and replaced with Cheers.

"We apologize for this interruption. Unfortunately, a technical problem prevents us continuing our scheduled program for the moment. In the meantime, we bring you a brief, alternative program."

—Nine Network announcer, during the technical difficulty card.

While at a diner, then-Nine Network owner Kerry Packer was informed of Australia's Naughtiest Home Videos and its content by some friends. He was tuned into TCN-9 to watch it, and was so offended by its crudeness that he picked up a phone, called the studio operators and said in a livid voice to: "Get that shit off the air!" The special was immediately pulled during a commercial break and in order to fill out the remaining airtime, Nine showed repeats of Cheers in place of the remainder of the special's timeslot. In different parts of Australia, the program displayed a different message depending on the area it was airing in. In Melbourne and Brisbane, the station simply started airing an episode of Cheers after a scheduled commercial break. The show was canceled before it was scheduled to air in the state of Western Australia, and thus its Nine Network affiliate showed a brief message mentioning that the special won't be aired and played a rerun of Cheers. This came as a shock to many confused viewers as the special was pulling in a record number of viewers. After the announcement, Nine reportedly received phone calls from viewers, with the majority of callers upset with the program being pulled from the air so abruptly.

Rebroadcast

In 2008, a full copy of the show was located by Nine's head of factual television. It was aired in its entirety at 8:30 PM on August 28, 2008 - one week short of sixteen years after the incomplete original airing, and at the same timeslot as the original 1992 broadcast. Though this broadcast did cut out portions of Mulary's monologues that included jibes about child obesity and making an offensive Indian accent had to be cut from the special in order to meet Australian television standards that did not exist in 1992. To create hype for the rebroadcast, Nine promoted the special as "the show Kerry Packer didn't want you to see", and featured commentary from Bert Newton. As a nod to the original broadcast, during the rebroadcast the special was interrupted by the Channel Nine bumper and "technical difficulties" announcement 36 minutes in, cutting to the Cheers opening credits before resuming to a monologue.