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john safran by Alex Burns (alex@disinfo.com) - March 03, 2001 |
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| From the time that he was selected at age 12 to deliver an introductory speech for the Dalai Lama's 1985 Australian tour, to his award-winning radio advertisements for Melbourne (Australia) based agency Cleminger Harvey, it was clear that John Safran was a creative force to be reckoned with: his work imbued with a scathing cynicism that penetrated the doublethink and shallowness of contemporary corporate culture. In 1997, Safran secured a place in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's innovative documentary series Race Around The World, in which he mocked religious authority in Lebanon and bravely revealed the gritty neo-fascist underside of Walt Disney's glitzy themeparks. Safran gained a strong audience following and public notoriety, with his final mini-documentary being banned. Not content to rest on his laurels, Safran recorded and released the satirical Not The Sunscreen Song, demolishing suddenly hip film director Baz Luhrman and child prodigy Quindon Tarver. But his most famous act of culture jamming was to come. While shooting two pilots for a planned ABC comedy series, Safran confronted Australian A Current Affair television talkshow host and media icon Ray Martin, using the 60 Minutes style psychological warfare tactics that had made Martin famous. At the time, Martin had been ruthlessly targeting Australian unemployed youth during a time of prolonged economic recession, going so far as to stage a set-up of the Paxton family for network ratings. Safran along with key scapegoat, Shane Paxton, 'staked out' Martin's home, and confronted him on-camera about his unusual working hours. Safran's gripping footage revealed Australia's most popular news celebrity to be a narcissistic hypocrite. The pilots were considered too hot to be broadcast by a government owned network that was fighting for funding, indeed, its very survival. A second controversy flared when network lawyers pressured university networks to censor student Web sites that circulated bootleg copies of the incident. The incident defined the brat-wunderkind Safran in the public consciousness as a culture jamming extraordinaire. He announced, in late 1998 that he was moving to the Seven commercial television network (which broadcast the Sydney 2000 Olympics), but the network dropped his show after only one season. He appeared at the 1999 National Young Writer's Festival in Australia, his culture jamming episodes were screened at the Disinfo.con 2000 conference, and he's in the second Disinfo Nation series. Despite no Australian network having the balls to screen his comic talent, Safran will achieve world domination . . . soon enough. In a political climate that has become increasingly conservative and inward-looking, Safran's humour and healthy contempt is a much needed antidote for authoritarian knee-jerk moralism. |
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John Safran: Spice Girl John Safran TV Pilots Mirror The Media Report: TV's Comedy Experiment Not The Suncreen Song (MP3) Annoying Bill Gates Background Briefing: Beyond A Joke No Longer The John Safran Pilot Home Page Channel V Interview Race Around The World Photos Bad Art Experiment Safran & Stubbs Switch To Seven |
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