Best of the Blogs: Paul Casserly: The Smalley scandal

Herald online

28 Dec, 2014 09:00 PM2 mins to read

Rachel Smalley. Photo / Robert Trathen

It’s been a busy year so we can’t blame you if you missed some of our blogs. Over the next two weeks, we’ll bring you the best of our blogs from across entertainment.

Paul Casserly takes a closer look at the Rachel Smalley scandal.

Ok, so I think this is how it went down.

Rachel Smalley was on the radio and said the other New Zealand girls were fatties, sorry, "lardos" and "heifers" and then people on Twitter and Facebook got upset - probably obeasts themselves - I know the word is obese in Auckland, but it's obeast in the smaller towns and better for it. Then leftie tut-tutters did some tut-tutting and then the right-wingers tut-tutted them back and essentially said 'harden up sweetie'.

Meanwhile, everyone in New Zealand is getting slowly fatter.

Then Rachel got on the radio and blubbed her way to forgiveness. She told us that she has never even thought these thoughts, even though they formed, as thoughts and spirited their way from her brain and onto her slender and perfectly toned tongue. This would seem unbelievable if it were not for one thing. The studio chair! You've seen that insurance ad about the devil's chair, the one where the heifer defecates at the end? It's the studio chair idiots. IT'S POSSESSED!

The chair that Rachel sat in that morning was the same chair that held the buttocks that withstood the fragrant wind of Paul Holmes. The build up over all these years must be monstrous in scale.

The sheer bad aura of that chair obviously overcame Rachel as she responded to its force. Blame the broadcaster if you want, but that chair, that's the problem. An insider* told me that the chair is kept despite fraying and smelling terribly because it's a sort of talisman, a lucky charm. It's link to the station's ratings is remarkable as it arrived the day of the first survey when Paul Holmes rose to the top and stayed there. Tellingly, the Dalai Lama refused to sit in the chair when he was at the station in the late 1990s.

What was lost in the kerfuffle and apology was the actual story itself. The fact that the morning after pill may not be effective on women over 70kg isn't as shocking as you might think as most of the people taking it are younger women, who typically are not in the heifer or lardo class. Still it says something about all of us when the story becomes a footnote to the 'scandal'. ...