Oh my, 60 Minutes, what have you come to?
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Roxy Jacenko's 60 Minutes interview
A combative Roxy Jacenko appears on Network Nine's 60 Minutes to counter claims about her breast cancer diagnosis and her husband's business dealings.
The stopwatch-turned-time-bomb has continued its self-destructive tick-tock, tick-tock in 2016 by pushing the "detonate" button with a story on … Roxy Jacenko.
Who? So inquired the vast majority of the nation living outside the eastern suburbs of Sydney when invited to tune in to a program which once upon a time would not have stooped below the nation-stopping attractions of the calibre of Lindy Chamberlain or Margaret Thatcher.
And now it comes to this, an attraction for which the nation would have barely paused before clicking over to the debut of Australian Survivor on another network.
It's almost impossible to understate how much you need to know about Roxy Jacenko, and almost impossible to overstate how much you are forced to be unnecessarily aware of her.
She has, by way of explanation, a relatively large following on social media, and has also created social media accounts for her toddler children - a modern media metric that should convince any TV producer with an ounce of sense that her following is the precise demographic that has little interest in a legacy show such as 60 Minutes, and even less interest in what a show such as 60 Minutes makes of her (or them).
But on Sunday night, there she was, about half of the fabled timeslot devoted to asking, as reporter Alison Langdon earnestly posited in her introduction: "What is it about Roxy Jacenko, TV star and Sydney PR queen, that irritates so many people?"
![Roxy Jacenko was quick to post this photo on her Instagram account, announcing she was donating the money she was paid ...](/web/20160824005604im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/q/x/t/i/q/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gqxtga.png/1471952912252.jpg)
The immediate and obvious answer - "That she's on 60 Minutes" - is all too easy, but the follow-up didn't provide much of an alternative.
The Jacenko bio is, shall we say, brief and mostly inconsequential.
![Roxy Jacenko opens up to Alison Langdon during the interview on 60 Minutes.](/web/20160824005604im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/q/y/5/6/0/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gqxtga.png/1471952912252.jpg)
She is 36. She owns a PR company. She once featured on an average-rating Channel Nine program, Celebrity Apprentice, which, like most of the nation, you will have missed, but which owes its dubious merit to an original creation of a Mr Donald Trump and which has contributed similar value to the greater good.
Roxy Jacenko has a husband, Oliver Curtis, convicted in June of insider trading. During his trial, she used her social media accounts to provide a daily fashion diary of her frocks and finery as she attended court each day.
![Keeping up appearances: Oliver Curtis and wife Roxy Jacenko arriving at his trial in the NSW Supreme Court.](/web/20160824005604im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/p/f/3/o/v/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gqxtga.png/1471952912252.jpg)
In the weeks after Curtis was jailed, Jacenko was diagnosed with breast cancer. She has since undergone surgery and her prognosis looks good.
That's it, but these days that will get you 30 of the 60 minutes on the Channel Nine program of the same name.
![Roxy Jacenko with her daughter Pixie Curtis who has her own Instagram account.](/web/20160824005604im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/p/v/2/3/1/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gqxtga.png/1471952912252.jpg)
Nine's cameras went everywhere, from Jacenko's kitchen to her operating theatre, and the result was that she was no more relatable in either setting. In the kitchen, she couldn't cook.
"Roxy can't cook, and never has," Langdon advised the nation, as Jacenko massaged a raw chicken carcass under the camera-familiar gaze of her son. And she couldn't emote going into the operating theatre any more effectively than she did coming out of it.
She was, rightly, angry that some had questioned the validity of her diagnosis, yet oblivious that this next sentence, referring to her son's mummy-managed social media account, described the entirety of her problem: "Someone wrote on Hunter's Instagram, 'How's your mummy's fake cancer?' "
Hunter. Has. An. Instagram.
Hunter is two.
"It makes me angry," Jacenko said. "I mean the reality is you'd have to be sick in the head to think that someone would actually manipulate a timeline on cancer. People die from cancer."
Yes, they do, and 60 Minutes dies a little each week when it demeans its brand with rubbish like this. God knows what they paid for the privilege - although Jacenko did announce, via Instagram of course, that all proceeds would go to three cancer charities - but you have to wonder what they're thinking.
For the record, we learnt:
❑ That she runs a PR company of 20-something "Roxy-lookalike workaholics" - and, really, the camera panned to an office of Roxy lookalikes, quite an achievement when what Roxy looked like before the plastic surgery is an open question.
❑ That she wouldn't use the word "steal" to describe what her incarcerated husband did. "It's very, very aggravating. It infuriates me ... everything is from hard work".
❑ And just how tough is she? She's tough. You betcha.
❑ And yet: "I'm tough and yes I'm strong. I'm also inside probably a broken piece of glass in a million pieces."
There may - may - have been a reason for 60 Minutes to do this story if they'd found the broken piece of glass amid the modern media morality tale that accompanies it.
They didn't come close. They didn't even try. Tick-tock.
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