Okay, let's start from the beginning, because by it's own sword, Channel Ten deserves to die for the viral marketing overhype that was this long road to nowhere of any interest. A few months ago, as this year's hideous Big Brother series poisoned the screen, we were roused by a quick text graphic promo of a so called David Tench. Mr Tench was, from what we could see, a smarmy right winger - Stan Zemanack meets Jay Leno, with a splash of Alan Jones. Tench had devilishly amusing things to say (or so they thought at Ten) about his disliking of hippies, his pro-consumer contempt for the environment, and his good-for-a-gay-gag condescension of homosexuality. It was more than appropriate in the midst of Big Brother, as Ten realised that glamorising social insensitivity (an all too easy to achieve controversy, if you're willing to stoop low enough) was about all it possibly had left. David Tench - asshole - coming soon... now back to the Turkeyslapping.

Eventually, it changed gears, slightly. This is the beginning of a big problem that has been the arrival of David Tench - the task seems to have been juggled around too many writing departments. There has been no fluidity - and after having seen tonight, no substance whatsoever - in the various twists of the Tench lead-up. Suddenly, there was a camera panning through the cliched office of an Australian journalist abroad. Tench was indeed a supposedly powerful man - he had many autographed portfolio shots on his wall, and a few sentimental Aussie icons thrown in (let's not forget those). Tench was "coming home". Lucky us.

Throw in more text promo ads, with a typewriter punching out the words, "At last, a real man on Australian television."

What, you mean the housemates aren't "real"?

 

However, this was about as clever as it managed to achieve. The only alternative explanation I can find to Tench's conceptual fragmentation, is that perhaps it was all to throw us off the scent. The whole thing was unveiled as a great mystery that we were supposed to find irresistible. "Who is David Tench?" the first words were. Um... a figment of marketing imagination? A myth that hoped to con the public into making the myth real? We could only guess. We were supposed to.

But why, then, give clues that in the end, have no connection to the show, whatsoever? Any idiot can do that. That's not a mystery - it's a dud marketing plan by someone who can't do any better (or even worse, it's a whole team of people paid obscene amounts of money to come up with it). Because it didn't just throw us off the scent - it had consequences. The dumb marketing team didn't stop to think about what would happen when the consumer finally engaged with the product, only to find it fail to deliver the promises it gave them in the hype. People don't just forget what suspicion and anticipation is roused in them - they turn up to opening night, expecting the product to pay up. You'd think Ten would have made a mental note, when Big Brother's over hyped "world's first" and "No more Mr nice guy" routine left thousands of consumers scratching their heads and eventually tuning out (Big Brother 's opening night was huge, but it failed to sustain the interest of those who gave it a go).

The problem with "At last, a real man on Australian television", was that whilst it was the only piece of advertising that had any real connection to the show (as an ironic joke for a character who is a computer graphic), I'm sure many people who were expecting something a little more challenging - even if they're more like me, who expected simply a contrived portrayal as the "realness" of the "tell it like it is" journo - sat there, scratching their heads, tonight.

Because the other carefully timed release in the lead-up was that Tench was an Andrew Denton production. Andrew Denton, people!! What the fuck happened to Andrew Denton? Was it the woman off Beyond 2000? Is he just a soft-ass Daddy, now? I was never a big fan, but still, Denton likes to put himself forward as the king pop-intellectual media man - he actually assumes a pose of credibility - and yet, he comes out with this? What the fuck is this?! Who is David Tench? Seriously. Because I'm none the wiser, having seen it.

It was a week ago, when it hit me just what a train-wreck David Tench was shaping up to be. A teaser website was unleashed, featuring copy by (from what I could gather) the people responsible for Cadbury's commercials. It was unbelievably plastic, and not very funny. It wasn't very "real". And it wasn't even very controversial. I googled the forums, and it seemed that not too many out there actually cared, and those who did were just as confused.

I then received some investigative work that pointed to David Tench as Gordon Elliot, who I remembered as a teenage Madonna fan, from the Madonna-hungry Hard Copy. Elliot was Trash with a capital T. The pieces seemed to fit - he was indeed a traveling (so called) journalist who no doubt, after being washed up in the U.S after his Campbell's Soup commercials, was more than happy to come home for a nominal fee from Ten. It wasn't shaping up, let's be honest.

By this week, we were shown the face of Tench - or the tacky computer generated one. Tench seemed like a bad cross between Conan O' Brien and something off Nickleodeon. For press, the producers started rambling on about the show as a "satire" of the American Late Show format - so in all fairness, at least he appeared to be created with this in mind. The assertion of intellect - completely at odds with the copy on the website - had been re-injected; as had the air of mystery, by refusing to name who the "real" man behind the tacky image was. We were also supposedly dazzled by the amazing technology - the same technology, we were told, responsible for Gollum in The Lord Of The Rings!

Okay, Ten. Bring it on. I don't trust you for a second; but show us what you've got.

And really, what can I say? I sat there with an expression no doubt akin to a lithium patient. At one stage, I noticed my MSN jumping up and down, and I found a simple statement that pretty much summed it up; "Are you watching this? This is even worse than I thought it was going to be!"

Of course, "worse" is a strange term to use for Channel Ten. After the decidedly unpleasant series of Big Brother, the mundane excuse for screen-time that is The Steph Show, and (lest we forget) Yasmin's five minute bridal waltz to oblivion, "worse" is perhaps now a redundant term for Ten. But tonight, it certainly didn't get any better.

Firstly, comparing Tench to Gollum is like comparing the 1985 Casio to a baby grand. The technology does not allow for accurate line of vision for Tench, so he appears to be talking not to his guest, but to someone a little to the right of them. The synching is also questionable, and perhaps impossible to achieve with the fairly limited movements of the graphics. It wouldn't be a problem if this was a low budget computer animation for 12 year olds on the ABC at 4pm, but next to live guests, it looks terribly wrong, and completely disconnects suspension of disbelief. The key word for the experience of David Tench Tonight is "detachment". Admittedly, this is a large recipe with many ingredients producing an experience so impenetrable; but the failure of the graphics (the point of the show, in many ways) doesn't help. I'll tell you who David Tench is - he's a badly generated computer graphic, caught between the marketing team who write his ads, the pre-scripting of his gags, and his spontaneous flair with guests (which is almost non-existent). The most unreal man on television isn't even believably unreal. David Tench sucks.

But Ten would have us believe the audience had a very good time, indeed. There is a line with the canned laughter, where it eventually works against the show, and just makes it look stupid. Post-production took it upon themselves to go so heavy on the overdubbed audience reactions, in the end, it was hard to believe there would be people that stupid as to roar laughing at nearly everything he said. Yes, even for a Ten studio audience.

"You know, you always seem like such a nice guy," Tench told Pat Rafter, "I've always wondered if you had a dark side."

The audience roared. Except, not only was this not funny - it surely wasn't even supposed to be a punchline. Somebody with common sense please fire the producer controlling post-production touches. It wasn't just a touch of spin - it was more like a turkeyslap. How unreal can David Tench feel? The "enhanced" audience should act as a vicarious vehicle, through which the mindless masses can be collectively cued to perceive what they're seeing as riotously amusing. But even the mindless masses have limits. The studio audience didn't deceive us into believing what we were seeing was funny. It just made it look even more ridiculously contrived.

And what about the satire? This isn't "modeled" off the American Late Show format as a satire - it's just blatantly modeled, full stop. In the end, it's just the format mixed with the novelty factor of an animated host, and it's much less lively. Tench is more O' Brien than Letterman, and quite frankly, he's not even a third as funny. The timing - such an important factor in comedy - is completely impossible,  thanks to what I suppose could be the irritating delay in the graphics. Or perhaps, Tench just isn't quick enough with his guests?

Because my money is now firmly on the report being right of Tench's identity being that of a Mr Gordon Elliot (but we're talking about voice and persona, here - it's the Gollum actor who does the movements). Tench adopts a verbose American TV accent (so much for the hype marketing of the Aussie coming home, surrounded by Australiana memorabilia), but occasionally, he slips and loses it, and the voice beneath it seems very likely to break out any second with, "Tonight on Hard Copy, Latoya Jackson in bizarre love triangle with pet pythons". Not only did Ten's marketing confirm that Tench was discovered by an NBC weatherman (as was Elliot), tonight he joked with Rafter about being married to a pro tennis star (which Elliot was). Perhaps we know how the show secured the first guest. The coincidences are so strong that if it isn't Elliot,  they've perhaps gone to some strange length to throw us off the track - but even then, I mean, who cares, anyway? Tench could be the corpse of Mother Teresa; it wouldn't make a shred of difference to any of our lives, or the fact that this is a really, really bad show. The fact that my mind bothered the screen to wonder on the (pointless) identity behind this abomination says so very much. "I wonder if he really is Gordon Elliot?" Yes, I was that desperate for mental stimulation.

And let's not expect the calibre of these (not terribly) special guests to rise. The overbearing characterisation of Tench smothers the interviewee to the point where the guests seem secondary props to the supposedly riotous new icon of television. Tench repeatedly veers off into pre-scripted laughs that have nothing to do with the conversation, while the guest is forced to sit there, hanging patiently, while we are hopefully spellbound by the most innovative, amazing, hilarious creature to grace our screens. Personally, I felt as bemused as the guests eventually looked. Even Pat Rafter, who no doubt is grateful to be given any screen time at all (it's not like we give a shit, let's face it), looked unsure of just what it was that he was expected to do. Sit there, and play along, I suppose. And he did. But don't expect anyone of too high a PR expectation to follow suit.

Speaking of which... Killing Heidi. Remember them? Lead singer, Ella, was also bombarded with more questions that served no purpose other than to segue into bad gag monologues. For example, "Britney Spears is a good mother, yes or no?"

 

Ella's response was seemingly irrelevant. I almost felt sorry for her, as she sat there oblivious to the script, as he used the reason she signed on the dotted line (a new music tour with other female singers who used to be big, called "Broad") to make a reasonably restrained joke of sexism (Tench appealing to the demographic who are frustrated by the imposition of modern values of gender equality). Even then, he twisted the sexism into appearing as if he was a gentleman, who would prefer the term "Broads" to more contemporary ones like "Slappers", suggesting the ways of old - you know, when women were valued by their pose of servitude - were preferably more respectful than now. This ignores that he is using two very different terms of reference, and ends up actually romanticising a sentimental view of submissive women as "Broads" (a term once used to denote a woman of class), in comparison to a gender who has fought for equality, only to end up being "Slappers" (a slang term for prostitutes). Nice. David Tench, what a gentleman.

 

Eventually, Ella became an innocent bystander to something Ten now weaves into almost every show it can - slagging off rival commercial networks. Of course, bagging out Eddie Maguire is very much the joke du jour of a jour that happened a month ago - but no doubt, that was when tonight's show was scripted and filmed. Tench put various ideas for new - bad - shows on Nine (the hide of Ten to ignore the irony, there) past Ella, who at least provided something interesting with her personal idea to "make the intruders on Big Brother be poisonous snakes".One can only speculate as to whether she realised she was stabbing a Ten production. Though surely she would remember, considering the unfortunate hypocrisy of her (otherwise wonderful) statement, that Killing Heidi was once a cross-promotion with Big Brother, and performed live for Jess' birthday (in the same way Rogue Traders did, this year). I must say, the stab is a bit lost on me, if you're stabbing something you have once been happy enough to cash in on.

By the time he waved us goodnight, after a boring interview with a boring tennis player, and a pointless conversation with a performer who looked like she was begrudgingly sitting it out, I didn't quite know what to say. There's nothing terribly clever to say about David Tench. It isn't very clever, it has no social power or affect, and it isn't the slightest bit entertaining. How long will Ten drag this cat out for, do you suppose?

Admittedly, I will tune in again, just to see Tench meet Paris Hilton. I am morbidly compelled to see who looks more realistic. Probably Paris. Enough said.