David Penberthy asks whether television stations might sit back and ask themselves whether tormenting people with disabilities is what you want out of a TV show.

----------

HERE is a question. Has Australia got smarter, or has The Footy Show on Channel 9 got dumber? I think it's probably a combination of the two.

Whatever the case, I accidentally watched about four minutes of this program the other evening, which a decade ago was a Thursday night mainstay for me, and felt my IQ plummet about 30 points - a serious concern coming off such a low base in the first place.

Having lived an equal amount of my adult life in an NRL state and an AFL state, I'm more than acquainted with the show in both its league and Aussie rules formats.

The NRL Footy Show was always perversely fascinating as it seemed to be a pretty innocent vehicle for grown men to indulge in their fondness for cross-dressing, with some occasional footy analysis thrown in.

It was also a pretty tragic boys' club, as evidenced by the time my colleague and friend Rebecca Wilson was lured on against her better judgment by Nine management, only to prompt a bout of lip-curling and silent stare-bear treatment from Fatty and Sterlo.

It was like the teacher telling the boys that they had to let the girls play on their lunchtime cricket team.

Awwww, not fair.

There has been plenty of equally idiotic sexism over the years on the AFL version of the program, much of it directed at quality female sports journalists who refuse to abide by the Old Mates Act and have an apparent unwelcome habit of breaking real stories and describing things as they are.

Then there have been the many moments of random sexually charged weirdness, such as the time when, for no football-related reason, Sam Newman decided to replicate Ralph Fiennes' mile-high antics by seeing if he could have a crack at a store mannequin dressed in a Qantas uniform.

He folded himself - with his pants down - into a Perspex replica of a plane dunny, and mounted the plastic figure. At other times the program has evidenced a kind of subliminal homo-eroticism, such as the time when Newman displayed his wedding tackle for all the nation to see after a well-executed dacking from Brendan Fevola.

The thing appeared to have withered away, possibly through overuse.

You can make that claim about Newman's private parts but it would be hard to sustain a similar allegation about his brain.

It is a testament to his mindlessness that his marquee product is the Street Talk segment which, to borrow a politically incorrect phrase from my grandma, involves interviewing people who aren't the full quid and ridiculing them on national television.

I was alerted to the latest episode of the program the other night when a bunch of footy-mad mates in the eastern states, watching the show half-an-hour ahead of me, started an email conversation about how, in 2013, it is remarkable that a supposedly sensible and responsible TV network chooses to put this garbage to air.

None of these blokes are members of the PC brigade - indeed, most of the emails they send would never get an airing in a family newspaper.

BUT it is in no way humourless to argue, in this supposedly enlightened age, that we should by now have outgrown the concept of devoting a prime-time TV spot to a segment which corrals people who are mentally ill, morbidly obese, afflicted by speech impediments or physical handicaps, so that a botoxed halfwit can crack jokes at their expense on TV.

It's interesting to chart the slide of this once-great show. Its greatness was, for a long time, the product of it being hosted by Eddie McGuire.

Many people regard him as an egotist, others hate him for being so biased towards his Pies - but at least he brought a sense of discipline to the show where it followed stories in a thorough, informative way.

There was plenty of comic relief from the likes of Newman but it was an adjunct to the rest of the program, not its dominant feature.

The program has become an endless mass of stupidity as the likable but ineffectual James Brayshaw and Garry Lyon sit there as things deteriorate and never recover.

I found on the internet that a bloke in Melbourne, who sounds like a pretty reasonable guy and describes himself as a fan of the show, began a petition to get Nine to remove Street Talk.

I'm not much of a signer, and don't know if I would bother getting on board (it has attracted some 1700 signatures thus far) but his motives are pure and his arguments are valid, and have been backed in by the likes of Melbourne social workers Father Bob Maguire and the Reverend Tim Costello.

I would prefer to think that in 2013, the people who run TV stations might sit back and ask themselves whether tormenting people with disabilities is what you want out of a TV show.

It's a bit like what Tony Abbott said last week, wisely, about live odds betting on TV, that rather than implementing censorious nanny-state solutions it would be better if station management could address the question of whether bombarding families with real-time betting during sports broadcasts was the way to go.

Even though it involves the unpleasantness of a new tax, a survey found last week that 93 per cent of Australians support the introduction of a National Disability Insurance Scheme.

You could hazard a guess that the same 93 per cent would reckon that a segment such as Street Talk has served its purpose if, indeed, it ever had one.

david.penberthy@news.com.au