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Before Tina Turner, rugby league advertisements effectively consisted of Rex Mossop ordering people to watch.
“The game’s on Saturday and I strongly advise you bastards to watch,” Mossop would declare, or something like that, and dutifully we’d tune in to Match Of The Day on the JVC Panavision, perhaps even “taping it” on Betamax home videocassette tape.
And that, apart from television commercials for “the big game” which were largely and unapologeticaly ads for the cigarettes of Winfield, was about that.
And then creative types in pastel happy pants remembered sex, and how it sells. And they changed rugby league forever.
For out came the diva, Tina Turner! It was 1989 and it was actually Tina Turner, a genuine American Famous Person, a red-lipped black momma with legs and booty and gleaming white teeth. And she knew us! Australians! How about that?
John Quayle had brokered the deal with Turner and her manager, Roger Davies, and convinced said cigarette manufacturers to pay for it.
Later Quayle found himself in Turner’s home in London as Turner “paraded in front of him in a variety of outfits for a one-day shoot she would do at Fulham’s home ground. When she emerged in red hot pants, [Quayle] declared: ‘That’s the one, Tina!’,” as reported in the Sydney Morning Herald.
And pretty soon there she was, Tina Turner! On the box, with Cliff Lyons and Gavin Miller and big sweaty Martin Bella, and she’s belting out ‘What You Get Is What You See’ about our rugby league players. And didn’t we feel good. And the voice-over man told us: “The big game has never looked so good.”
And it was true. It never had.
A year later it was Tina again, of course, this time with ‘Simply The Best’, an apt anthem for the self-proclaimed ‘Greatest Game of All’. And rugby league, for decades the game of the wharfie, brickie and dockyard knuckleman, was sexy. It was show business. It always had been, after a fashion – people paid to watch its sterling entertainments. But it wasn’t until Tina lobbed that rugby league worked out how to truly make bank.
Because we, the people, the fans, the consumer, loved it. We still do.
Despite more ructions than a particularly dramatic and blood-soaked soap opera written, directed and starring baby-faced kook Kim Jong-un, rugby league today is a billion-dollar baby. It’s run by a commission of rich, smart bankers, far removed from the leagues club chook rafflers from days of yore. The game has flourished.
Tina Turner and Andrew Ettingshausen punch on. (Photo by Patrick Riviere/Getty Images)
But the ads since Tina have never hit the same heights. They have often been catchy enough, because, like Tina’s tunes, they are already hits.
Jon Bon Jovi, the Hoodoo Gurus and Tom Jones sang anthems. Jimmy Barnes sang Simply the Best with Tina.
Frankie Goes To Hollywood embraced the Super League War with “Two Tribes” and Chumbawamba did “Tubthumping”.
A kid from Australian Idol sang “Feels Like Woah”, which felt like Christian soft-cock rock.
And Thomas Keneally did an arty, spoken-word and ultimately completely shit-house bit of schtick called “Blow That Whistle, Ref”, which people threw VB stubbies at.
In 2020 the NRL trotted out Simply the Best again, with montages of cracking footy action, fans doing fan stuff, and nods to indigenous culture, women’s footy and LGBTQI folks that, predictably, triggered a few types because that’s what these things do.
Australians all let us rejoice because we need to chill out a bit.
It’s hard to remember back to February if the NRL had a song this year – things moves fast in the New Roaring ‘20s – but Simply the Best could get another go, just as it did in 2020 when Jimmy Barnes belted it out from a mighty construction site crater that would become Allianz Stadium.
Tina Turner, a legend, who has died aged 83, could tell you that. Rex Mossop, not so much.