Charlie Pickering Unpacks The Corruption Ruining Your Favourite Sports In The First ‘Weekly’ Of 2016
He's baaaaaack.
After a solid six-week break over Christmas, Charlie Pickering’s John Oliver-style comedy news vehicle The Weekly is back on the ABC as of last night. In last year’s debut season the show set an ambitious agenda, tackling topics as knotty and varied as Indigenous incarceration rates, the anti-halal movement, government secrecy around offshore detention and Karl Stefanovic’s mercifully short-lived talk show The Verdict.
To kick off a fresh new year full of terrible things to mock and point out, Pickering’s turned to a newsworthy issue that’s been bubbling along for years: the staggering extent of illegal gambling and organised match-fixing in sport. Taking the revelations of match-fixing in tennis revealed a couple of weeks ago by BuzzFeed UK as his cue, Pickering profiles one of the world’s most insanely profitable clandestine industries, and the surprising ties between one of its biggest players and exclusive Australian casinos. It’s enough to make you look at any unlikely sporting result a little cockeyed.