Vote For Anyone But Gaylord Gayford

Clark Gayford optimises the New Zealand B Grade celebrity. He's also, which ever way you look at it, one letter away from being Clarke Gaylord, which is about as funny as the guy gets really. He's been on the radio and he's been on the TV, but it seems that’s not enough for the boy from Gizzie.

Gaylord started out as a member of The Edge breakfast crew, the radio station that pioneered having three fuckwits talk each over other for three hours each morning as you prepare for work, where you'll probably spend the day amongst several fuckwits arguing over each other. He then moved onto TV and was one of the very first hosts on C4 where he played the 'sarcastic guy', a role that could have been funny, but wasn't. He then went on to have a bit part hosting 'Holiday', the travel show on Prime watched by millions.

Now I could go on and on about the guy's history but I won't. Partly because a) there’s not much more to tell and b) you can check it out yourself though by reading his Wikipedia entry which I highly suspect he’s written himself. Now that's the real beauty of a world wide wiki, you can be world famous without anyone else knowing.

Gaylord has one hidden talent; he's a doppelganger of the Aussie singer Pete Murray who's songs your girlfriend probably quite likes and can be found on just about every 'chill out' and 'weekend surf' compilation going. I quite like Pete Murray. I've seen him live and he is one of those real singers who can actually sing the songs he writes. He's also pretty cool and the kind of guy you wish you could swap bodies with for a few days because you suspect he gets his - and quite possibly all your - share of the pootang. And you wondered why yours dried up aye?

Anyhoo, this look a likeness led to the only genuine funny Gaylord moment I can recount. In one episode of some C4 show he co hosted there was an ongoing reference made to the similarity, much to Gaylord’s frustration. All this ribbing culminated near the end of the show in one of the most magical moments in New Zealand’s short history of telly. The camera slowly pans away from Murray (who was touring NZ at the time) to a wide shot of he and Gaylord sitting together on Queens Wharf looking quizzically each other as two people who look a lot alike, tend to do the moment they realise they could be brothers from another mother. Absolutely brilliant. I’ve wet myself just writing this. You had to have watched it I suppose.

Fast forward to now and Gaylord is again on TV and in the news. He has entered the online competition to win the so called ‘best job in the world’, a six-month caretaker position at Great Barrier Reef in Australia. The ‘dream job’ pays NZ$193,000 dollars a year, which seems to me to be an exorbitant amount of money to pay someone who will spend their days telling off puffy, pale English tourists for pissing in the water and killing off the coral, but hey, what do I know? The global recession doesn’t appear to have gotten as far as the Great Barrier Reef it would seem.

TV3 news played Gaylord’s audition tape which was a very polished entry, but then it would be because clearly Gaylord has used the considerable resources available to him as a TV3 / C4 staff member to make it. A luxury that I doubt was available to the other 34,000 applicants that didn’t make the final 50. Gaylord does admit to feeling a ‘wee bit guilty’ to having a ‘few more skills up his sleeve’ than other applicants, but justifies it by revealing that this really, really is his dream job. Oh and he really likes fishing.

Who decided that fishing would make for entertaining TV aye? Lets be honest, even if you do enjoy sitting for eight hours on a boat waiting to catch all of three fish, watching someone else do it on TV is pretty bloody boring. One of the local hosts of just such a program has struck it big by jumping out of helicopters onto unsuspecting big game fish. He was even on Letterman thanks to his YouTube exploits. He reckons he does it to raise awareness of fishing and the delicate matter of how we’re raping the sea of all its resources. I wonder if he’d be keen to progress to the next worthy cause; Quadriplegia. He could jump out of helicopters onto unsuspecting pedestrians, thus making tetraplegics of them both.

Now Gaylord has a job that most of us would quite fancy. He might have got there, like the song says, by sucking a lot of dick, or he might have got there through sheer hard work, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. In any case, I think it’s more than ‘a bit cheeky’ of him to then use the privileges that come with that one job to get another that will make him a shitload of cash. Will all those that helped him get this far get a cut of the 200k he could earn if he wins the competition? I doubt it. No what they’ll actually end up getting is lots of emails from Gaylord, containing lots of photos of Gaylord standing knee deep in the Great Barrier reef with a big Gaylord stiffy. What a guy.

I don’t know how many votes I get to cast but they’ll all be for the other buggers and thankfully others share the same thought because currently Gaylord is a long way back in the polls. Good fucken job.

Clarke Gaylord, back on your Prime TV screens sooner than you, or he, thinks.