Having learnt nothing from their unsuccessful assault on The L Word in 2004, Peter and Jenny Stokes of the Salt Shakers (SS) organisation set their sights a little higher this year and took on the Desperate Housewives juggernaut.

With their customary flair for understatement the Stokes’ asked their readers:

What could be worse than Channel 7’s bunch of psychotic ‘Desperate Housewives’, all living in one street, doing their best to destroy the foundation of society - marriage and family? (SS E-News, 10 Feb. 2005)

The SS website assured nervous members that the program ‘encourages people to be voyeuristic and peer into the sexual antics and problems of others … Marriages are shown to be filled with problems.’ (Posted 2 Mar 2005)

Salt Shakers Journal (SSJ) of March 2005 confirmed that the show:

… promotes marital infidelity and denigrates marriage, family and motherhood … It has become popular because people like to watch the misfortunes of others. This is voyeurism at its worst. (p.15)

Conservative Christians responded to this new threat in different ways. Evangelical guru (and former convicted Watergate conspirator) Charles Colson thought that real-life desperate housewives should simply take up the home-schooling of their broods:

After all, who has the time for bed-hopping or pill-popping when you’re planning lessons or correcting homework? (New Life, 17 Feb 2005)

Festival of Light supporter Judith B of Glen Alpine, NSW thought that the program was ‘doing its best to destroy the foundation of society and biblical teaching’ and asked:

Who in their right mind would learn anything from watching ‘Desperate Housewives’? (Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), 13 Apr 2005, reprinted in SSJ, May 2005, 10)

This invited a series of (slightly sardonic) replies. Kate T of North Lyneham, ACT thought that Housewives:

… is full of useful tips for everyday living, [as is] ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’ (how to wake up with a full face of make-up on) … I am sure God intended us to watch these insightful programs; otherwise he would not have granted us a sense of humour and the ability to distinguish farce from reality. (SMH, 15 Apr. 2005)

Despite Housewives’ massive ratings (2.48 million viewers nationally for the first episode, higher than the 2004 Melbourne Cup audience), the Stokes’ were pretty confident that they could wipe the grins off Channel Seven executives’ faces. After all, hadn’t SS persuaded 26 companies to withdraw their advertising from The L Word just a few months previously? And Desperate Housewives seemed to be absolutely packed with ads! When SS printed out all these companies’ names and email addresses, the list ran for pages. Surely the group’s supporters could knock dozens of these advertisers out of the show with just a few well-chosen complaints. The ratings would start tumbling and, you never know, some viewers might even begin watching the Australian Christian Channel instead.

But as early as episode 2, Peter Stokes must have experienced a few misgivings. The only identified ‘Christian’ among the neighbours on the show was Martha Huber, the local busybody. Everyone knows that Christians are never busybodies, but Australians still didn’t seem inclined to desert the show in droves. The viewing numbers were red hot again and there were a lot of very big names among the advertisers, Ford, Telstra, Visa, Mercedes and Kraft among them.

Worse still, two of the episode 2 advertisers were none other than Just Jeans and Centrum (a vitamin producer). These were two of the 26 companies that SS claimed to have ‘won’ away from The L Word, so how to explain their scandalous backsliding? (Actually, after a few weeks, Centrum had advertised on a late episode of The L Word, so there’s one company that’s right off the Stokes’ Christmas list.)

But Peter Stokes had a shrewd idea of what might be going on. There was something a bit funny about this new ratings method via set-top boxes - after all, who knows anyone with a monitoring box? - so those big numbers might not be too big after all. Stokes asked his readers to tell him about any ratings boxes of which they had knowledge, and reported rather triumphantly the following week that no one had contacted him. So, ladies and gentlemen, you can draw your own conclusions. Safeway, David Jones, ANZ and BMW obviously did, as they advertised on episode 3.

Nothing much happened for the next few weeks, except that Desperate Housewives continued to rate its socks off and minor, nonentity-type advertisers like Target, Kodak, Holden and KFC kept clamouring for spots on the program. Compiling the ad lists for each show seems to have been taking SS so long that they apologised for the lateness of their episode 5 email, along with a rather plaintive little introduction:

More of the same, anti-family, anti-marriage … Channel 7 continues to give us real anti-family entertainment. (E-News, 4 Mar. 2005)

But episode 6 yielded a spark of hope:

Instead of Libra being a ‘joint sponsor’ [with Ford] in Melbourne, the same company, SCA Hygiene Australasia is now heralding Sorbent as co-sponsor. Were there too many complaints about tampon adverts?? (E-News, 10 Mar. 2005)

Apparently not, as Libra soon returned as joint sponsor, none of which seemed to worry other advertisers like the National Bank, Mastercard or Toyota.

Stokes thought he’d made a breakthrough in episode 8 with his discovery that ‘the man writing this series is a homosexual‘, but the advertisers kept right on advertising and the viewers kept right on viewing. This just about finished the SS campaign off, with the ad lists for the next few programs being run together. Stokes growled in frustration:

The man writing ‘Desperate Housewives’ is a homosexual, he is preaching about the death of marriage and the natural family - his ‘values’ are all over this program and his pulpit is people’s loungerooms. (E-News, 26 Apr. 2005)

SS only offered a list of regional advertisers for episode 12:

‘Desperate Housewives’ continues to be a favourite of TV watchers - perhaps that says a lot about those who watch a lot of TV!! (E-News, 14 May 2005)

When in doubt, blame the hoi polloi.

Thus ended the anti-Housewives campaign, which disappeared from SS literature like snow on a sunny day. Two days later, Stokes began to fulminate against Triumph underwear ads appearing on the backs of buses.

Evidently not a single company withdrew its advertising from Desperate Housewives as a result of pressure from Salt Shakers. During the 2004 campaign against The L Word, Stokes kept a running log of advertisers whom he claimed had abandoned the show although there was no way of verifying his assertions.

Desperate Housewives ended its 23-episode first season as the most-watched drama series on Australian television for a decade. Almost 2.3 million viewers watched the final episode, with advertisers including McDonalds, Myer and Medibank. As far as anyone could tell, marriage and the family had survived the onslaught from Wisteria Lane.

SS threw in the towel at about the same time as Housewives began to use a new introduction, a tape of US First Lady Laura Bush saying that she enjoyed watching the program. Where conservative evangelicals are concerned, Republican Presidents are rather like Protestant Popes and I sincerely wonder whether Salt Shakers began to think that, just for once, they had committed a truly monumental blunder.

Filed in: Christian Right, Family Values