Perhaps the only thing more counterfeit than Australian Idol co-host/FM radio jock Kyle Sandilands’ carotene tan is the myth of his significance. Today, his value is again over-estimated thanks to an ongoing stoush with News Corp. The Daily Telegraph’s Sydney Confidential reports that Vile Kyle came over a greenish hue of livid during a taping of Enough Rope.

The way they report it, Byle morphed into a six headed sea monster that sucked all conversational volleys into his reeking whirlpool mouth and then picked his teeth with quivering host Andrew Denton. The way an observer at Enough Rope describes it is rather less vivid.

“He was a bit thick and boring, actually.”

A few calls to Harris St bear out this interpretation. ABC Sydney is hardly buzzing with news of banter, bon mots and soul baring. Hardly surprising.

Sandilands’ MO has been, from the outset, a peculiar brand of stump-dumb conceit. It’s unlikely that any interviewer, even one as gifted as Denton, could hoist plumpy from his fetid pit of folly.

Austereo shareholders must be pleased to see this latest news. After the bombshell earlier in the week that breakfast co-host Jackie O wants to Be Taken Seriously As An Artist, this latest faux-fire can only widen the break between 2DAY and breakfast rivals Nova.

But, whether by marketing executive design or slow news pile up, the story serves only to embolden plumpy.

Why does this guy get so much press? His style is bland, lexically clumsy and utterly synthetic. He is faker than wrestling and faker than many of the putatively “explosive telephone calls” that go to air on his feculent radio program.

Much has been made of Sandilands’ on-air sadism. Like the bastard child of Artaud, he has taken Theatre of Cruelty to hitherto unplumbed deaths and, basically, built a career from calling women fat and blokes pouffey.

Rather than seeing Sandilands as evidence of an increasingly cruel public culture, perhaps it is worth viewing him in another way. To concede the impact of his nastiness, I think, is to afford him an importance that he simply has not earned.

This diseased organ of the electronic body is something like an inflamed appendix. It is not his potential to cause harm that intrigues us. When we see him on Idol or endure his ranting on the radio, it is precisely his worthlessness that engages us.

Riddled with infection, Vyle makes me feel cleverer than I actually am. If insults like “you’re an ugly fat chick” are what pass for broadcast-able invective these days, then most of us can go to bed feeling like Oscar Wilde.

It’s not the contestants or talk back callers we like to watch in pain. It’s this orange coloured naïf clinging to the myth of his cunning and his FHM cover girl.