The Best Australian Humorous Writing Read online

  The Chaser’s Logies

  We’ve been asked to help Channel Nine make the Logies into a high-quality, entertaining, watchable TV show.

  An impossible task, but we’re gonna try.

  And to be fair, it’s not that Nine’s people are incapable of doing things well—it’s just that they usually wait until they’re working for Seven to start doing it.

  For that reason, the first way we’d help out Nine is by simply moving the whole Logies show to Seven. After all, the basic idea of any commercial program is to take a hackneyed format with mediocre performers and miraculously turn it into a giant money-making success. David Leckie’s done that with Gladiators, so surely he’s the man to do it for the Logies.

  The telecast

  When it comes to making the Logies night telecast enjoyable for people at home, we’re looking overseas for inspiration—to awards telecasts such as the Emmys and the BAFTAs. And we realised the Logies would be far more popular if they combined the best thing about American TV awards (i.e. Eddie McGuire does not appear) and the best thing about British TV awards (i.e. they’re simply not televised in this country).

  But if we really must broadcast the Logies here, we have no choice but to spice things up by borrowing techniques from other, more popular shows. Taking our lead from Gladiators, we’ll make everyone wear a lycra bodysuit—including John Wood. Viewers will be delighted to know we’re also being inspired by Underbelly, and murdering 35 people before the show is over. Finally, we will showcase the personal side of the ceremony by filming an adaptation of I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!, entitled I’m a Celebrity … Get Me a Line of Coke.

  The red carpet

  To improve the broadcast, Nine needs to use its stable of talent better. Why have Richard Wilkins turning the red carpet beige when Nine could deploy news boss John Westacott to assess the f—ability of starlets? Any disagreements about Westacott’s assessments will be settled in the usual way—with Supreme Court evidence that Nine tries to suppress and Crikey publishes.

  The pre-Logies red carpet is always so dreary, but remember it is red. All it would take to turn this part of the night into must-watch TV is one half-starved bull. Watching an enraged steer flat-tening Matthew Newton will be far more amusing than asking him what he’s wearing. (And would provide a bit of revenge for Brooke Satchwell.)

  The host

  The host needs to be someone who really understands boozy, drug-fuelled evenings—Wayne Carey. He can follow up the Logies by appearing on Enough Rope and denying they ever happened.

  Guest presenters

  “Here’s an idea. How ’bout we get two stars together who don’t know each other, give them an awkwardly written unfunny script, make sure they don’t attend a rehearsal, and then get them to stumble through it live on air before making a lame segue to the award they are giving.”

  These were the words of James Oscar in 1923, which revolutionised the awards ceremony format and are still used today as the blueprint for ceremonies such as the Logies.

  What few realised is that James Oscar then uttered in late 1924: “Oh, that doesn’t work, please make them stop.” Unfortunately he was ignored. It is time we listened to him.

  Problem is, dispensing with the awkward banter script only makes things worse, because actors are all such boring individuals when playing themselves. The only viable solution is to appoint Chris Lilley to play every single presenter and co-presenter. Since this would make it difficult for Chris to also appear as himself (rightfully winning every category he’s been nominated in) we’ll get John Clarke to play Lilley when receiving his awards.

  Awards and punishments

  One of the major problems with the Logies is that it is only a “celebration” of Australian TV. This needs to be balanced by some castigation of those shows and stars who need to be punished and discouraged. Daryl Somers’ drive to return to television, for example, has been fuelled by the row of Gold Logies lining his living room shelves. If there were a few well-deserved Golden Turds on his shelves then maybe his return would be less swift and therefore a mercy to us all.

  In Norway the equivalent of the Logies, De Brunershulderfelts, effectively incorporates the carrot-and-stick approach by lashing the makers of awful TV with frozen herrings and then throwing them briefly in an ice hole. As a result, poor programming has significantly decreased there while ratings for the awards ceremony are at an alltime high. Here, if the producers of The Resort and Let Loose Live had been thrown to crocodiles during previous Logies, then we wouldn’t have been subjected to Monster House this year.

  In fact, forget the old Logies rules. Time for some rules people can relate to—schoolyard rules. Most Popular Entertainer gets to pash a looker. Least Popular gets a wedgie. And viewers would certainly tune in to watch the entire cast of Quizmania getting their heads flushed in toilets.

  We’d also like to introduce one brand-new category, the Where Are They Now? award. This will comprise soapie actors reaccepting awards they won five years ago—only now, the actors must wear their waiter’s aprons while receiving the trophy.

  Acceptance speeches

  Each year threats are made by the organisers about winners making overly lengthy speeches. But so far they are not heeded. The Oscars approach of retracting the microphone was the most effective method, although even then it left bent-over stars thanking God into the hole in the lectern. We have a solution. If celebrities insist on giving acceptance speeches, then they will only be allowed to give a single web address where interested viewers can go to read the hundreds of names that the starlets would like to thank. This will cut the duration of the telecast by about seven hours. On their website, the celebs can also express their “complete surprise” at winning.

  Ultimately, though, we’ve decided to forbid any actual celebrities from giving speeches at all. It works like this. Despite the fact that most Logies attendees manage to escape the horror of the show and spend the whole night outside the ballroom, the seats are amazingly never empty in the camera wide shots. This is thanks to Nine’s army of “seat warmers”—extras who are hired to sit in empty seats so the room appears full to home viewers. Last year at the Logies, one member of The Chaser actually found himself at a table of these well-dressed extras and not a single genuine guest. Not only were the seat warmers better dressed anyway, they were far more interesting to talk to—which is why all acceptance speeches ought be given by the seat warmers.

  Cameras everywhere

  Part of the dullness of Logies telecasts is that the cameras are trained on the most boring part of the night—the awards ceremony. We would like viewers to be given access to Bar-Cam so they can see the real highlight: the US guest star (this is usually someone relatively obscure, like Dennis Haysbert, and the fact that you haven’t heard of him only proves the point—he was the President from 24) trying to get into the pants of the nearest well-endowed publicist.

  Recent Logies have featured live crosses to a smaller room outside for unguarded interviews with the winners. They should cross to an even smaller room where celebrities are far more unguarded— the toilet. There we can witness the Best New Talent still clasping her freshly won trophy while yocking up her complimentary Vodka Cruisers.

  Because the Logies take place in Crown Casino, another avenue is for the telecast to be fed from the security cameras in the pokies room downstairs. Slowly watching a grandmother fritter away her pension will be much more cheerful than the normal ceremony, and you may even catch the odd kneecapping from a stand-over man. In fact, for viewers in Victoria this may be the closest they get to seeing Underbelly this year.

  In memoriam

  Rather than showing “In Memoriam” packages for deceased people no one has heard of, we would like tribute to be paid to the far more tragic deaths of TV shows such as The Power of 10, Yasmin’s Getting Married, and whatever show Nine gets Bert Newton to host this year.

  Guest singer

  The Logies feature performances by v
isiting musical guests from overseas, but in an era when all our own TV personalities are willing to sing on It Takes Two, this seems an unnecessary waste of a galaxy of home-grown stars. Rather than being forced to watch Avril Lavigne lip-syncing her latest pap, viewers will instead watch Sandra Sully performing Britney Spears’ Toxic and Gardening Australia’s Peter Cundall crooning Justin Timberlake’s SexyBack. We’ll take anyone—the only rule being that under no circumstances will Daryl Somers be allowed to sing. In fact, we’ll have the security personnel prevent him from entering the room at all.

  Voting

  We could make the Logies score a profit for the first time in history. If Nine really wants people to vote by SMS, they should give them an incentive: every voter who sends an SMS will receive an annoying ringtone and a picture of a horny Russian babe.

  Yes, giving out a public number for people to text is risky, so an entire call centre will be set up specifically to deal with the thousands of dirty messages the nominees will receive from Shane Warne.

  Furthermore, all the prizes will be announced using the Up Late Game Show method. The winners’ names will be used as obvious clues in a guessing game for home viewers—so for the Gold, it might be KATE R-TCHIE. The drawback of this is that the Logies will have to be hosted by Hotdogs. Sorry.

  Charity

  Some nasty cynics describe the Logies as a shallow orgy of money-grubbing self-congratulation. We need to find a way to divert attention from the fact that those people are right. The best way to do that is to link Logies night with a good cause. In particular, the Logies should get on the climate change bandwagon by teaming up with Earth Hour—a 60-minute blackout during the middle of the ceremony would be a considerable improvement. Everyone would feel better about themselves, not just because they’d be helping to save the planet, but also because they wouldn’t have to watch those dreadful award categories SBS always wins like Most Outstanding Public Affairs Report.

  But an Earth Hour tie-in would only be the start of an environmental initiative. To really eliminate noxious emissions, we’ll also ensure Kyle Sandilands isn’t invited.

  The after party

  Everyone knows (or at least suspects) the real entertainment at the Logies happens at the after parties. To ensure that this year’s event goes off like no other, we’ll appoint Corey Worthington as the official host—on the condition Max Markson doesn’t get a cut. We’ll invite everyone except for A Current Affair summer host Leila McKinnon, who’ll be forced to gatecrash with her fella, Nine chief executive David Gyngell.

  The Arts

  SHANE MALONEY

  Cook’s tour: Peter Cook

  If Peter Cook hasn’t done much in the past 12 years, that’s only because he’s dead. Before then, he did quite a bit—although the obituaries tended to infer that he had squandered his prodigious talent. Since that talent consisted essentially of being the funniest man in the world, it is difficult to imagine how he might better have expended it than pottering around, smacking the occasional golf ball, pretending to be a Norwegian fisherman, having a few drinks and leaving ever-expanding ripples of laughter in his wake.

  In 1987, his rigorous gift-frittering regime brought him to Australia as guest of honour of the inaugural Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Far too unpredictable to be allowed out on his own, he was allocated a minder. That task fell to me. It was the best job I’ve ever had.

  For the previous three years, I’d been employed by Melbourne City Council to run its cultural program. This consisted mainly of wangling free concert tickets for the councillors. Elton John, if possible. The opera, if there was nothing else up for grabs.

  The allure of this task had begun to wear thin. I was ready to jump ship. And when a rag-tag collection of small-time theatre promoters knocked on the town hall door, jester’s cap in hand, asking the council to bankroll their plans for a comedy festival, I saw my chance.

  From Barry Humphries onward, Melbourne has long been a fertile breeding ground for comedy. By the mid-’80s, comedy venues were springing up all over town, television was tapping into the talent and even the city fathers wanted a piece of the action.

  They weren’t too sure, however, about handing a bucket of cash to a bunch of shady-looking joke-brokers. I suggested that instead of money, they be given in-kind support. To wit, a council officer on secondment. Somebody to see that the jokes ran on time, that the books were kept in good order and that dodgy promoters didn’t abscond with the takings. Somebody like me, say.

  The councillors bought it. Lock, stock and whoopee cushion.

  John Pinder, proprietor of the Last Laugh and the Sydney Greenstreet of Melbourne comedy, took me under his voluminous wing and we set to work to hammer out a program. The Age agreed to run a spoof front cover on our launch date, April Fool’s Day. The chief magistrate volunteered his court as the venue for a mock trial. A trio of young actors of ethnic persuasion put together a show called Wogs Out of Work. Marching girls were booked and Wendy Harmer was put on sedatives.

  The only thing missing was a marquee attraction. A comedic luminary of global proportions, a name so big that even journalists would recognise it. Peter Cook, for example. Assuming, of course, that he wasn’t too busy pulling lobsters out of Jayne Mansfield’s bottom or teaching ravens to fly underwater.

  Cook had a longstanding connection with Australia. In 1971, he and Dudley Moore toured here for nearly five months, test-driving Behind the Fridge before its premiere in the West End. Australia loved Pete and Dud, revelling in their irreverence and surreal wordplay. The tour was a triumph, the shows were sold out and the media couldn’t get enough of them. Several weeks into the run, they performed a sketch on the Dave Allen Show on the Nine Network. Called “The Gospel Truth”, it took the form of an interview by Bethlehem Star reporter Matthew (Dudley) of Mr Arthur Shepherd (Pete).

  The skit created an immediate furore. Hundreds of irate viewers besieged the switchboard with complaints and the Australian Broadcasting Control Board immediately banned the offending satirists from live appearances on every television and radio station in the country under pain of loss of licence.

  One particularly obscene word had been used. “Something a lot of us sit on,” Dudley later explained to the National Press Club. “Not a chair. Short word. Starts with ‘b’, ends with ‘m’.”

  I was 18 at the time, in my first year at Monash University. Student protest was at its height, and when the terrible two appeared on campus, fresh from their monstering by the forces of wowserdom and cant, they were greeted as heroes. The allocated venue filled to capacity within minutes of the doors opening. Speakers were rapidly set up on the lawns. When these proved insufficient for the crowd, lectures were cancelled and the show was piped campus-wide on closed-circuit television.

  In the 15 years since, Pete and Dud had plumbed the scatological depths as Derek and Clive, then gone their separate ways. Dudley became Hollywood’s resident sex thimble, starring opposite Bo Derek in 10 and playing someone not entirely unlike himself in Arthur. Peter made some middling to bad movies and created one of the funniest, most biting satirical speeches ever written, a monologue parodying the judge’s summing up in the trial of Jeremy Thorpe, that “self-confessed player of the pink oboe”, who once headed Britain’s Liberal Party.

  “Whereupon,” Peter put it, “I immediately did nothing.”

  Nothing which—miracle of miracles—included agreeing to return to Australia for a week as the official guest of honour of the Melbourne Comedy Festival.

  As he staggered from his London flight, fabulously dishevelled, golf sticks slung over his shoulder, partner Lin Chong at his side, the assembled comediocracy of Melbourne could scarcely refrain from prostrating itself at his feet. “You come as an emperor,” declared producer John Pinder, “to accept the homage of your subjects.”

  With the wryly amused air of an infamous rake being invited to inspect a mining camp bordello, he allowed himself to be duch-essed around town, making guest appeara
nces, dispensing trophies and generally enjoying the hospitality of the burgh.

  The mischief began almost immediately. As he checked into his hotel, he was informed that its manager, lately of Zurich, had requested an autographed photo for the celebrity guest wall of the cocktail bar. Peter immediately launched into an impromptu dissertation on the contribution of Swiss hotel management to the development of modern comedy. Was not the knock-knock joke invented by a Swiss housemaid, he asked? And that mint-on-the-pillow idea was sheer comic genius.

  Drawn by the chortling, the manager bustled across the lobby and joined us, a look of comprehension settling on his face. This must be his celebrity guest, the famous English clown. Peter, oblivious to the identity of the man in the pin-striped trousers, continued his monologue. Herr Metzger, taking his cue from the rest of us, roared with laughter. While he was in charge, nobody could say the Swiss didn’t recognise a joke when they heard one.

  Then it was off to the Town Hall for lunch with another fan, Lord Mayor Trevor Huggard. They talked architecture and His Honour, an early champion of urban conservation, mentioned plans to restore the Regent Theatre, then derelict. It took little encouragement from Peter for the keys to be found and the two of them spent the afternoon wandering through the picture palace’s cobweb-draped rococo smoking lounges, Roman Empire Wurlitzer pit and late medieval projection box. It was just the place, Peter decided, for the world premiere of his forthcoming musical based on the secret diaries of Queen Victoria’s gynaecologist.