The Best Australian Humorous Writing Read online

  Tamasin’s Great British Classics has Daniel Day-Lewis’ earnest little sister behaving a bit like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall without the sense of humour. If food and cooking’s fun for our Tam, she hides it well.

  Next up (with a little slumber en route) is our old mate Neil Perry with Food Source, which must be at least four years old. There’s a lot more grey in the ponytail these days. Good show then, good show now.

  French Leave: John Burton Race’s canal change to southern France. With a camera crew along for the ride. No wonder his family life’s a mess.

  More of the Gap man. He’s still good. I still hate him.

  And then the avuncular fish man and part-time Australian Rick Stein—from a few years back—making another show about Padstow. He owns Padstow, by the way. Ming Tsai (Simply Ming) demonstrates his appalling dress sense and ability to put at least one viewer to sleep almost immediately. I wake to Food Fight (having slept through Huey): it’s high-five and yee-hahs as a couple of amateur marathon runners (men) cook off against a couple of bookish Ivy League types (women). More corn please.

  Back to Australia for the straightforward but not unpleasant Good Chef, Bad Chef followed by Heaven’s Kitchen Cookbook, an unashamed pitch to those of us vulnerable to the possibly nonexistent mythical charms of a bucolic English idyll, to wit, host Mike Robinson’s country village pub. Fantastic.

  And Jamie; he had to come. It’s no mistake the guy is prime time, but will we be watching re-runs of a 25-year-old Oliver when the guy’s expecting his first grandchild?

  Another snooze during Chef at Home. And dinner—more pasta and parmesan (with eggs)—in front of the River Cottage with the aforementioned Fearnley-Whittingstall. Is this the best series of food series ever?

  Market Chef again … hey, I saw this at breakfast. Another episode of Masterchef Goes Large. And another of Heat in the Kitchen. We shuffle from Australia to the UK via the US, more or less constantly.

  Rachel Allen (Rachel’s Favourite Food at Home) is apparently famous. Why? She cooks baked potatoes. She’s followed by a couple of forgettable Sloane rangers wasting an entire half-hour on chocolate on Chocolate Covered. The programming seems to get lamer as the night gets older. It’s not helping the mood or health.

  But then it all comes good at 9.30pm when Peta Mathias’ humble but informative Taste Takes Off explores the back streets of Hanoi. At 10pm, after a challenging day doing exactly nothing, I drag myself off the couch and into bed. I’m feeling a bit better. It’s been an informative day.

  Once upon a time you sought out the rare food program on television and chewed it up; now you can watch them 24 hours, seven days a week. What a concept. How sick would I need to be for that?

  GRAEME BLUNDELL

  Rude food

  You can imagine Jamie Oliver saying of fellow television culinary master Gordon Ramsay, “Gordon ain’t just a scrotum-faced sack of testosterone; he’s got 10 Michelin stars, for Christ’s sake.” Chef (“It’s my [expletive deleted] kitchen”) Ramsay hates being labelled a celebrity chef and has little interest in seeing his “scrawny, crinkly, wrinkled face like the map of Wales coming out” on the screen.

  But he is seemingly omnipresent, greatly (expletive deleted) talented, and back for the third series of the globally successful The F Word.

  TV chefs are defining the meaning of cooking in this celebrity age. As Nigella Lawson once said, “cooking is the new rock’n’roll”, presumably following hairdressing, reality TV, knitting, spelling bees, India and decorating.

  The culinary Susan Sontag, who can so eruditely mention Marcel Proust in the same breath as praline, may be stretching it, but there’s no doubt that cooking is losing its attachment to a living culture and becoming a new form of global entertainment.

  Before Lawson, no one had ever so softly name-dropped ingredients as though they were designer labels. Food is increasingly part of the madness of popular culture, tied up with anxiety, guilt and fear. And in Ramsay’s case, sex, as every show features the onetime professional soccer player topless.

  Cooking shows, once considered a daytime format, conventionally gendered as feminine, are now a staple of mainstream, terrestrial programming, many of them fronted by hyperactive, tes-tosterone-driven men such as Ramsay.

  Their high-energy shows are a central part of the hybridisation of formats that characterises contemporary TV, often incorporating other styles of programming such as the travel show, game show and fly-on-the-wall documentary. Ramsay’s brazen TV style looks like a foodie version of Jerry Bruckheimer’s cop show aesthetic. The F Word is all explosive angles, extreme close-ups and rapid-fire editing. There is a mental acuteness at work, sophisticated, contrived, attention-grabbing.

  In The F Word he has created a new TV genre, the foodie-friendly action-adventure, an MTV-paced foodie joy-ride. Every activity Ramsay engages in is sexy, glossy, high-camp fun.

  He enters the first show in the new series like a parody of Marlon Brando before he started eating, prowling through the restaurant set, slamming down the bloody carcass of a deer and shouting, “There’s dinner!”

  Ramsay has become a kind of actor alive with resonance for his audience. He’s almost Shakespearean in his delight in the big moment, his hysterical profanity and in his liking for live animals turned into carpaccio before our eyes.

  He has constructed a big-top culinary circuit in which he revels, his passion for his food relentlessly under the spotlight. His series is a hybrid of cooking demonstration, TV food journalism, celebrity chat show, strident sitcom, and a reality-style behind-the-scenes look at the way great kitchens work.

  There are also the mischievous stunts that bring the swearing, swaggering chef into controversial contact with guns, horsemeat, breast milk and the new superfood, blood.

  In this episode, he treks off to Norway, diving through ice in a bulky dry suit in search of the monster king crab, the world’s largest crustacean. “My balls feel like two (expletive deleted) ice cubes,” he yells at the camera. (I think I had counted 43 uses of the f-word by this point. Ramsay leaves the profane Deadwood well behind in the swearing stakes.) When he’s not out hunting and shooting or butchering hard-to-find things to eat, Ramsay’s in the glamorous F Word restaurant with amateur brigades of wannabes trying to prove they have the skills and character to deliver under the pressure of a professional restaurant service.

  And Ramsay is on a mission to find a talented female chef who can fill the shoes of legendary TV cook Fanny Cradock, as part of his “Get women back in the kitchen” campaign. Of course, it’s called Find Me a Fanny.

  Celebrity guest Dawn French can’t help herself. “Interested in my fanny?” she asks, licking those lascivious lips. The pulchritudinous Vicar of Dibley actor seems to be a hit with the randy restaurateur, who can’t stop snogging her.

  You can’t imagine the scholarly molecular gastronomist Heston Blumenthal copping a feel in In Search of Perfection; his show is more witty chemistry lesson than in-your-face cookery program. Blumenthal’s Berkshire restaurant, The Fat Duck, was named world’s best several years ago by a panel of international pundits and owns three Michelin stars. It is famous for its egg-and-bacon ice cream, tobacco chocolates and sardine-on-toast sorbet.

  In his eight-part series, the stocky, oddly groovy Blumenthal, his cool obsessiveness totally captivating, focuses on some of Britain’s classic dishes, from fish and chips to roast beef. This week, bangers and mash and treacle tart get the Blumenthal treatment. Dressed in white coat and safety goggles, he scientifically dismantles the traditional recipes with liquid nitrogen and thermally kinetic dry ice.

  Like a mad scientist from a Jules Verne story, Blumenthal seeks to create the ultimate taste sensation in his purpose-built laboratory-style kitchen, using his famous pressure cookers, vacuum cleaners and gas chromatographs. He employs innovative ways to film the cooking process, too, with infrared, ultraviolet, heat sensitive micro-cams and graphics that illustrate molecular animation.

 
Blumenthal introduces us to food growers across the globe, as well as like-minded passionate researchers, making this a culinary version of Michael Palin’s Around the World in 80 Days.

  The abundance of TV chefs, especially one as ardently scientific as Blumenthal, probably confuses as much as it assists anyone at home trying to learn the subtleties of cooking. But the rest of us can drool over the populist, telegenic foodie flirts on the screen, soaking up their subliminal message about money, self-esteem and an elusively elegant lifestyle.

  In their very different ways, Ramsay and Blumenthal have turned TV food into a new form of spectator sport, fascinating, sometimes frightening and always deeply humbling for anyone who thinks they know anything about cooking.

  Contributors

  Phillip Adams is Australia’s most ancient newspaper columnist— fifty years and counting—and the ABC’s most biased broadcaster. Although he has published twenty collections of jokes—and despite being described by Gough Whitlam as “Australia’s greatest humour-ist”—he despises all forms of levity. He gets particularly angry when people describe his film The Adventures of Barry McKenzie as a comedy. Both that film and this column were “deadly serious”.

  David Astle has written two novels, a true-crime book plus a trivia-travel guide to Australia—and his publishers wish he’d settle for a single genre. “Oxtales”, a short story, won the James Joyce Suspended Sentence in 2001, while his short plays have been performed in Sydney and Melbourne. He reviews books for Radio National, teaches journalism at RMIT and is also an incurable maker of cryptic crosswords.

  Graeme Blundell is an actor, director, producer and writer who has been associated with many pivotal moments in Australian theatre, film and television. Now the national TV critic for The Australian, his autobiography, The Naked Truth, has just been published. He lives on the NSW coast with writer Susan Kurosawa.

  The Chaser team has created the ABC TV series The Election Chaser, CNNNN, The Chaser Decides and The Chaser’s War on Everything. Since founding the widely acclaimed but mostly unread newspaper The Chaser in 1999, the team has produced comedy in all major media, including TV, radio, books and Christmas cracker jokes. The Chaser is now a satirical media empire which rivals Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp in all fields except power, influence, popularity and profitability.

  Barry Cohen was a federal MP from 1969 until 1990, including Minister for Home Affairs and Environment from 1983 to 1984, Minister for Arts, Heritage and Environment from 1984 to 1987 and the Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Bicentennial. He is the author of several books and a regular contributor to some of Australia’s leading magazines and newspapers including The Australian.

  Kaz Cooke is a columnist and author. Her website is www.kaz.cooke.com

  Ian Cuthbertson began his liquorice allsorts freelance writing career in the 1980s. He was engaged by The Australian as a contributor in late 1996, and his adoption was made formal following a full-time job offer in 2002. He builds his own computers, runs a project music studio and is currently The Australian’s television and DVD editor.

  Mark Dapin is a writer for Good Weekend Magazine in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. His latest book is Strange Country, the story of his travels around Australia. In another life, he was editor-in-chief of Ralph Magazine.

  Catherine Deveny is a serial pest and professional pain in the arse. She writes columns for the big paper with the big words despite being dyslexic and half-cocked.

  Frank Devine has been editor of the New York Post, the Chicago Sun Times and The Australian. He now lives in Sydney and writes regularly for The Australian.

  Alexander Downer was Australia’s Foreign Affairs Minister for twelve years. He was instrumental in delivering independence in East Timor and played a pivotal role in Australia’s response to the Middle East conflicts. He has been an active participant and diplomatic force on global issues of human rights, climate change and natural disasters. He is now a United Nations Special Envoy for Cyprus.

  Larissa Dubecki is a news reporter for The Age. She was the editor of The Age’s weekly entertainment lift-out EG until August 2006, and currently writes on topics relating to entertainment and popular culture, including reviewing television for the Green Guide and restaurants for the Good Food Guide and Cheap Eats Guide.

  Suzanne Edgar, as a member of Seven Writers, wrote Canberra Tales, and her short stories were published as Counting Backwards. Her poetry collection, The Painted Lady, was short-listed for the ACT’s Best Book of the Year and for the 2007 ACT Writing and Publishing awards.

  Charles Firth is a leading think-piece writer, boasting more than 55 000 opinions about the world, all of them less than one sentence long. He delivered the keynote at the 2008 World Cynicism Symposium in San Diego, where he expressed thirty-seven controversial opinions in under twenty seconds, setting a new world record.

  Germaine Greer was born in Melbourne and educated in Australia and at Cambridge University. Her first book, The Female Eunuch, remains one of the most influential texts of the feminist movement. Germaine has had a distinguished academic career in Britain and the US, and makes regular appearances in print and other media as a broadcaster, journalist, columnist and reviewer. Since 1988 she has been director (and financier) of Stump Cross Books, a publishing house specialising in lesser known works by early women writers.

  Gideon Haigh is vice-president and chairman of selectors at South Yarra Cricket Club.

  Marieke Hardy is a writer, radio broadcaster, hedonist and raconteur. After an ill-advised early career as a child actress she carried on polluting Australian television airwaves via her work as a screenwriter and producer. She is very sorry about any damage caused to your carpets.

  Matthew Hardy is a Melbourne-based comedian who was the first Aussie to cement himself full-time on the UK live circuit, spending eight years there in the 1990s. He is the author of the bestselling book Saturday Afternoon Fever, and his television credits include The Big Schmooze and The Fat. Matthew was also a part of the BAFTA-winning writing team for The Sketch Show on ITV in the UK, and subsequently wrote for Kelsey Grammer’s sketch series on Fox in the US.

  Wendy Harmer hosted The Big Gig on ABC TV and Sydney’s highest rating FM radio breakfast show for eleven years. She has written seven books for adults and ten for children, and she wrote, produced and presented the documentary series Stuff for ABC TV. Wendy is currently writing and producing an animated television series based on her Pearlie books, and her third novel for adults.

  Barry Humphries is a multi-talented actor, artist and author. As an actor, he has invented many satiric Australian characters, but his most famous creations are Dame Edna Everage, Barry (Bazza) McKenzie and Sir Les Paterson. Edna, Bazza and Les between them have made several sound recordings, written books and appeared in films and on television and have been the subject of exhibitions. Since the 1960s Humphries’ career has alternated between England, Australia and the US. He was given an Order of Australia in 1982.

  Clive James is the author of more than thirty books. As well as his four volumes of autobiography, he has published novels and collections of literary and television criticism, essays, travel writing and verse. As a television performer he has appeared regularly for both the BBC and ITV. In 1992 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia and in 2003 he was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for Literature.

  Danny Katz is a columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He is the “Modern Guru” in the Good Weekend Magazine. He is the author of several books including Spid the Dummy, Dork Geek Jew and the Little Lunch series for kids. Danny is originally from Canada, but came to Australia at a young age because he was allergic to maple syrup.

  Malcolm Knox is the author of ten books, most recently On Obsession. His works of fiction and non-fiction have won several awards and have been published around the world. A journalist since 1994 for The Sydney Morning Herald, he has won two Walkley awards.

  Peter Lalor is a senior sports writ
er with The Australian and has written a number of books including Blood Stain, winner of the 2004 Ned Kelly Award for True Crime Writing. He lives with his wife, two children and a brown dog in Sydney, but learned about darkness in 1980s Melbourne.

  John Lethlean is fortunate enough to write about the subjects he loves—food and restaurants—for a living, mostly for titles associated with The Age. When he’s not being a proper critic, he has a bit of fun with a food-related column in the Saturday Age, where the pieces in this collection were first published.

  Mungo MacCallum has been writing and broadcasting irreverently about politics for more than forty years. His work has appeared in most major Australian and some overseas publications. He is the author of seven books, the most recent being Poll Dancing: The Story of the 2007 Election.

  Shane Maloney is the editor of Speleology Today, the world’s biggest selling glow-in-the-dark monthly magazine. He is better known as the author of the Murray Whelan series of comic thrillers.

  Shaun Micallef is a writer, comedian actor, TV producer and professional tennis player. He is married and has three children.

  Paul Mitchell’s latest books are a collection of short stories titled Dodging the Bull, and a poetry collection, Awake Despite the Hour, both published in 2007. He’d like to say something else but is too busy answering his email.

  Les Murray is a fair poet but a poor cook at best. He lives in the Australian bush.

  Olga Pavlinova Olenich was born in Australia of Russian parentage. She is a Melbourne-based writer whose stories, articles and poetry are widely published in Australia and overseas. She has one son, who is a musician.

  Rod Quantock is one of the reasons that Melbourne is the live comedy capital of Australia. For forty years he has remained a contemporary stand-up comedian, evolving and staying at the forefront of the craft. That he continues to build new, younger audiences is testament to possibly the most impressive career in Australian comedy.