The Name of a Saint, the singing voice of an angel, the mind of a sinner.
It's not easy being Paul McDermott - but it’s far less easy being Paul McDermott’s audience.
A freezing midwinter’s night in Sydney. In a draughty ABC-TV studio, the taping of Good News Week is getting underway. McDermott bounds onstage and surveys us through gleaming eyes, the fox loose in the hen-house. We make tasty morsels - a bouncy Clariol-ad hairstyle here, a lurid sweater there and, over in this corner, a sweetly smiling adolescent boy. Paydirt. "Are you old enough to have public hair yet?" McDermott demands. "You don't even know what "fucking" means." His victim makes the mistake of protesting. Our host grows silky at the prospect of forthcoming humiliation. "Oh, you do know!" he says. "Stand up and tell the audience, then."
Another comic would warm up with a more soothing routine, invite people to observe the absurdities of life, not that comic. "If the audience don't like it they can go away" is how he sums up his performance philosophy. Tonight, taunting and jeering - "Tell us! Come on, you're so clever, you know everything" - he gives the impression he's not going to relent. And he doesn't, until the boy begs, "Please don't make me do it."
The warm-up didn't make it to air, but it goes a long way towards explaining the 36-year-old McDermott's steadily growing cult appeal. In a wateland of homogenised entertainment he represents the unknown. He will say the things you were thinking five seconds before. He might not stick to the script. "Dangerous" is the word used most often when discribing his style.
"He'll get right out there and risk a great deal." says Wendy Harmer, who worked with him on the Big Gig. "It's fascinating to watch, in a scary way." Similarily, comedian Mark Trevorrow (aka Bob Downe), who has been a fan of McDermott's since he first saw him perform with the Doug Anthony Allstars, admires his capacity to push the envelope. "It's such a skill," Trevorrow says, "to be so rude to everybody and still have them like you." Trevorrow lauds the "true spirit of cabaret" behind McDermott's antics, saying that " the room decides what will happe". It works, Harmer muses, because, "obviously people can see the twinkle in Paul's eye. They wouldn't stand for it if he really was awful."
Audiences do seem to adore McDermott. Every arch of his eyebrow, every mocking remark is greeted by rapturous applause. Women - and plenty of men - declare him a big old sex bomb. Fifteen-year-old girls dedicate websites to him and wave placards saying, "We Love U Paul". (You spelt 'you' wrong," he retorts.) Advertisers want him to sell their products, directors send him film scripts to consider, other TV shows are trying to create their own version of him.
Not long ago, few observers would have predicted such a rosy future. McDermott established himself as a talent to watch in the late 1980s, but when the Allstars had their much-publicised split in 1994, it was the other two, Tim Ferguson and Richard Fidler, perceived as the 'user friendly Dougs", who were being courted. Ted Robinson, the producer of Good News Week, recalls trying unsuccessfully to "sell" McDermott, whom he descibes as an engine-room of ideas, as a compere to commercial television management for a year or so. "Too edgy," Robinson says. "Paul has a natural bent to want to shock, and television is a conservative medium."
In the end, Robinson created Good News Week - based on a satirical current affairs show in the UK - a knowing blend of current affairs and pop culture that capitalises on McDermott's freewheeling schtick. the show made a sluggish start, then picked up steam to the point where, when the hugely popular Channel Nine Show, with Roy and HG, took a break, the GNW team was chosen to replace it with Good News Weekend, a variation on the weekly program.
McDermott casts himself as part of a group effort - Mikey Robbins and Julie McCrossin complete the onstage team - but there's no doubt he is the one the audience screams loudest for. His popularity has resulted in some interesting offers; recently, a major political party asked him to run for office. He turned them dowm. "It's stupid to build a party on personalities, " he says, looking faintly embarressed when the subject is raised. "I've done too many evil things in my past and they would come up. No way. Why would you do it? For Christ's sake...." A minute later, he has thought of a reason: "If you were a conservative politician it would make sex more interesting. Oranges up your arse, big plastic bag over your head, dangling from an electrical beam - that's living!"
McDermott's monster act is convincing. "what's Paul like?" I've been asking his friends and collegues, with growing trepidation, the week before we meet. Here are some of the answers: "Smart", "thoughful", "Sweet", "hard to get to know", "Complex". Most people who know him concur that he has long, dour periods and can be prickly. Wendy Harmer wighs in with this reassuring bit of advice:
"He's only scary if he thinks you're bullshitting him." "Paul's something of a contradiction," says filmmaker Tony Ayres, who went to art school with him in Canberra. "He's got that confident public persona, but underneath he's an incredibly shy person who takes a long time to make friends." When he does befriend someone, however, it's a commitment. Gerald Jones, another art school friend and Canberra resident, says that though they move in different circles, McDermott has stayed in touch and when they meet, 'He's genuinely interested in what I do."
A few days after the taping, McDermott takes time out from his frantic schedule to meet me at his local, the Bondi Icebergs bar, a place where grizzled guys drink beer and play cards and nobody recognises him. Away from the cameras, lights and audience action, he appears smaller and quieter. Also a lot less matte. "On TV you've got no wrinkles, " I note.
"And now, heaps of wrinkles, " he replies amiably. "It's amazing the amount of blusher, rouge and foundation they paint on to make you look lifelike for the cameras. That's the thing about television and performance, it's an illusion. If you didn't wear makeup it'd be pretty scary, like those mornings when you drop acid and your pupils are enlarged because you're accepting so much information [that] you see a landscape completely different from what you normally see. Very tricky for everyone at home."
He is immediately likable, lively without being overbearing and, unexpectedly for the star of the show, attentive. Almost any query will send him off on a riff which twists and turns through myriad subjects. This is highly enteraining and has the added bonus, from his point of view, of deflecting inquiries until he has worked out a way to answer them.
McDermott did not set out to be a comic. It was something he began doing as a way to put himself through art school. Being part of he cabaret theatre of the Allstars was also a way to consolidate his interests: writing, singing, dancing and drawing (he painted the backdrops for many of the gigs). He became one of the trio almost by accident when another member left and was, for a while, the shy one. Mr Grumpy, as his Allstars character was known, developed because "nobody else wanted to be the monster, wanted to be hated in that sort of sense". He was the one who would encourage the sadistic games the trio became known for, or the one who would single out audience members for abuse. It was challenging for both audience and performers - anything could happen - but at times even he was surprised by the frenzy that erupted. With the Dougs, we used to have a game where we'd get everybody to slap the person next to them, " he says. "You'd get this domino effect, people would forget they were at a comedy venue and their goal became to win this farcical, belittling race that achieved nothing! They'd slap their loved ones, their friends, people they didn't know, and you'd be thinking, 'Why are they doing this?' and at the same time you'd be shouting, 'Come on! Faster! Harder!' It's a weird thing, a good-bad schism."
When people came up later and showed him bruises he had engineered, he would apologise only to find that they didn't mind at all. 'What interested me," he says, "was the way that people kept coming back for more."
Where does the persona end and the person begin?
McDermott will frankly concede that he can behave like a prize arsehole - he has turned friends into "demented messes" with his irrational moods and made several enemies along the way - but he stresses that the stage act is just that, a piece of theatre which exposes the hypocrisy of accepted social veneers by ripping them away. "It's like painting pictures of the devil, exploring that terrain," he offers as explanation. The skill lies in knowing when to stop and how to control it, what he calls "the magician's trick" of performance. Asking if he feels any moral compunction over upsetting people is, to him, missing the point; even on the rare occasion his parents came to see the Alltars he didn't tone it down.
You could construe all this as a power trip and in a sense it is. McDermott has a way of turning things around to his advantage. But another way to see the act is as a form of rebellion, a revenge on the sort of guy he was supposed to be. McDermott, who grew up in the suburbs of Canberra, the oldest son in an Irish Catholic family, and a twin to boot - his sister, Sharon, was born a minute before him - was a misfit at the all-boys Marist Brothers high school he attended. A "backwardly quiet" student, paralysed by shyness - he recalls once losing his maths book and being too terrified to tell anyone for the whole year - he was hopeless at the things that mattered, like rugby league. His teachers regarded him as an imbecile and he had few friends.
There was a point where he couldn't imagine anyone ever liking him.
He relates this without self-pity, although the way he hops up from the table and busies himself with nothing in particular suggests it has left a few scars. What did he think would happen to him? "I hoped I would die young," he replies and seems to be only half joking.
To add to it, there was his growing distance from Catholicism. He rails against the "duplicitous" nature of a Church which preaches tolerance on the one hand and condemns all non-believers to burn in the eternal fires of damnation on the other. The Catholics he grew up with, he says, were "insular and hideously racist" and his early religious teaching left him with a mistrust of orthodoxy that's a constant in his work and his conversation.
By channelling his audience into a performance he has made it work for him. But what's notable about McDermott is that while other comics trade on their outsider status, idlaying endearing eccentrics, he has inhabited a less ernpathetic role. As Mr Grumpy, he was the alpha male, the sexual predator, the football hooligan. The scabrous-compere drag he puts on for Good News Week is another guise; it gives him leave to hurl invective at anyone who doesn't agree with his version of the world. Like religion, and the media, which he relentlessly critiques, masculinity is a departure point and a reference. "It's the attraction-repulsion thing," he says. When I remark that the harshness of his characters is a male prerogative, that a woman would have a harder time getting away with that, he agrees, though he thinks more should try. "It would be good to see women taking on that powerful role." For a group of "fey lads", as McDermott describes the Allstars, posturing as aggressors was cathartic, like "squeezing the cancer out of the body".
He sounds a little nostalgic as he talks about the group whose split, triggered by Tim Ferguson's decision to quit London where the Allstars were performing and return to Melbourne to be with his young family, is still the subject of speculation. Rumours that the break was acrimionious were fuelled by an article in the Good Weekend magazine earlier this year which stated that McDermott and Richard Fidler have not spoken to Ferguson since. More recently though, Ferguson appeared on Good News Week. McDermott is willing to talk on the topic, although he chooses his words with care. The break came at the wrong time, he says. "We were working towards our own series with [UK'sl Channel Four and they were interested. Richard and I thought coming back to perform in Australia would mean going to a commercial station, which was the next logical step, and that would have been an incredible compromise of what we did." His friends say that McDermott, who invested a lot of himself in the Allstars, was depressed for a long time after they split. "No, not depressed McDermott corrects. "I was probably sullen for awhile, but I'd always expected it to happen." He does remember feeling "mute" afterwards, as if all the known avenues of expression had been cut off.
Do he and Ferguson have a good relationship these days'? "We have an OK relationship," he says evenly. "We send each other flowers on our birthdays." Tim Ferguson, who is in Sydney to play Frank n' Furter in a production of the Rocky Horror Show, did not return calls, but in The Sun-Herald he was quoted as saying that he left the Alltars because they were just, "touring England, in a van, going from gig to gig, town to town, making money but never arriving anywhere in a professional sense".
Says McDermott, "He believes that because he wants to believe that. We were playing 3000-seat venues and we were on TV the whole time. But I wrote all the material, so maybe it wasn't as artistically enriching an experience for Tim." With a flash of feeling he adds, "I don't feel comfortable talking about this, but it would be better to make no money and like what you did than to be in the cesspool of comedy hell."
Richard Fidler, who is currently hosting the program Race Around the World, declined to be interviewed.
If he's not being a compere, or writing songs, or hurling himself into the surf at Bondi, McDermott spends his time painting. One evening he shows me through the flat he shares with his girlfriend, Jo, and academic, and about a thousand of his paintings; minature surrealist landscapes, grotesqu cartoons in the manner of Raw comic books sketched in Texta on the backs of envelopes, tortured renderings of devils and saints. A half-finished drawing of a foot sits on an easel. Dotted about the place are books he has made - he is an obsessive paper collector - and the various other projects he's working on, among them ideas for scripts and shows.
He says he needs to produce things, that he can never just sit still. "Maybe because I'm not going to produce anything else," he cracks. Meaning? "Well, children," he says firmly; kids would be for him a way to "pass on all your insecurities". Is he a workaholic? He doesn't like the word, he prefers to say that he has a lot of things to do.
What will he do next "That's always the dilemma, isn't it?" he responds. Comedy is a transient business. He has plans but they are not linear. "These are books that I want to write or.....whatever," McDermott says. "I fall into everything." For all his talents and the productivity, he seems to still be working out a direction to go in. Ted Robinson, who gives Good News Week another year, predicts that McDermott will possibly move on to feature films, "I will say this about Paul's life," Robinson says. "I think he needs to make some choices soon about what to do."
He won't give up performing yet, he loves it too much. Talking earlier about its allure. McDermott made it sound like the activity which allowed him the most freedom while supplying him with a protective cover for the things he holds precious.
"Anything that you do - painting or writing - there's no repsonse in the world that's going to make you happy with it if you're not happy with it," he says, "You can show a piece of it to someone and they say, "oh, I love that," but that's got no value, it doesn't mean that much. Performing is the opposite; you can go out there and do something appalling and people love it."
Doesn't that make him feel like a fraud? He laughs. "Occasionally, yeah, yeah, of
course I do. What's so traumatic about that?"
Published in HQ magazine. September-October edition. No.60.
New-look News
Time, or to be more precise, timeslot, is an illusion as far as Paul McDermott is
concerned. But after his move from the ABC, it's about to become a reality, reports Simon
Yeaman.
Its the eve of Good News Week's commercial premiere and host Paul McDermott can't
understand what all the fuss is about. "I think it's strange that every time we
mention we're going on at 7:30 on Sunday night, people go "Oh my God"," he
says.
"Its been sort of a 60 Minutes homeland for God knows how long. I guess we would like
to just do a good program rather than this idea of competitiveness and so on that seems to
be rife with everyone."
"I suppose that's one of the curses of commercial stations. It' like who's first.
Second or third, or whatever."
"I can't really be bothered with it myself. I'd just be happy to do a very good
program."
Perhaps, but ratings will play a big part in the longevity of the topical quiz show
satire.
The show struggled in its first year on the ABC (1996) and was almost canned for it.
While the pressure is far more intense in commercial telly, the luxury for McDermott and
pals is that Network Ten is more concerned the lucrative 16 to 39-year-old market than
winning the timeslot by being all things to all people.
And while ABC insiders mightn't say it publicly, some of them will be happy to see
McDermott, Mikey Robins, Julie McCrossin and the rest of the defecting comedy camp crash
and burn. McDermott says the GNW team has received "negative and positive"
feedback about the move.
"Negative people, you know, staunch ABC heartland viewers who never watch anything
else, are going to feel compromised going to Ten," he says. "But on the whole I
think people are going to feel excited by it - they've given us their approval and
support."
"I felt incredibly sad leaving the place. I love the ABC. The practicality of going
to Ten was more that just going to Ten or going to a commercial station."
"It was tied up with the whole idea that if we stayed with the ABC than we would take
the entire budget for the year because we wanted to do Good News Weekend (the spin-off
show) again. If we did that then we'd take everyone's money. It's really not that fair if
we had somewhere else to go." Sources say the Ten deal is worth more than $6 million,
arranged with Ted Robinson, a former head of ABC Comedy whose production company, Good
News Week Productions, has produced GNW for three years.
The deal also includes a new weekly 90-minute variety program to screen later in the year
(McDermott says this will be much like Good News Weekend). Ten fought off not only a
counter-offer from the ABC to snare its coup but also those from Seven and Nine.
"Nine and Seven were also chewing at the bit, trying to get us on….it was
interesting to be wanted like that in such a barbaric, frenzied way," says McDermott.
"But really, Channel 10 has, over the last four years, targeted the demographic we
were strongest in: the 18 to 40 group. For myself, Channel 10 is the only commercial
channel I sort of watch. The Simpsons, The X Files occasionally, and of course Judge
Judy."
Before Good News Week, McDermott struck fame with the comedy-music act The Doug Anthony
Allstars. Raised in Adelaide, Paul is the first cousin of former Crows footballer Chris
McDermott. He moved to Canberra when aged 12, with his father John, a taxation department
employee.
A singer, songwriter, actor and author, McDermott, who now lives in Sydney's Bondi with
girlfriend Johannah Fahey, is also well known in the United Kingdom for his Allstars and
stage gigs. However, he insists life only began with the "dynamic" GNW. "I
always have trepidation about going to commercial television. I've rallied against it for
years - I'm nothing but a hypocrite," he laughs. "So the good thing about this
move is we're going as a team. Mikey, Julie… we have all the same people working on
the show (including Flacco and The Sandman), the writers and producers. That's what makes
it very easy. We trust those people - there's no reason to change what we do."
The ABC says it will consider allowing H.G. Nelson and Adam Spencer to again guest on the
show "if and when approached".
One inevitable change is the duration of the program. GNW will screen as a one-hour
format, twice the length of the ABC version.
"We might have to bring in a few segments just to fill the hour - a commercial hour's
pretty close to the ABC's old half-hour anyway," McDermott says.
"On the first edit we did the program (for the ABC) we would get 45 minutes. So, in a
way, its going to be more natural for the show to be on the commercial station.
"We always felt like we chopping a lot out when we cut it to half-hour."
McDermott says the contract with Ten precludes any compromise.
"Apart from giving away the car each week and having the chocolate wheel on, we will
not be
compromised," he quips. "If you start messing around with the integrity of the
show then you lose what the show is essentially about. I think it was courageous of Ten to
not to try and editorialise or censor us at all. They like what they purchased and that's
what they want to have on."
Despite, the rumoured $6 million deal, McDermott, who, like most of the GNW team, retains
ties with ABC's triple J, says his wage "will not change substantially from the
ABC".
"Some people are getting less," he says. "I think there's a lot of myths
about commercial television. One of them is we'll become fabulously wealthy now and get
all our hopes and dreams. It's not that at all. I think the opportunity's there to do
things like ads and promotional stuff. I won't say I won't be doing commercials - that
would be stupid - but at the moment I'd really prefer not to."
He says he can't endorse anything. "Every time I've tried to do things that are
sincere, people just think I'm an arse. They just think I'm a liar and charlatan," he
gags again.
As for the show's travelling plans, McDermott says they're taking it out of Sydney to
Canberra, Melbourne and Perth, but not his home town of Adelaide at this stage.
"Hopefully soon, one day," he says.
"Show an interest, get the ratings up."
Published in the Adelaide Advertiser on 17/3/99
Sexiest Man No. 3
Paul McDermott squirms in his seat, uncomfortably pondering his sexability, "I've
never really understood why people scream at comedy," muses the former Doug Anthony
Allstar and Triple J regular. "When you tell a joke, and to have people sort of
faint….." But this particular protagonist, with a delivery as jagged as his
haircut and come-on smile, knows he sets off the spunkometer. Teens in the audience at
ABC-TV's Good News Week tapings tell him so with their yells and catcalls. Older fans
claim to appreciate the 36-year-old host for his scurrilous mind. We reckon the hint of
bristle, the cute, taut bod, the hello, you've-got-my-attention eyes and choirboy-sweet
singing voice may have something to do with it. He can throw his arms around us any time.
EROGENOUS ZONE: ANYWHERE THERE'S AN AUDIENCE
Bad News Week for ABC as Comedy Trio goes to TEN
The ABC's popular quiz show satire Good
News Week is moving to Channel 10.
The Ten Network announced yesterday the
signing of the program, as well as a new weekly 90-minute variety program featuring Good
News Week regulars Paul McDermott, Mikey Robbins, Julie McCrossin, Flacco (Paul
Livingstone) and The Sandman (Steven Abbott).
"It's a very significant coup - the
team is made up of some of the hottest talent in Australia," said a delighted Network
Ten programmer, Mr David Mott.
Mr Mott not only fought off a counter-offer
from the ABC but also attempts by the Seven and Nine Networks to snare the GNW Team.
The deal, which industry sources say is
worth more than $6 million, was arranged with Ted Robinson, a former head of ABC comedy
whose production company, Good News Week Productions, has produced GNW for the past three
years.
Under the agreement, Robinson willproduce a
weekly one-hour Good News Week and the variety show.
It may also involve some one-off specials.
Mr Mott would not discuss timeslots but
there is speculation Good News Week, which could begin on ten next month, will screen on
Tuesday nights at 9:30 pm after the new series Dawson's Creek.
The variety show will come later in the
year.
Published in the Adelaide
Advertiser......date unknown.....
The Good News about Paul
For once Good News Week host Paul McDermott wasn't gagging. " My home town ... love
Adelaide, love the Hills, love the Crows," says McDermott, endeavoring to ingratiate
himself to us in the lead-up to his Channel 10 premiere (7.30pm, tomorrow week).
"My cousin was captain for a number of years, Chris McDermott." "Yeah,
right", said we, before putting in a call to Triple M, McDermott's radio station,
just in case. Shock, horror. Paul was actually telling the truth. Triple M informs us PM
is actually Chris's father's brother's son, making them first cousins. And what's more,
it's believed Paul, is the son of a taxman (no wonder he's been so coy about his
past). "He owned up, did he?" says Chris, pictured above left, of the cousin
connection. "His family were here until Paul might have been 10 or 12 before he went
to Canberra. His father went over with work. So Christmases and all those sort of family
things, we used to spend quite a bit of time together, we were about the same age. My
memories of him were of a relatively quiet, good fun, skinny kid. Then when he popped up
on TV as this lunatic, I thought 'God'. I think he's got real good humor," Chris
adds. "I don't know whether that (the move to Ten) puts a restriction on his warped
sense of humor or it's good for it." More importantly, could Paul, a former Doug
Anthony Allstar, play footy? "He wasn't without talent, although I'm sure he's far
better in his chosen field. He's become this superstar," says Chris. But surely not
as big as the mighty Crows? "Probably
bigger, in his own right."
Published in the Adelaide Advertiser on 13th March 1999.
Hostage to Fame
Unlike his spiky, hyperactive on-screen persona, Paul McDermott is a shy, intensely
private person, uncomfortable in the glare of media scrutiny. JON CASMIR attempts to pry
beneath the surface.
Mikey Robins says that if I want to get a glimpse of the inner workings of Paul
McDermott's mind, I should ask to see one of the journals he is always carrying around.
These notebooks, Robins insists, say a lot about the host of Good News Week.
And so it is that, seated in McDermott's
chilly office in the GNW warren at Fox Studios (Yes, he has bumped into Tom Cruise in the
corridor), I find myself asking him what exactly these Journals of his say.
The thinking woman's breakfast choice (crumpet, muffin, brioche, whatever) folds his arms
and shrinks into his chair. For a moment is seems that he is not going to answer the
question, But then he cackles and finds the words.
"Mikey's been looking, obviously because I don't think I've shown him," he
snorts. "He's been going through my bag. That's what it says. It says more about him
than it does about me..."
It's a neat deflection, the kind that turns up often with the intensely private McDermott,
whenever conversation approaches a doorway he doesn't feel like going through. As he
speaks, he shoots a sideways glance at the nondescript blue notebook lying on his desk,
but his hands stay firmly tucked under his armpits.
"They're just notes," he says dismissively, "ideas, thoughts, things I have
to do..."
Pushed a little further, McDermott explains that he has "stacks" of those
journals at home "food for the silverfish". He has been scribbling away in them
for the best part of two decades, spurred by an experience at the Canberra School of Art
when an installation was dismantled before he had the chance to document it. Since then,
he has been fastidiously keeping a record of himself, not for posterity but for his own
reasons.
So, given his long-term artistic bent, are these journals visual as well as verbal?
There's another pause, then McDermott sighs and relents reaching for the book, holding it
open on his lap while he flips quickly through its densely inked pages.
"Well, look, I wasn't going to show you," he says, his head down, his voice
lowered. "This isn't a very good one...it's just this sort of
stuff...notes...drawings...crap...rubbish, basically ..rubbish...rabid..." He trails
off. Closes the book. Looks at the floor. I change the subject and he seems
relieved.
The reluctant, oddly shy individual sitting opposite me is a considerable distance from
the Paul McDermott we all think we know from television and stage.
When the big lights flash on, he is the smiling, power-suited cattle prod, the savage wit,
the angry satirist, the vanilla-sweet chanter, the acidly sexy front man, the playfully
satanic choirboy.
But while the real Paul McDermott is probably all those things, he is also the charming,
carefully spoken, physically slight person here now. Whereas long-time pal and co-worker
Robins is pretty much the same on and off camera, McDermott can seem the polar opposite, a
mild-mannered Clark Kent to his onstage
Superbastard.
The sharpness is still there, but it's accompanied by a thoughtfulness, a self-contained
calm and a caution that seem a million miles away from his other self. Even the spiky hair
seems to change, suggesting a quizzical, rather than an aggressive nature.
"It's odd, because I don't think people expect what they get," he says.
"After they've seen the show, they get quite disheartened when they meet me because
they think I'm going to be something I'm not - loud. I do have moments when I drink and
this other side comes out, but most of the time I'm fairly quiet.
" All this makes more sense if you know McDermott was not destined to be a performer.
He was not dancing on the table for cheering Auntie's at age six. He was not precociously
wooing casting agents at nine. He was not making a name for himself in soaps in his teens.
Instead, he fell into performing while studying art, motivated not be the usual heady mix
of egotism and insecurity, but by financial necessity. When he began his career with the
Doug Anthony All Stars, back in the mists of the early 1980s, he was finishing his degree
and desperate for the cash to keep himself in canvas.
After three years of happily scratching away in his burrow with a mapping pen, the
would-be hermit discovered the instant gratification that audience applause could bring.
Emerging, blinking, into the limelight he decided to stay there, surprising himself by
doing so - he had not thought he could be so extrovert.
Since then there's little in media terms that the 36-year-old McDermott hasn't done. He
has performed on stages around the world. He's written a book and a TV show. He's been a
newspaper columnist. He's released records and videos (and even a comic). He's survived
breakfast radio. He's been captain of the goodship GNW.
Through all of it, he has continued to experiment in the visual arts (he loves small
drawings and making books , but also paints and sculpts) for his own amusement and sanity.
Which makes it even stranger that, with a bulging CV like his, the one glaring omission
is: art exhibition.
"I think it would be very difficult for me to have an exhibition," he says,
"because I would feel very exposed. All this [he waves at his GNW surroundings] is
like a front, a facade.
"It's the idea of having strangers look at these things that are so personal, at
what's in my head. I can do what I do on television, but to open a book and show someone
is still difficult for me. Even showing you before, I felt uncomfortable."
Is that because there's no prickly ironic shell to protect him?
"Sharp!" he laughs. "Yeah, I would feel naked. I feel naked when I see
other people's work. I'd feel vulnerable."
According to McDermott, there is no single reason for the defection of Good News Week to
Ten this year. There were instead a bunch of small reasons that just seemed to add up.
He says ABC budget cuts would have made it impossible for the team to make both GNW and
Good News Weekend.
He points out that had they stayed at Aunty, they would have been absorbing dollars that
could be better used developing new talents and ideas.
"Also, we were comfortable and whenever I'm at the point where everything is going
smoothly and comfortably in my life, I have always unfortunately destabilized it.
"All those things were working towards us doing something a bit radical. So when
channels Ten, Seven and Nine offered us the chance to jump...
" What, SBS didn't?
"No weirdly, SBS didn't come through...Ten was the only one I was interested in at
all. My favourite program at the moment it the World's Wildest Police Videos. Have you
seen it? It's a gift from God.
"I just think Ten has shown a bit of foresight lately. It's heading for a certain
demographic, focusing on it. It hasn't done what the networks have been doing for
years, which is wanting all Australians to be watching 24hrs a day, ensuring a level of
mediocrity."
So the GNW move is all philosophical, then, and not just a question of great stinking wads
of commercial television cash?
"Oh, God, no!" he says, appearing genuinely taken aback. "My wage has gone
up a little bit, but nothing compared with what people think."
If the remuneration situation is not hugely improved, it has to be said that even less has
changed elsewhere for the GNW team. Produced out of house for the ABC, the program is made
in the same way, by the same people, for Ten.
The principal difference between 1998 and 1999 is that the tape has to be delivered each
week to a different address. Still, if you're willing to believe some of the letters to
The Guide, GNW has lost it.
"Oh, yeah," McDermott laughs. "They're just assumptions. People have all
these in-built stereotypes in their skulls that they can't shake them loose. They accuse
you of going for the money. It's the instant reaction that people have because you've gone
over to the dark side. You can't do anything about it."
The network switch (the contract is for one year and he can't see the show for going
longer than two, even if it is turned around the flat ratings and becomes a success) has
fired up McDermott, giving him energy to overcome his restless urges. The moribund
natural of commercial television satire also played a part in inspiring him to take the
program to a new market. So can GNW make a difference?
"No." he says pitifully, then breaks into a raucous cackle. "Look, it's a
good show and it has substance. Generally, as a form, TV doesn't have substance, but its
great to vegetate in front of. It's like a Thermos and a little fire.
"When we were kids, it was almost like the great white hope: television was going to
inform and educate us. I don't think that's happened. I don't think that's why people
watch television. They do it in the same way that people used to huddle around the
wireless. It offers a bit of warmth, its always there for you, you don't have to
feed it and it doesn't s--- on the carpet like a cat."
McDermott will talk you into a corner on the subject of television, but ask him to discuss
himself ands the air in the room goes thin. Unlike many other celebrities, he is not
driven by a need for others to know about his life. He's no open book. In fact, the less
people know, the better.
Because of this, the interview process involves a polite wariness, a carefully staged
dance of truth and obfuscation. If some people are easy to pin down, others, like
McDermott, continually manage to slip free.
"I always feel like I'm doing this (he executes a zigzag movement with his hand). You
ask me a question and I am conscious of a truth beyond the wall, but I don't want to talk
about it. I always feel like I'm hedging, telling half-truths. I'm not a lot better than I
use to be though. When I first started good news week, I was just a liar."
"It's so easy to lie," he continues. "And it's fantastic. With the All
Stars, we used to tell people that Doug Anthony was our Prime Minister of Australia who
was killed by members of the National Front on the 11th of November. When it got it
printed in The Times with a photograph, I just thought: yes that's a victory.
You weave incredibly complex stories that people jot down or tape and then this myth gets
transformed into something. It's great. And we're all guilty of it to a greater or lesser
degree."
Except that he's not guilty. He doesn't feel bad about it at all. Confounding the
expectations of his audience is what McDermott has always been about. If there is a
defining characteristic of his onstage self, it is ambivalence about the people who come
to watch him. He's famous for baiting and insulting what he calls, with a laugh that is as
close to joyful as he gets in our conversation, "the horrible rabble" and
"human detritus."
This desire to mess with the minds of the audience stems from an interest in fanaticism
that may or may not be traced but to his exposure to, and rejection, Catholicism. (He may
have lapsed but he notes grimly, "like circumcision, you're cut for life")
It's an interest that would, perhaps, have amounted to little had he not discovered quite
early on, that he has the gift of getting away with being appalling rude to people.
"I have no idea why I get way with it," he says a little disingenuously,
"but it has got me into trouble, too. When I'm onstage, I can get away with it. But
in social situations, I am not very good and very often someone won't understand the tone
of what I say."
McDermott concedes that he is "fairly" self-analytical, but declines to offer
motivations for why his onstage self behaves the way he does, other than to say that the
aggressiveness is the legacy of the Australian male childhood, with its rituals of peer
abuse, its barrage of testosterone truths. He says he used to save himself with his mouth
rather than his fists, but when asked if he's a pacifist, reveals that "if I was
physically
capable, I would be a bully".
Asked to nominate his strengths, he fires back: I'm cheap, I don't talk back. And I make
tea for everyone." Left to fill the gap, I venture that the core of his appeal is his
ability to shift performance gears with going through neutral, to instantly change
direction and emotion. As a viewer, you are never safe with McDermott around, never
certain that where you think your going is where you'll end up.
"I'm conscious of that play," he says. "That's what I really like, the
thing loving people one second, and hating them the next, the moodiest of the play
onstage. That's basically what I do. It's slap, slap, slap, hug, slap. That's fun. I don't
know where it comes from."
Something about the way he says the last line makes me think he's lying here, that he is
well and truly aware of what makes him tick. But I know we're not going through that door.
And he knows that I know it.
So Mikey Robins was right. Those journals probably do have a lot to say about Paul
McDermott. But if you want to know exactly what, you'll have to go through his bag
yourself.
Published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 10 May 1999 and kindly typed by Hilary.
10 THINGS YOU MAY NOT KNOW ABOUT PAUL McDERMOTT*
-He's known for his kindness to all living things, his tact and poise in extreme
situations and his ability to forgive.
-He has an appalling memory for anything other than pettiness.
-He has two piercings, one of which is recently infected.
-He is overly sentimental and prone to cry at commercials.
-He has mingled his life essence (through urination) with most great rivers of the world.
These include the Thames, the Ganges, the Hudson, the Seine and the Grand Canal in Venice.
-He is always stopped at customs
-He has grotesque, misshapen feet.
-He believes Party of Five is an accurate and moving portrayal of white middle-class
America and cannot stop watching it.
-He was told as a child that he would be blind and toothless by 25.
-He was physically attacked in America over his song Dead Elvis.
*ONLY FIVE OF THESE ARE TRUE you guess which ones...........
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