Holly Robinson's last wish - to raise the roof and raise funds for cancer research - comes true. When 27-year-old Holly Robinson died on cancer on April 27, she had a plan. "Every time she got sick, the notepad would come out," says her good friend and Seven Network presenter Johanna Griggs. Battling a rare brain tumour as well as an unrelated pelvic cancer, "Holly formulated a plan to create some sort of benefit concert to raise money for cancer research at [Sydney's] St Vincent's Hospital," says her father, Ted Robinson, the former head of ABC-TV comedy. "She was an unstoppable girl, very brave and very jolly. Whenever she made up her mind to do something, it generally happened." And on July 19, it did.

More than 40 performers, many of whom had worked with Ted Robinson on such shows as Good News Week, The Big Gig and The Glass House, came together for Sunday's For Holly, a musical and comedy concert at the Sydney Opera House. "All night there has been a knife-edge tension between the pleasure of entertainment and then people wanting to talk about Holly," says entertainer Julie McCrossin. "She was an extraordinary young woman."

Having grown up in a show business (mum Ann is a casting director), the single Holly, a former nanny who worked as a Home & Away casting director, "was the frankest critic a comedian could have," reckins Steve Abbott, aka the Sandman. "God help us if we get this wrong," joked Andrew Denton. No worries, reckons Ted Robinson: "She left the blueprint. We're just joining the dots."
*For Holly, The Comedy Concert of 2003, airs as a telethon on Network Ten, Aug 3, from 9pm. To make a donation, visit www.forholly.com

Holly never gave up - even in her darkest hour

We are often assailed in the media with the word 'hero'. It's tossed about willy nilly every time a man in a baggy green cap hits more than 100 hard balls with a lump of willow, or a thick-necked man with thighs like tree trunks throws himself over a chalk line while clutching a ball under his wing.

Makes me wonder why such feats are labelled herioc. After all, in most cases these 'heroes' have selected their career path and are being well remunerated for it.

Over the past three years I have been lucky enough to be invloved with a real hero. Her name? Holly Robinson.

This amazing young woman was my agent's much loved niece, and the daughter of two childhood friends of mine, Anne and Ted Robinson.

When I was a budding - well, overblown - ballerina in the 1960s, Ted and Ann had just met, and made an exquisite teenage partnership. They were the seniors in a class I was promoted - well pushed - in to. They treated me as an equal and we became friends.

They went on to make names for themselves - Ted as the producer/director of The Big Gig, Good News Week and The Glass House, Ann as a casting director, running Mullinars agency. Years later, as luck would have it, Ann's sister Sue Muggleton became my agent. Small world.

Three years ago, at the age of 24, Holly was diagnosed with a brain tumour. Further examination established a second tumour in her pelvis, but the treatment for this had to wait until the brain tumour treatment had concluded.

She was amazingly brave and positive through all of this, and never once complained, even after the invasive hip operation left her with a half a pelvis and the challenge of learning to walk again.

During her time in hospital Sue asked me for an audiotape of the play I was in, The Vagina Monologues, for Holly to listen to. As soon as she could Holly was out of hospital and back at work.

My voice can do that to people - drive them back to work!

But Holly was a hero. She fought the disease like an Amazonian warrior to the very end. She died in St Vincent's Hospital two months ago, after the brain tumour resurfaced and grew to twice its size in just under eight weeks.

But Holly's illness is not unique. It's all too common. So Holly's family have joined together to create an event, For Holly, at the Sydney Opera House, to honour her life and provide hope for the thousands of other families facing a similar journey with this illness.

The concert will be held on Saturday July 19, and all proceeds from the sale of tickets will raise funds for St Vincent's Hospital, in particular the cancer research and treatment work being done by Dr David Dalley and Dr Robyn Ward.

The concert will star many of Holly's friends, people who knew her through her short life and through her family. The list is a who's who: Wil Anderson, Paul Capsis, Andrew Denton, Flacco & Sandman, Tim Freedman, Corinne Grant, Libbi Gorr, Wendy Harmer, Marcia Hines, Dave Hughes, Jean Kitson, Julie McCrossin, Paul McDermott, Rove McManus, Jamie Rigg, Mikey Robins, Roy & HG, The Wiggles and many more.

Holly had decided she wanted to be a producer, and she wanted to stage this benefit. As casting director for Home and Away, Holly enjoyed life despite the seemingly endless challenges she had to face with her illness.

But sadly she ran out of time, so her family joined an array of talented friends to make her wish come true. These truly are Holly's hereos.
*For more information on For Holly, log on to www.forholly.com

Theer are two types who stride this earth. The enthusiastic school debaters (subtext: love to talk, lacking hand to wye co-ordingation) and the rest for whom all that posturing at a lectern spelt social death.

About a decade ago, a comedy festival debate was televised for the first time, and the idea of debating - three speakers on each side battling for and against a provocative point - got serious cachet. The subject was sex back then, and tonight's topic - Celebrities: should they be seen and not heard? - is equally titillating.

Grappling with this notion are a pack of comedians of varying orbits of celebrity: Australian jokesters Wendy Harmer, Adam Spencer and Jean Kitson (if you wear a hat like collapsible cardboard to the Cup, it doesn't make you an expert on Africe, she declares). Also, lining up are Britsih stand-ups Boothby Graffoe and Dave Gorman, and American import Rich Hall, appearing in character as guitar-welding southerner, Otis Lee Krenshaw.

Melbourne's own Che Guevara of comedy, Rod Quantock, is a well chosen chairman. The talent go through their paces in a suitably garish set - Krenshaw suggests its been looted from Baghdad - and the jokes (mostly) fly, but there is something a little formulaic by now about this set piece performance in front of a live audience.

The format, which has done the rounds at channels Nine and Ten, has been resurrected as a once-off by the ABC (9:30pm). Perhaps, however, the era for televised debating with celebrity comedians has passed and none should be seen or heard for a while.

A gentler sort of comedy is enacted in Dimboola (SBS, 7:30pm), a modest documentary putting an effectionate scope on the township in the wheat belt of Victoria's Wimmera district. The locals are putting on a play, and it's no ordinary play. The performance is of the well-known Jack Hibberd play about a rural wedding reception that appropriates the township's name. The narrator informs us its also happens to be Australia's most performed play.

Director-producer Annette Pickering, the local GP's wife, has recruited most of her stellar cast from those who've turned up at the doctor's waiting room. Dimboola's thespians include the fellow who runs the local tip - and keeps forgetting his lines - and the town's baker Keith Le Blanc, whose French name belies his ockerish tendencies.

The countdown to the show is on, intensive rehearsals are underway at the local footy club, but will these players get it right on opening night? The pressure is on, the playwright himself is attending. A classic slice of Australiana.

A few years back, if you had wandered into a small pub in Yarraville, just outside Melbourne, you may have come across three guys with a guitar singing funny cover songs. But back then, you may not have guessed that the trio would evolve into one of Australia's premier musical comedy acts - hailed by some as the country's funniest.

Tripod, as those guys are known, refer to those beginnings as their own brand of caberat. So you could say that, with this latest trip to Adelaide, they are returing to their roots.

"Yeah, you could, but thats bulls...," laughs Gatesy, sometimes referred to as "the cute one". "It's just going to be just us doing our thing. We actually say we are going to go "caberat mode", which is our cute way of saying there are three mikes and a guitar, and we'll talk s... and sing songs."

Since their early days in that Yarraville pub, Tripod has become something of a cult act in Australian comedy, its earnest fan base accumulated from sold-out shows across the country, their work on Triple J's breakfast show - writing a song in an hour every Tuesday morning - and, more recently, their work on Channel 10's SkitHouse sketch comedy series. But Gatesy says there's been no urge to ditch the funny stuff in favour of a more serious image. "Comedy is the new rock and roll," he says with a smile. "I think people would see right through that if we tried to suddenly be cool. We're just doing what comes naturally to us, and that's why the geeky, nerdy sort of thing comes through because really we are three different types of geeks.

"We all have our side projects and things - like I have a band where I don't have to be funny all the time, which is ace fun. Music is great that way because you're not asking the audience for anything, apart from liking it or hating it. But with comedy, they either laugh or they don't, and so it's not more immediate."

Breakfast radio host. A successful stand-up comedy career. His own TV show. It must be a pretty good time to be Wil Anderson.

"There's two sides to every story," resorts the comedian. "It's OK to be me, but how much cooler would it be if I was the Rock, you know what I'm saying?"

Ditching journalism for stand-up in the mid-1990's, Anderson's profile has continued to grow as he extends his influence. Heard every weekday on Triple J's Breakfast Shiw alongside Adam Spencer, and seen every Friday on the ABC's The Glass House with Corrine Grant and Dave Hughes, Anderson is without a doubt one of Australia's best-loved talents. And through it all is that stand-up career - and the constant touring it brings. Which makes it hard to keep track of what he said where.

"What I really need is a small Asian boy to follow me around and write everything down in a book," Anderson says. "I dont know why it had to be small and Asian, but it made comedy sound a little bit more corrupt. Like karate, I liked that. It sounded a bit cooler. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Punchline. A little bit of wax on, wax off.

"Actually," he says, chaing tack, 'I'd like an old Asian guy to teach me stuff. 'Ah Wil, your Weekend at Bernies bit isn't working, you must paint the fence to understand the true nature of Weekend at Bernies." I'd be bang up for that." But what of Australian comedy in general? Does it need its own sensai?"

"I think the scene was in a really good state, the stand-up scene in particular, four or five years ago," he says. "There was a real boom of rooms around, young people, new people challenging each other. And out of that group of people, that's where people like Hughsey, and Corinne, and Merrick and Rosso, and Peter Helliar and Rove, Tripod - we all started out doing stand-up togeher, and playing in littel rooms together where no one came to see.....

"But I think at the moment there is a bit of lack of those experimental comedy rooms on the scene. While it all seems really nice now, it could be demaging for that next generation of people trying to come through.

"You need rooms not just where you can work, but where you can experiment, where you can do stuff that's a bit weird or a bit edgy or just get things wrong. Because there's nowhere you can learn to do comedy. There's no humourversity. You can't do Comedy 101. You cant get a doctorate in doctor doctor jokes. So it's one of those things where you need to just do it and be s..t at it sometimes.

"There's a couple of (those rooms) in Adelaide, like what they do at Rhino Room I think is really important....because it's a night the young people can experiment, do weirder stuff and find their own voice, and that's where you find interesting performers come out of, I think"

Which brings us to Jagged Little Wil, Anderson's latest show - and the one he's bringing to Adelaide next week. But it is part of the Caberat Festival, so will that mean Wil seductively draped over a piano?

"Oh, I'm going to do show tunes. Don't you worry about that," he laughs. "I'm going to launch my new caberat show - The Boy from Hayfield, and it's just going to be camp caberat songs about growing up on the mean streets of a contry diary town. It's going to be excellent. Book now. Tickets will sell fast."

The man who created an art form out of being mean and nasty has decided enough is enough. Contemplating early retirement, he thinks it may even be time to try being nice.

Paul McDermott is unemployed. He also suspects he is dying. "I'm feeling like a Charles Dickens character, in a little garret, coughing myself to death," says the flu-sodden host of Good News Week, which is officially no more.

He is not a bit surprised that the end of the show and his own demise ("consumed by phlegm") have co-incided.

"Most families break up during vacations," he says gloomily.

"Disasters usually happen at the moment when you take time off, because you store up all those things you can't look at or can't talk about.

"You just keep it all at bay while you complete the tasks you have to do and then, once it's over, you fall apart."

Good News Week is a victim of Ten's tough line on ratings. The last episode of the five-years-old show has been taped and will air later this month.

Meanwhile, Ten has compiled a clips show of highlights, out-takes and behind the-scenes goings-on which will be broadcast on Tuesday night.

While many high points get a second airing - McDermott's extremely threatening version of the Britney Spears song Oops! I Did it Again springs to mind - the 38-year-old is disappointed the retrospective does not include anything from the years Good News Week was produced for the ABC.

"it's pretty appalling," he says. "You know, the things you do, you don't own.

"I've always found that curious. You produce something and then, stupidly, you think it's yours.

"Then you find out there's some contact somewhere that says it's not actually yours, there's some corporation that owns it."

McDermott is going through what might be called a blue period.

It is not that he is bitter about the end of Good News Week - he is ready to do something else.

But the former member of the ferociously satirical Doug Anthony Allstars is worried about the viability of anything he would be remotely interested in doing, given the way television seems to be going.

"I don't think there is any room for satire with reality TV and I think that's where we're heading now," he says.

This Mac the knife fears reality TV is immune to satire. "It's already satire," he says.

"You could not get more satirical than Search For a Supermodel.

"Can you imagine it? I was watching that, trying to imagine the guy - or whoever, I assume it was a man - trying to sell the concept. Unbelievable."

He is horrified by the mock suggestion that Ten might try to lure him back in the new year to host their latest reality TV outing, Big Brother, based on a British model of sticking a bunch of people together in a house and filming everything that goes on.

"No, no! I mean, that's too scary for words," he says, after a shocked coughing fit.

"It's just the concept - creating these tiny microcosms where people are just chosen for their incompatibility with other people, you know.

"Creating an environment where disaster is only a heartbeat away."

The nastiness of it all has led him to decided that whatever it is he does next in televisoon - if anything - will be for the forces of niceness.

"I've been evil for too long now," he laughs. "I want to do something for positive energy, rather than the evil sarcasticness and bile that we've been churning out for five years."

Whether television will let him is another matter.

"If you were sensible at the moment you'd be doing a reality TV show so I don't know what the other options are really," he reflects.

"But I still like working in the....um...in the televsions, um...industry..."he says slowly, before chucking at his own lack of conviction.

"Do I? Yeah. No, I thik so. I think I'll still be doing it. I just need to basically get over this flu and have a bit of a rest."
*The best-of-clips' show, GNW - Over and Out Takes, will air on Ten on Tuesday at 9:30pm. The final episode of Good News Week will be broadcast a week later, on Tuesday November 21.

From Allstar to week-spot
Paul McDermott - the story so far:
>1984: Forms the Doug Anthony Allstars in Canberra with fellow art students Tim Ferguson and Richard Fidler.
>1989: The troupe comes to national attention on the ABC television comedy show The Big Gig. One of the most memorable performances of these early days was an anthem to the boss of the Victorian division of the National Safety Council. John Friedrich, who was arrested after 16 days on the run, having disappeared with a loss of $235 million on the books. The song, Free Johnny Boy Friedrich, was sung to the tune Free Nelson Mandela. The show, hosted by Wendy Harmer, continued until 1992.
>1993 and '94: The Allstars take on London. McDermott makes headlines when he is alleged to have knocked down British pop star George Michael in a nightclub. The group become regulars on British TV, but by 1995 there split up, citing creative differences.
>1995:McDermott goes solo, hosting the first Great Debate on Seven.
>1996: Moves to radio, co-hosting an afternoon show on Triple J.
>1997: Teams up with Mikey Robins on the Triple J Breakfast Show. Later in the year, ABC television commissioners the duo, along with Julie McCrossin, to form the core of a new satirical news and current affairs quiz show, Good News Week.
>1999: Good News Week moves to the Ten Network, where it has a short-lived Thursday-night spin-off, GNW Nite Lite.
>November 2000: The final episode of Good News Week is filmed in Sydney.

He sees it as a heck of a challenge, but Paul McDermott has never walked away from a challenge.

The former GNW star, who most recently wowed audiences in his starring role in the stage musical The Witches of Eastwick, returns to the small screen to hist this week's AFI Awards, from Melbourne's Princess Theatre.

"They signed me only a couple of weeks ago, so it's been a case of working frantically with the writers to get some material together," he says

The Australian film industry's night of nights will feature musical performances by Archie roach and Sarah McGregor, highlighting music from the soundtracks of nominated films Walking on Water and The Tracker.

This year the awards will screen on Ten, with the network hoping to inject some much-needed sizzle.

Highlight will be an appearance by Belinda Emmett after an enforced break through her battle with cancer.

"With people like Belinda, Sarah O'Hare, Kerry Armstrong, Bill Hunter, Claudia Karvan and Vince Colosimo on stage, we should have a great night," McDermott says.

Paul McDermott hosts the AFI Awards from Melbourne's Princess Theatre. It's all about showcasing the best in Australian film and television, but every now and then it tosses up the odd television category choice. Tonight, it's Kath and Kim being nominated for drama, which will satisfy anyone who couldn't raise a laugh while watching it. I laughed, so I reckon it's dumb, but what would I know. McDermott will be terrific.

Special. Grab the matchsticks to keep the peepers open, folk, because you'll need them. But if Paul McDermott's AFI Award hosting is an energetic and entertaining as his stunning performance in the stage showWitches of Eastwick, then it will be worth waiting up for.

This is the Australian movie industry's night of nights, which also tosses off a few token award morsels to TV. The problem is that often the TV award decisions are laughable.

Enjoy McDermott and pray the speeches aren't as boring as last year.