THE ORGAN GRINDER'S MONKEY

Slice of spicy lives

One wonders if sex will be on the agenda when Julie, Mikey and Paul lob for a second session of Good News Week with ads, which defected from the ABC to Channel 10 last year amid much gnashing of Aunty's teeth - is reverting to the old, once-a-week format, dumping the spin-off show GNW Night bite.

The irreverent panel quiz relishes sending up the big issues of the week. While Mikey Robins and Paul McDermott have kept a low profile during the off season, McCrossin has been very much in the head- lines. Her new book, Love, Lust & Latex, has - in conjunction with Family Planning - published very intimate sexual revelations "m some famous Australians.

For instance, did you know comedian Judith Lucy's first "open- mouthed kiss" was with a Catholic priest (she was just a schoolgirl).

Or that comedian Peter Berner of ABC's BackBerner fame lost his virginity to a prostitute on Anzac Day to avoid being the last in his class to have not had sex.

Or that Adelaide Festival 2000 artistic director Robyn Archer was 15 when she started having crushes on girls. Or that Julie McCrossin herself is a lesbian. Her dedication in the book reads: "This small contribution to fostering happy relationships is dedicated to my partner Melissa, my stepchildren Luke and Amelia and their dad Michael, just your average new millennium Aussie family".

"For those people who've seen me only on Good News Week who had no idea I was a lesbian, something I've been open about since the late '70s, that dedication may come as a surprise," she says.

McCrossin describes the book as a "perfect vehicle" for communication between parents and children. "Another big theme that comes through is if your parents can be open with you, it gives you an enormous leg up (so to speak) in those first few years of your sexual life," she says.

"The Catholic Church gets a pretty rough rap from Judith Lucy because of the kind of messages she got as a schoolgirl. It took her some time to recover from that.

"It is an era in which there's been a bit more of a revelation of the shocking price the Church has paid for keeping its priests celibate and not allowing them to learn about their own sexuality." Peter Berner

"Actually says for most men, if they were left alone on an island, they'd (expletive deleted) mud. That kind of sexual drive is there.

"Now for him, affection, intimacy and cuddling, he actually says, are more important than orgasms."

McCrossin was approached by Family Planning to write the book. Apart from being a quick wit on telly, she is very much a jill of many trades. The verbose Sydneysider has worked as everything from a bus driver to a waitress in hot pants, artists' nude model, touring member of a community theatre, to eight years as an ABC Radio National broadcaster.

Now in her final year of a law degree, she also moonlights as an author, journalist, master of ceremonies and conference speaker.

McCrossin says she doesn't intend to pursue a law career but can incorporate it in MC work.

Of Good News Week, which will again feature Sandman and Flacco (and this week performances by Taxi Ride, Midnight Oil and the Dili A-Allstars), McCrossin admits the show did change in making the transition from public to commercial television - partly because of the different studio audience.

"The boss edits very much on the basis of the reaction of that audience," she says. "Because people are seeing it for the very first time, because there is that slice of audience that never turn on the ABC, gradually I think the audience got younger, more and more mobs of school children. It got younger in front of your eyes...and I think we also began to get people who were more working-class.

"The ABC audience obviously is generally more likely to be tertiary educated, more likely to be in middle-to-upper-income brackets, and the Channel 10 audience is more likely to be young and it has a large following of people who aren't tertiary qualified.

"That affects what you do then on stage, because it's performed live. Cracks that you might make that would have been understood or got a laugh at Channel 2 wouldn't necessarily work as well with that new audience. Just the simple things, literary references or things that an ABC audience might get, certainly you felt you're playing it a bit more broadly".

Adelaide Advertiser Wednesday, February 23, 2000 by Simon Yeaman

Up Where She Belongs

Sunday Mail - TV Scene - 26 March 2000

Good News! It's back to basics

Most of that, however, was due to the original concept show spinning off a hybrid, which did more to confuse fans than titillate them.

It also put great strain on the core cast of Paul McDermott, Mikey Robbins and McCrossin, who were stretched creatively and physically.

McCrossin said she was so "wired" from the show that well into her Christmas holidays she found herself still buying and reading three to four daily papers.

But now Ten has cut back to the original one-show concept, returned the emphasis to the week's news, and slotted the show at 8:30 pm (where it belongs).

This has given the Good News Week team renewed enthusiasm. "I feel we can add an explosive bacchanalian feel to the end of people's working week," McCrossin said.

She recently released a book, Love, Lust and Latex, on how to pursue a safe and happy sex life, which contains interviews and hints from celebrities such as Robyn Archer, Adam Spencer, Senator Natasha Stott Despoja and Judith Lucy.

"It's really a thinly disguised sexual survival guide that I've put together in conjunction with a number of government family services departments," she said.

"I'm certainly not aware of another book where famous Australians are talking about their private sex lives."

One pearler from Love, Lust and Latex concerns ABC comedian and TV host Peter Berner relating how he thought he was the only kid in school who had not lost his virginity, so he went and paid for a prostitute, only to have the most awful experience.

Good News Week screens on Channel 10 at 8:30 pm on Saturday.

Adelaide TV Plus - 26 March 2000

Laugh? I thought I'd cry

In one blokey, giggly chinwag overheard by more than 1 million eavesdroppers, old friends Tim Ross and Merrick Watts are discussing the shame of being pasted around a golf course by a group of elderly female golfers with gigantic "mummy bulges". They've just moved on after concluding that all buffed men over 35 should be banned from the gym because they make young blokes with man boobies look bad.

It's 4.30 on a Tuesday afternoon and all along the FM dial a collection of twittering, gag-cracking, caustic comics are doing their version of the Nashville music writer's eight- hour working day.

In they go, to radio studios all over the country, "doing funny" for listeners who want their stand-up served lying down That steady stream of giggles that comes filtering out of your car radio every breakfast and drive-time is worth millions, as are sought after radio jokesters such as Wendy Harmer, Andrew Denton and the now departed Tony Martin and Mick Molloy.

The problem is, as the earning potential of the country's best known comedians has soared, decent breaks for new talent have dwindled exponentially. In the space of a decade, dedicated comedy venues in Melbourne, once the centre of Australian comedy, have declined from 14 to just one.

It Is a similar story in Sydney.

Triple J comedy duo Merrick and Rosso excused themselves from the comedy stand-up circuit almost three years ago. Ross says the pair saw the writing on the wall, that people were getting bored with straight stand-up, and tried something different. They introduced prank phone calls, projectors and video into their show and before too long were making their television debut on Foxtel's comedy channel.

"I think you have to be aware that there's a time for purity in art and I don't think now is one of them," says Ross. "The industry is in a dip at the moment because everyone's technology obsessed... It's not enough to just be funny. You have to come up with new ideas, market yourself, attack and make people come and see you, and I'm not sure many people are doing that. I don't think you make a living on the circuit anymore."

The duo hadn't anticipated a career in radio but recognised that mainstream TV breaks had become increasingly difficult to find. At the same time, other dependable avenues for comics are also disappearing. Development money in TV networks, particularly at the ABC, which traditionally fostered new comic talent, has all but dried up - along with the mettle of commissioning editors.

Radio and pay-TV are fast moving to fill that void, particularly the comedy channel, which has already sired and married off comedians such as Merrick and Rosso and Rove McManus to the big networks.

That's fine for the happy few. Elsewhere, the dip has hit comedy where it hurts - right in the bottom jokes. The Melbourne Comedy Festival which opened on Thursday, is really the last laugh for grassroots comedy. In its 14-year history, turnover has grown from $400,000 in the early years to more than $2 million today. It is the one time of the year Melbourne audiences seek out live comedy en masse and the best chance any amateur comedian has of getting a break.

The stakes can also be high for the professionals. Ubiquitous Melbourne comedy writer and stand-up comic Dave O'Neil no longer counts himself among the thousands of comedians on the breadline, working the pub circuit for loose change. Better known among industry players than comedy consumers, O'Neil makes a good living because he is willing to accept a variety of jobs. On the day we speak, he has done his regular three- hour breakfast show on Melbourne public radio Triple R, an all-day shoot for the comedychannel and is limbering up for an 8.30pm stand-up at the Melbourne Comedy Club - "a factory" for stand-ups. On top of that he is in the middle of launching his Unfit for Life book - a comprehensive almanac for slackers.

He's a hard worker and for that he earns astoundingly good money - way more than $100,000 last year. But for him, as with so many other comedians, festival performances are still about making the right connections for the next step in the career ladder.

It's not just a comedy festival; It's a trade show - and director Susan Provan will happily admit as much.

"It's true, comedians will often chart success in-a-festival not from what they make at the box office but if they managed to make new contacts," she says. "Industry people, casting and ad agency talent scouts come from all over Australia and festival directors from other parts of the world to see what's going on."

The opportunities are there, but it's not the relative bonanza of more than a decade ago. The rash of seminal Australian comedies, which started with Rod Quantock's Australia You're Standing in It and The Gillies Report and arguably peaked with The Big Gig, D-Generation, The Comedy Company and Full Frontal, created enormous opportunities for both comic performers and writers.

More than 10 years since those shows first introduced Steve Vizard, Paul McDermott, Andrew Denton and Rob Sitch to big audiences, the same school of comedians still dominate TV comedy. The only difference is these days the comedy has taken a more sophisticated turn.

The Late Show metamorphosed into Funky Squad, Frontline, then The Panel; The Big Gig into shows such as Good News Week. For Vizard, king of TV comedy production in this country through the coin- pany he founded and chairs, Artist Services (soon to be known as Red Heart Productions under a merger deal), Fast Forward turned into the David Letterman Late Show-deriv-ative Tonight Live. Sketch shows, the comedy barns for aspiring stars, are all but dead.

In their place is what Good News Week's executive producer Ted Robinson calls "smart-arsery". Robinson argues that shows such as Good News Week not only provide huge opportunities for emerging comedians but stretch the boundaries of the old TV sketch comedy formula.

"They not only give comedians a chance to demonstrate how quick they are on their feet but also fold in semi-prepared material so they can look even funnier and more spontaneous than a human could ever expect to be. There's this whole thing about getting people sitting down and talking. That throws me because that's the sort of thing I've been trying to do for years. I've always held television can be about wit and talking, and not just about footballers dressing up in frocks."

Such shows are not to everyone's taste of course, a fact attested to by Good News Week's continuously disappointing ratings. What's more, news of the new TV-Influenced style of Australian comedy has been slow to reach audiences abroad. No amount of sophistication, it seems, can convince the world that Australian humour Is anything other than "a bit rude".

Karen Koran runs the Gilded Balloon - one of Edinburgh's most famous comedy venues - and is an ardent champion of Australian humour. She has hosted all of this country's best known stand-ups, including Judith Lucy, Wendy Harmer, Rachel Berger, Greg Fleet and Steady Eddy. Yet even she will admit the content can sometimes be a little raw for the genteel British car.

"They're not scared to say what they think. Some English may find that distasteful - personally, 1 don't."

Although shows such as Good News Week and The Panel are trying to turn that view around, comedians such as O'Neil, who cut his teeth on Full Frontal and Jimeoin, still mourn the death of the good, honest sketch show.

"There always used to be comedy shows like Full Frontal for young people to get a foot in the door, but there's no big sketch show at the moment," O'Neil says. "There doesn't seem to be any space for comedy at the ABC anymore."

Much fuss was made of the ABC's newest venture, BackBerner, supposedly a reincarnation of Max Gillies-type political satire, but O'Neil says the public broadcaster is no longer pulling its  weight. Within the comics-without-contracts community, that would appear to be the main complaint; although the networks plead ratings and financial imperatives as the justification for not nurturing new talent, they will happily let someone else take the risks and pluck ripening stars as they emerge.

"The major broadcasters, in radio and TV, all reap the benefits of comic talent once it's developed and famous," says.

Provan. "For them, comedians are another generation of pop stars who can create large amounts of high-rating product, but there's a bit of a reluctance to actually invest in the bottom end of the market and that's where people really get their opportunity."

Provan is also critical of the networks' mercurial approach to new talent, and cites the Nine network's hasty signing of Rove McManus and Mick Molloy last year in an attempt to throw off its stodgy mantle - only to lose its nerve within months.

There is still no word on whether young Melbourne comedian McManus will get a second bite of the cherry this year.

Although the show rated well and fulfilled its expectations - drawing a badly needed younger audience to the traditional family channel - Nine continues to drag its feet.

Then there was the ribald but ill-fated Mick Molloy Show, which was tipped to be the cutting-edge replacement for the comfortably frumpy Hey! Hey! It's Saturday format. The show should have been hurricane-proof, with a line-up of the country's biggest crowd-pulling comics headed by one of the most successful and popular radio comedians. Why that didn't translate in TV terms is not a question Nine spent much time pondering. Instead, it crumpled at the first missives of disapproval from viewers accustomed to Nine's traditionally sedate and family friendly brand of humour.

"I was really disappointed it got pulled off air," says Provan. "I think Mick's an extraordinary talent and I can't believe something could not have been saved from that."

What concerns Provan most about the networks' pathological aversion to risk- taking is not only that they are limiting their future star pool but that they may also be holding back the progress and development of mainstream comedy in this country.

"I actually think comedy is ready to expand a bit more and I worry about the conservatism of the networks. I worry about the extent to which they can compromise developing a taste in the community for new and interesting things because I think the general public are open to things."

Good News Week's Robinson sees things differently.

"At least Nine had a go. It was a well- intentioned attempt to make itself less moribund. They got rid of Daryl [Somers] and got Mick Molloy [but] they still have the same commercial imperative so they couldn't give [the show] enough chance to find its feet."

As the former commissioning editor for the ABC's comedy section before moving to Ten with Good News Week and the brains behind seminal shows such as The Big Gig and The Late Show, Robinson is a fairly recent defector to commercial TV. But he will concede that the networks have largely failed to foster new talent and that the ABC, once fertile breeding ground for comic talent, "is a bit lost at the moment".

In such a climate, it seems, it is the old jokes that are drawing the biggest laughs, as The Wog Boy, the film incarnation of the long-running Wogs out of Work gag will attest. Its reward for ploughing well-trodden ground was more than $4 million in box-office takings in its first week - and all because it could raise a giggle.

The Melbourne Comedy Festival runs to April 23.

Published in The Weekend Australian - Review pages 16-18. April 1 - 2 2000.

ABC Farewells three years of good news

In The Hot Seat

SUNDAY MAGAZINE (SUNDAY HERALD SUN) - January 23 2000