Published in the Weekend Australian May 19 - 20 2001

Projects have a habit of sneaking up on Paul Livingston. Before he knows it, he finds himself involved in a painful act of creation that he didn't initiate and which requires wrestling to the ground. Often he finds he hates the task thus foisted upon him, but when the deed is finally done, he is glad he pulled it off.

Livingston hadn't comtemplated writing a novel, for example, until Penguin suggested he do so. He said no, but then he couldn't get the idea out of his head. Three agonising years later, in 1988, The Dirt Bath was published. So too, penning a play hadn't crossed his mind until Livingston happened to tell his agent the jaw-dropping perverse, true story of Sigmund Frued and Wilhelm Fliess's barbaric nasal operations, conducted as supposed cures for sexual diseases, among other conditions.

His agent thought it would make a good play and spoke to Company B Belvoir. "And the next thing I was going to a meeting to pitch this idea that I didn't really have," says Livingston with a genial chuckle. "And I got the job!"

The resulting play is Emma's Nose, a darkly comic piece about blind, obsessive love and crackpottery, directed by Neil Armfield and starring Jacek Koman and Tyler Coppin.

Even though the subject matter is "pretty nasty", Livingston has made sure there is a lot of fun to be had as well. "I can't help it, it's a way of looking at things," he says. "I've never done anything serious. Even when I went to art school and was a pretentious 19-year-old, my paintings still made people laugh. I always wanted to be the cool guy but it never quite happened.

Andrew Denton calls Livingston "Australia's leading renaissance fool". He has worked as an animator, performed in films such as Babe II and Reckless Kelly and in stage productions such as the Sydney Theatre Company's The Government Inspector, directed by Armfield. He also produces a regular cartoon for The Australian Magazine, The Flacco Files. But most people know him as his cult comic creation Flacco, a verbal gymnast with a wondrously absurb, sorrowful take on life.

You can see why Vincent Ward cast Livingston as a medievel monk in his acclaimed film The Navigator. With his boiled-egg pate, soulful eyes, fine nose and elastic cheelks, which he can balloon with the greatest of ease, Livingston does have a look of times past. In fact, his head sat very well on Flacco's Elizabethan get-up, recently abondoned in favour of something a little more modern.

He talks quietly but incisively. As our interview goes on he becomes progressively funnier. In fact, by the end you'd dearly love to quote the whole lot verbatim, if only space permitted.

Livingston, now 45, didn't find his way into comedy until he was 29. Flacco took his first tentative steps in 1986 but was unleashed in 1988 when Denton gave him his big break on Blah Blah Blah. Since then, Flacco has pretty much taken over Livingston's career. Livingston tried to retire him in 1997 "but no one noticed". In 1999, however, he was lured back to life by Channel Ten to perform with the Sandman (aka Stephen Abbott) on Good News Week Night Lite. Abbott has become a close friend over the years and Flacco and the Sandman, one of the oddest couples in Australian comedy, recently hit the road together.

"I was happy to let the character go forever but he won't go away," says Livingston. "I accept that now and I'm not never trying to kill him off. I accept him and I enjoy him." But only after a few modifications.

Of the Elizabethan gear, he says: "I would do anything to hide Paul Livingston because I was chronically shy. Now I'm just regular shy. When I brought Flacco back after the retirement period it had to be on Paul Livingston's terms. I was sick of the Elizabethan version, this screaming maniac which I'd been doing for almost 10 years and I told myself that after 40 I wasn't wearing tights on stage. So I got a really nice suit. Flacco is now half of me and half of him, so it's a compromise and much more enjoyable."

Working with the Sandman has also boosted his enjoyment. "I don't think I could go on the road on my own anymore. It's a sad life, a young person's life, and you need to drink to get by, and I don't drink much anymore.

"When we're on the road we stay in the best hotels. We get there a day early and we eat at the best restaurant in town. We make less money but we enjoy the process. We do the gentleman's tour." Fortunately, Abbott shares Livingston's taste for negativity. Looking on the bad side means he is never disappointed, says to Livingston. "It's always better than I expect. Mostly I look on the negative side of life but I'm not miserable ... I don't want to be happy all the time, I'd be miserable if I  was.

"Australians are great whingers and I enjoy a good whinge even when things are really good. In my relationship with the Sandman, even when things are going really well, we like to complain. It's our fuel, it keeps us going."

And Livingston needs plenty of fuel, given that he gets very little sleep. He has long been an insomniac. "I'm always tired. I've been tired for 25 years. Insomnia is a very intriguing thing to have. Maybe it does feed my imagination, because I'm always suffering fromlack of sleep, so there are strange thoughts going through my mind 24 hours a day.

"I haven't been to sleep clinics because the idea of going to sleep in front of somebody doesn't appeal to me, but I've tried all the pills and you simply get used to them and they don't work anymore. So what can I do? It could he stress and no exercise but you have to draw the line somewhere. I've never done an exercise in my life and I'm not about to start." Writing The Dirt Bath and Emma's Nose was also grist for the mill. Writing a novel was just as lonely and miserable as Livingston had anticipated. Writing a play was no better. He compares it to running a marathon. "It's a horrible thing to do. You feel very sick and tired and confused at the end of it but, for some absurd reason, you feel proud of crossing the line." He managed it with the help of the Australian National Playwrights Conference, where Emma's Nose was workshopped last year. Sitting in an audience watching other actors perform his work proved more nerve- wracking than doing it himself. "My heart was beating out of my chest the whole way through, whereas when you're on stage that goes away. I hated the experience but it was extremely valuable."

He will no doubt be squirming in his scat during the Company B Beivoirproduction of the play in Sydney, wishing he was anywhere else. Difficult though he often finds writing skits for Flacco, having written that material, the pleasure is in performing it. "Which is the weird thing about writing a play," says

Livingston. "I hated writing it and I can't watch it, so where does the pleasure come in?" Enma's Nose runs at Sydney's Belvoir St Theatre unti]June 14.

Rove McManus has plenty of reasons to beam his cheeky grin. He's very much in love with his girlfriend, All Saints star Belinda Emmett, and he loves the second series of his late-night Network Ten show Rove Live almost as much!

"I didn't know what it was like to have a second series until now," says Rove, who started out at the Nine Network before crossing to Ten last year. "I'm enjoying finding my feet again. I haven't forgotten how to ride the bike!"

Rove also enjoys the response he receives from the show's fans.

"People are watching us, and we enjoy doing the show." he says. "You shouldn't make the people who are watching regret it. They aren't the ones who should be punished - it's the one's who aren't watching it!"

In recent weeks, Rove showed how topical he and the show could be when he arranged for a singing telegram performer to make a house call on the winners of the new series of Popstars, then yet to be officially unveiled.

He revealed their inner-city Sydney address to television viewers across Australia, and did it again the following week. However, Rove claims his intentions are honourable.

"They're good sports," the says of the singing hopefuls, who had their identities revealed in last Sunday's (March 25) episode of the Seven Network reality program. "I'm actually supporting them and not discounting them. I would like to meet them and say hello."

Along with his sharp wit, Rove's friendly demeanour is proving a winning formula with his guests. He charmed film star Russell Crowe, who gave a candid interview before performing a song with his band 30 Odd Foot of Grunts.

"I really enjoyed that interview," Rove says. "Russell was very giving. I had heard that he can be pretty prickly, but I thought he was great.

"I try to treat the interviews more like conversations than actual interviews, so that people don't feel like they're in the hot seat as much. It's just a chat. If he [Russell] feels that someone is trying to have a go at him or is not respecting him, he feels that he can give as good as he gets!"

Published in the Weekend Australian on January 13 - 14 2001

Matthew Hardy is looking comedian Anthony Morgan directly in the eye across the cheap desk on the cheap studio set for the pay-TV tonight show The Big Schmooze. Hardy, also a comedian, loves playing the audience for laughs - hell, they even ply the 100-odd punters with free beer and whine before the show. And Hardy's forever taking the piss out of himself, lounging back in a chair draped with wooden beads, the kind you usually see under a sweaty taxi driver.

Morgan has made   thousands of people laugh over the years. But he's not making Hardy laugh tonight. Whatever the host asks him, the guest gives a surly reply.

Hardy had been warned. "He's famous for having a bad attitude," his production staff had told him. And then Morgan's fax had arrived. Hardy's team had asked for five topics to use as feeders for the interview the Melbourne comic's list included European agriculture, treated pine and smoothness. "I can handle him," the host blithely instructed his troops. His verdict now" "I was wrong."

It was one of the many lessons for Hardy last year as host of his show on Foxtel's Comedy Channel. And he wasn't the only on learning on the job. Two other television personalities debuted weekly chat shows on the box in 2000 - Rove McManus, with another classic format variety tonight show, Rove Live, on the Ten Network; and former Good News Week's Julie McCrossin on her intimate, more serious-minded McCrossin, on the ABC.

Hardy, 31, may be the fresh face, but the better-known McManus, at 26 the youngest of the trio, and McCrossin, 46 , are equally concerned about their potential success. In the rough-and-tumble world of TV, it's tough enough to get a show up in the first place, let alone have it run a number of seasons. And when you're coming after such greats as Graham Kennedy, Johnny Carson, David Letterman, Jay Leno, Don Lane (hey, the Lanky Yank did have eight long years) and Michael Parkinson...well, just how damn good do you have to be?

"Someone out of the new breed....is going to have to be the one who stays," says Hardy, before musing: "whether Rove is the one...." McManus, however, has no illusions. "I have achieved a lot at a young age. My shelf-life could be quite short," he says matter-of-factly. "It's a very cutthroat industry, which I learned last year." That was 1999, when the Nine network allowed his 12-month contract to lapse, despite having made two 10-episode seasons of the first incarnation of his show.

But 2000 saw the Melbourne-based McManus back in favour, big time. All three commercial networks, including the regretful Nine, went courting and he eventually struck a deal with Ten, for which he made 10 shows late last year. The network has commissioned another 13 for 2001, starting early next month.

The traditional tonight show format is an evergreen that hasn't really changed since it was invented by Pat Weaver (father of Sigourney) when he was head of America's NBC network in the late 1950's: a host (almost always male) dressed conservatively in a suit and tie sitting behind a desk, a couch or lounge chairs for celebrity guests to sit and chat, a house band, musical acts and comedy in between.

A few rebels - such as McManus and Andrew Denton before him - have tinkered around the edges, dispensing with the tie, desk and house band, but by the large the formula has stuck. "We're not trying to reinvent the wheel or anything like that," says McManus. "I don't have for a second have people try to believe we're doing something that's never been done before. The difference is, it's me in the chair - and that's what makes the show. The shows are host driven."

He couldn't be more correct. Steve Vizard, who hosted Tonight Live five nights a week for four years in the early 90s, says: "The main element is the host, because at the end of the day it's the host you're watching, and it's the host who reflects the audience's position on life.  If they don't trust that person or like that person, the show is doomed (to) failure." Plenty of variety show corpses began as promising and previously successful talents. Think Mick Molloy, Russell Gilbert and Tim Ferguson most recently.

So what makes a host rise above the pack? "To a great extent they're born to it," says McCrossin series producer Marion Bennett, who has also worked on Denton, Midday and with Parkinson. "They have an ability to engage people, they're interested in people. It's a very rare skill. Not many people have it."

However, there is another view. "Most of the people who have run these sorts of shows for a long time and were successful were regarded as tyrannical," says Frank Holden, who hosted IMT from 1996 to 1998. "Bert Newton came on my show once. He's been a good friend. He said" 'Have you  got your hands on the reins? Are you driving the thing?' I said: "No, I'm not.' He said: "The show will rise or fall on your performance'," says Holden, now a regular actor on the ABC drama Something in the Air. "You have to be hard boss and not work with idiots or fools."

He says his time on IMT - which Nine owner Kerry Packer began in an attempt to revive Kennedy's legendary In Melbourne Tonight - was troubled because Executives kept fiddling with the time slot as well as the format: "We stated with John Farnham's backing band. Someone said it wasn't good enough, and said we needed a big band. Then we had dancers. Then we had big set changes. All of which were very expensive." Another "mistake" was that "the show was treated as a testing ground for other talent" under contract to the network, he says.

McManus, too, admits to his share of problems in his early TV career, discovering that, as host, "it's your balls on the line." He adds: "Sometimes there are outside influences where you're not happy." So when Nine asked him to produce his own show, he jumped at the offer. "It helps when you don't have a thousand people pulling you every which way.

"The way I look at producing is for myself," he says. "It makes for a better creative environment when you have the ability to create your own product. I don't see it as some overseeing warlord or dictator."

Through his company Roving Enterprises, McManus is backed up by executive producer Craig Campbell - who quit Nine to join him - and guest and segment producers. The team liaises closely with Ten's head of programming David Mott.

McManus's producing credit sets him apart from Hardy, McCrossin and most TV hosts, who are effectively hired guns, and his ambition was apparent early on. "He was much more focused on getting to a free-to-air audience," says Vizard, who employed McManus on the Comedy Channel (Vizard is a board member) before McManus joined Nine.

It's been well documented that McManus was plucked out of obscurity at a Melbourne stand-up comedy  club by producers for the community TV station Channel 31, where he hosted a new variety show, The Loft, in 1997. But afterwards, he worked on the Comedy Channel's stand-up comedy series Headliners, and in 1998 hosted game show Dilemma for 13 half-hour episodes.

"We were grooming him to be our next tonight show host, " laments Elisa Tranter of Red Heart Productions, which produces The Big Schmooze. "But Channel Nine (made) him an offer he couldn't refuse."

The Comedy Channel's loss was Hardy's gain. The Melburnian left for Britain in 1993, where he established himself as a comedian, and returned home last February with nothing lined up. Fortunately, he had kept in touch with old friend and fellow Melbourne comic Dave O'Neil, who with Kate Langbroek had been hired by Tranter to be resident comics on a new tonight show. Tranter, The Big Schmooze's executive producer, says O'Neil and Langbroek suggested Hardy and, after auditioning "various talents", the prodigal son was put on in April.

"I'm absolutely loving this job," says Hardy, who gained some TV and radio experience in England and writes the show's material with O'Neil and Mark O'Toole. Initially, he tried experimenting with the tonight show format - interviewing people in the audience, wearing a T-shirt, no desk - but found these variations wouldn't work. "There were some shit shows at first," he admits.

Thirty one-hour shows later, he's looking forward to this year's second season. But ideally he'd like The Big Schmooze to be broadcast live rather than pre-recorded, as it is now. Vizard, who is chairman of Red Heart and has given Hardy a few host tips, such as how to treat prickly guests, can sympathise. "There's nothing like the buzz of going to a national audience live," he says.

McCrossin knew just that form her five years at Good News Week, the weekly satire she helmed with host Paul McDermott and Mikey Robins. McCrossin is virtually the opposite of the loud, raucous GNW. As host, McCrossin asks three guests intensely personal questions on that episode's particular theme, such as the second generation of famous parents, Aboriginal heroes, or being gay - all crammed within half an hour.

"My ideal is, the next day people [viewers] find themselves involuntarily thinking about last night," says McCrossin.

"We're seeking to draw out personal emotional stories, or actual experiences. So it's not an analysis program."

Executive producer Mark Fennessy, whose Crackerjack Productions also makes the ABC comedy program BackBerner, was attracted to McCrossin's background as a broadcaster on ABC Radio National's Life Matters, and her 15 years as a convener of panel discussions for community meetings, training seminars, corporate conferences and the like.

"I thought that was a very interesting combination of talent and skills," says Fennessy. "She wanted to move away from her image on Good News Week. She felt she was stereotyped as a comedic performer."

McCrossin says the panel discussions are "my main life" and TV "a hilarious variable". The irony of her high-profile TV career is that both shows fell into her lap after calls from executive producers she had never met: Ted Robinson for GNW, and Fennessy, who contacted her in mid-2000 after the ABC had invited submissions for a talk program to canvass big ideas.

The show's driving force is Fennessy, series producer Marion Bennett and associate producer Lesley Holden, who flesh out the themes and guests, and discuss them with McCrossin during a weekly production meeting. The producers also decided to promote McCrossin - so heavily, in fact, that the studio set includes no less than 27 portraits of the beaming host; the effect is a bit like watching Oprah on acid. "I saw the set for the first time when 1 came to record the first show. I'm a normal person: it is almost overwhelming to enter a room that is so intensely about you," says McCrossin. But although "the show is marketed around my identity, it will rise or fall on my capacity to engage the guests and the audience".

Watching her continually play to the small audience and build an instant rapport with guests during a taping at Sydney's Gore Hill studios, there's no doubt she engages everyone. But whether she has similarly charmed ABC management remains to be seen - the broadcaster is yet to commission a new series after 2000's seven episodes.

The show owes its spark to McCrossin's unerring ability to ask penetrating questions, quite literally getting straight to the heart of a matter. As she points out: "I've been interviewing people for nearly a quarter of a century."

McCrossin, like Hardy, can benefit from having their bloopers edited out of the prerecorded shows. But then, perhaps McManus has the best gig, going out truly live with no safety net. When he makes a mistake, he has to admit it. "I wouldn't want to perform any other way. 1 think this type of format works very well live. Some of the best human and entertaining television happens when something goes wrong," he says.

Vizard once got a rude awakening, so to speak, after failing asleep while suppos- edly interviewing fashion designer Prue Acton. "I ended up having three kids during the show," he says of starting a family. "I was just knackered." In his defence, Vizard was also producing Tonight Live and other shows. "All the best moments are unexpected - unexpectedly good, or unexpectedly bad."

Foxtel is part-owned by News Limited, publisher The Weekend Australian.

Now Good News Week is over, it’s time for Julie McCrossin to inform. Simon Yeaman reports.

The Good News Week gang may be back on Ten next year in a new show - but Julie McCrossin suspects she won’t be part of it. "Good News Week Productions is putting bids in, to my understanding, to more than one network at the moment. I may have a role, but it’s less likely, I think," she says.

"Ted Robinson (GNW producer) says he wants to talk to me next year but my expectation is now the quiz show format is absolutely gone, it’s likely to go more into the comedy music format - and that’s not my strength."

Away from TV, McCrossin is also an author, journalist, master of ceremonies, conference speaker and ABC Radio National broadcaster. "I’ve been taken on for another year with Life Matters (her social issues radio show) and I love that work," she says.

"My expectation is I’ll stick with the ABC on radio and, if there’s more television, great."

Since Good News Week vanished from television, McCrossin, who says the GNW team was to "over-exposed" and endured too many timeslot changes to succeed commercially, has returned to ABC-TV to present her own self-titled late-night chat show.

Each week, three guest speak on an issue or theme to which they are all connected in some way. There’s also a musical act. Next week’s episode features rugby league’s Ian Roberts, Tasmanian senator Bob Brown and opera singer Deborah Cheetham talking about their experiences as public figures coming out.

McCrossin is a lesbian - "something I’ve been open about since the late - ‘70’s. The following week’s show will have comedians Mikey Robins, Magda Szubanski and Shaun Micallef talking about life in the funny lane.

McCrossin says that while the show aims to entertain, it also hopes to stimulate. "We’re trying to bring a journalistic edge to a chat show," she says.

"I don’t think at the moment, outside of daytime television in Australia, which tends to be very fast and reasonably superficial because of the time allocation, there are many outlets where Australians can listen to each other reflecting on issues and ideas.

"I actually enjoy Parkinson. I quite like the meeting people but again it’s (Parkinson) pretty much focused on entertainment.

"We’re endeavoring to engage them (viewers) through entertainment but over the weeks I want people to come away thinking."

McCrossin screens on ABC-TV at 10pm on Tuesdays.

Published in Adelaide Advertiser Wednesday 13 December, 2000