| THE AUSTRALIAN TUMBLEWEEDS | Part 3 |
NEWTON
Welcome back to the Australian Tumblies, coming to you live from the magnificant Sphinx Entertainment Centre, Geelong. A lot of you logging on won't know this, but the Sphinx used to be right next to a funeral parlour. That in itself would have been appropriate when you consider that most of the nominees for these awards have killed Australian comedy stone dead. Except, that the funeral parlour closed down last year, to be replaced by a cable TV instillation business. Yes, it's two for the price of one when it comes to irony here tonight at The Sphinx. And don't forget to check out the over 28s disco on your way out. If you spot anyone under 50, you'll win a prize. Unfortunately, that prize is a date with whoever it was you spotted.
But let's move on and remember all those members of the Australian entertainment industry who so tragically died in 2006.
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CHONG LIM AND THE ORCHESTRA ACCOMPANY DELTA GOODREM SINGING MEMORIES, WHILE PICTURES OF THE DEAD ARE FLASHED UP ON A SCREEN.
CAPTION
Belinda Emmett, 1974-2006
CAPTIONTHE AUDIENCE STARTS TO TEAR-UP.
Steve Irwin, 1962-2006
THE AUDIENCE WEEPS UNCONTROLLABLY, WHILE ALSO FEELING MORE AUSTRALIAN THAN EVER.
CAPTION
Peter Brock, 1945-2006
CAPTIONTHE AUDIENCE ARE PRETTY MUCH EXHAUSTED, BUT MANAGE A SLIGHT SNIVEL AND A MARLBORO.
Richard Carleton, 1943-2006
CHAS LICCIARDELLO CAN BE SEEN IN THE BACKGROUND, HAND ON HEART, PRETENDING TO LOOK SAD.
CAPTIONTHE AUDIENCE ARE COMPLETELY UNABLE TO WEEP ANYTHING AT ALL AT THIS POINT. ONE PERSON CLEARS THEIR THROAT.
Colin Thiele, 1920-2006
CAPTIONWRITER. MOVE ON.
Grant McLennan, 1958-2006
CAPTIONSONGWRITER WHO DIDN'T WRITE ANY SONGS THAT ARE SUNG BY THE AUSTRALIAN CRICKET TEAM. MOVE QUICKLY ON.
Don Chipp, 1925-2006
CAPTIONTHE BASTARDS KEEP HONEST AND JUST KINDA SHRUG THEIR SHOULDERS A BIT.
Peter Russell-Clarke
CAPTIONNOT ACTUALLY DEAD, BUT WE ALWAYS ASSUME IT'S NOT FAR AWAY CONSIDERING THE AMOUNT OF CHEESE HE MUST HAVE EATEN.
The Australian Character
THE TRIBUTE ENDS.DEAD MANY TIMES OVER, BUT JOHN HOWARD DID PECULIAR THINGS TO ITS DEAD CORPSE DURING THE PAST YEAR. AND PEOPLE APPRECIATE THAT.
NEWTON
And it's only right at this time to also take a moment to remember those who, despite all our best efforts, refused to die.
CUT TO DARYL SOMERS. DARYL PULLS HIS 'SHOCKED LOGIE-WINNER FACE', THEN REALISES WHAT'S GOING ON AND SCOWLS, REVEALING THE DEPTHS OF HIS BLACK, BLACK HEART. THE CAMERA LENS CRACKS IN FEAR.
Just joking Daryl, we all know no weapon forged by man can kill you. I'm speaking, of course, of the following...
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NEWTON
No surprise there, ratings smash-failure David Tench Tonight racks up another Tumblies win. That's three so far, incidentally. It takes a lot to be worse than The Wedge, but Tench has done it. But what of Tench's creator Andrew Denton? He's with us here tonight, but seems rather reluctant to come up and accept all the awards he's been getting. Still, we hear he's got quite an interesting guest on the next series of Enough Rope. Let's take a sneaky peak...
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NEWTON
And as we follow the lead of the Australian public and turn our backs on television comedy, what do we find popping up in front of us like a shooting range target that's already had a couple of clips emptied into it? No, it's not John Blackman trying to revive his career...actually, hang on a second, yes it is! Or at least, it's his employers Triple M, the radio station responsible for 2006's...
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NEWTON
The concept behind The Shebang is pretty standard in Australian radio: a semi-amusing blokey bloke is paired with a dumb woman and they talk about stuff from magazines and newspapers inbetween lame segments. Lazy radio made by lazy people.
In a similar vein is The Cage. Or 'that bloody thing before Get This', as it became known. Truly radio to make you leave for work, five (or six, or four, who knows for sure) people you kinda know from lurking around shows like 20 to 1 compete to talk over the top of each other during the two minutes per hour that isn't full of ads or Nickelback. It's perfect post-content radio for aging gen Xers: there's no reason to listen to it on its own merits, but it features sports-people and comedians who used to be almost funny somewhere back in the distant past and Triple M plays 'better music and more of it' or at least they used to back in 1996 when you cared about that kind of thing. So why not tune in? Oh, right. Because it's shithouse.
Meanwhile, over on Fox FM is The Matt & Jo Show, with Jo Stanley - whose entire act is that she's a sub-Paris Hilton moron - and Matt Tilley, easily the most hateful thing on commercial radio even before he decided to bring the prank call back. What's next, Tilley? Bringing back offensive racial stereotypes? Oh wait, you already have in your prank calls. Their success almost explains how The Shebang got so popular: after listening to these insipid no-talent whores for five seconds, a show as gleefully moronic as The Shebang seems almost refreshing. Except that with The Shebang there's always a vague undercurrent of domestic violence underneath it all, one that seems to be actively encouraged by everyone associated with Triple M.
So, while it would be nice - for our peace of mind, if nothing else - to think that bad radio just somehow happens, the truth of the matter is that there are people out there actively working to make Australian radio the steaming mound of dog-dirt it is today. And there's no-one who's taken more pride in his evil work than...
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NEWTON
Sandilands has managed a rare double act in the Australian media: he's not just hateful, he's actively proud of it. Combining an ego the size of the Sydney Opera House with a sense of entitlement rarely seen outside of a European royal family, he manages to strut around slagging off everyone around him while treating the slightest intrusion of reality into his sycophantic suck-bubble as a direct attack on himself. Not even his fans seem to actually like him - they just admire him for 'making it' and 'telling it like it is', making him somewhere between John Laws and Hitler.
In contrast, it's hard to imagine Fifi Box actually meaning anyone harm - her rise is more the result of faceless, evil people who run a media machine that requires a regular diet of giggly blondes, who end every sentence with an implied 'Am I right, girls?'. And Denise Scott isn't exactly hateful either...it's just that she's on a radio show with Shaun Micallef, one of this nation's greatest comedy talents, and every time she opens her mouth to talk about that time she went to a party in 1984, over the top of Shaun, an angel loses its wings. And sense of humour.
These days you don't even need to be near a radio to catch any of the previously mentioned media horrors - you can listen to their work over the internet via the magic of podcasting. Of course, it's not quite the same thing: podcasts are usually a chopped-up collection of so-called 'highlights' presented without context. In any other medium, they wouldn't be worth a mention, but with the fine, fine work of Ricky Gervais and his chums setting the bar so low it'd be easy to mistake it for a section of underground sewage pipe, the world of podcasting has become the place to go for shit served with a smile. And there's no better example of this than these...
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NEWTON
Next to women's mags and stupid female co-hosts, prank calls are the lifeblood of the crappy commercial radio programme. They can't be stopped, they can't be killed, and they can't be done worse that Matt Tilley does them. And yet, since a two-week gap where no other breakfast team was doing them, he's swanned-in and become the local king of this rightfully despised genre. We shouldn't hate him because he's rubbish; we should hate him because he wants people to pay money to hear him put on a zany voice and pester people with real jobs. If you ever see these CDs at someone's house, run - but light a fire before you go.
Meanwhile, Vega's Melbourne breakfast show, currently called Dave & Denise with Shaun Micallef (but insiders believe it'll soon become Dave & Denise & the Morning Cleaning Crew & a poster of The Eagles & a bag of chips Dave'll be munching on in the second hour plus that guy Sean Whatshisname), continues to leave listeners torn between the potential of what Micallef could do on radio and the reality of Dave O'Neill refusing to shut the fuck up about food for three hours. Shaun has said he's happy with the challenge of radio. I guess sometimes you have to lie to yourself to get through unpleasant things, eh? And the Vega podcast manages to distill all of this down to an even more concentrated brew. Are they really the best bits? It makes you wonder if you'd be better off paying for comedy to enjoy at home...
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NEWTON
Sports humour hit yet another new low with Peter Helliar's character Bryan Strauchan - because once you put on a wig and a footie jumper, jokes only get in the way of the comedy. As for The Wedge DVDs - all four, fucking volumes of them - why? Who would buy them? In fact who would buy The Best of The Glasshouse when series 1 of The Games is available? Thank God for region-free DVD players.
Highlighting the woefully inbred nature of the Australian comedy scene is the following category, filled once again with the usual 'famous faces'. Because why limit your awfulness to just one medium when you can stink in all of them?
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NEWTON
Fifi Box, a woman whose lack of talent and appeal is seemingly endless, is everywhere. And worst of all she keeps on being everywhere. She may not be as evil and horrible as Kyle Sandilands, or Labrat, or John Laws, but she is on more programmes and is forever expanding in to new genres of entertainment. This year saw her acting debut on Thank God You're Here. She appeared on the show an unbelievable six times, while evil twin Kate Langbroek only appeared once. But at least Kate could act. OK, she got her tits out in Chances, but still, it's 'acting' of a sort.
Meanwhile Jo Stanley struggled on, as though she knew she'd lost the battle to be Kate Langbroek's true successor. But just in case Box got a movie role in Hollywood, based on her astonishing performances in Thank God You're Here or got sold to Poland as part of the Working Dog TGYH kit, Stanley was preparing herself to take Box's place and show just how much talent she doesn't have.
Spicks and Specks gave a generation of alternative musos, who never really did all that much other than appear on t-shirts worn by Wil Anderson in 1998, the opportunity to be less funny than the likes of Richard Clapton and Hamish Blake's haircut. Happily Spicks and Specks was such a feel-good family programme, with a readymade audience who found The Glasshouse a little bit too strident, that anything the guy from Shihad said was always greeted with maximum chortling. The Spicks and Spicks talent would eventually drift into such other ABC programmes as The Greatest Album of All Time, which, with Dicko and Chas from The Chaser on board, would explain to us why Jeff Buckley's Grace was the second best album of all time. Ahead of albums with actual songs on them.
And now we come to the part of the night where we turn the spotlight onto the media, with the Robert Fidgeon Memorial Award for Worst Critic. Not that any of the following had any input into tonight's awards. Some might think that for an awards ceremony seemingly devoted to the toppling of false idols, critics would be coming in for praise, not hate. And that would be the case - if there were any critics working in Australia who weren't glad-handing hacks, yes-men, attention-seekers courting controversy for its own sake, or unqualified morons promoted well above their station by editors who seem to think that having someone talk rubbish week after week makes them a colourful character who you love to hate instead of just a pain in the arse...
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NEWTON
Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt is best known as a fist-shaking, macho, right-wing attack dog constantly hammering on about how race riots don't mean that Aussies are racist - unless they're left-wing academics - and by the way, global warming is a myth spread by pagan greenies who hate Christians and want to keep you poor as part of their twisted 'faith'. It's some of the best print comedy currently being produced in this country, especially when he delivers one of his classic 'Some of my best friends are gay/Muslim/Aboriginal, but' zingers.
But it's when he turns his attention to the arts that he really comes into his own, with a stream of shocking exposes revealing that films with animated animals like Finding Nemo are really a green attempt to brainwash 'our kids' into, um, well, not realising that given half a chance a cow would kill you and everyone you love. It's hard to take him seriously - until you see him on the ABC providing 'balance' to counter clearly crackpot views like 'the stolen generation actually happened' and 'global warming is real' and realise that thousands do.
In one of the strangest pieces of writing of the year, Sydney Morning Herald reviewer Ruth Ritchie dared to look through a water cooler darkly to examine David Tench Tonight’s black soul, and somehow, somewhere, she found humour in it. Nobody knows where or what sort of humour it was she found, but there was enough in there for her to find Tench 'funny'. Which is a word even Andrew Denton seemed reluctant to use when admonishing the nation for not finding the programme amazing.
The key to understanding Tench is explained in Ritchie’s piece, and it is this: water coolers. Ritchie had noticed that Australians were not gathering around water coolers to talk Tench. She had not noticed that the show wasn’t very good. Ritchie had noticed that the Tench character relies on a great comic conceit which it shares with much-loved Australian comedy characters of yesteryear. She had not noticed that it also relied on about three-quarters of its budget being spent on viral campaigns, and interviews wherein Andrew Denton used his reputation as a man with the ability to make Rolf Harris cry during an interview to try to get the public interested.
Ritchie’s baffled pining for a different world - or dimension - where gems like David Tench Tonight would attract five million around, presumably, four-dimensional psychedelic water coolers while eating ginger nuts and drinking coffee became one of the best comic turns of the year. Her inability to notice that Tench was very expensive rubbish, and that there actually was a gigantic difference between something Denton intended as a sort of fast food franchise bland enough to work very well in Sweden and eventually maybe Iraq, and Norman Gunston or Dame Edna doing anything at all, underscored how little these comedy writers and reviewers knew about comedy, and how little of it they actually watched.
Meanwhile Australians prepared for 2007’s surplus of great new comedy shows by installing dozens of water coolers in their lounge rooms. In a new viral campaign Denton will ask people like Rolf Harris and Kris Kristofferson if they would like water coolers stationed below their tear ducts just before they burst into tears and the camera zooms in to catch every last gleaming drip of anguished salt. Ruth Ritchie has still not declared her shares in various water cooler companies around the nation, but at least her kidneys are very healthy.
Jim Schembri once wrote for Totally Full Frontal, performed stand-up under the name 'Jimbo', and wrote the incredibly creepy 'comedy' book Room For One - in fact, he loved the chapter where he put his pet cat in a sack, took it to the river, and only decided not to kill it at the very last second so much, he recently recycled it for an 'all-new' 'humour' article in The Age over summer. Yet despite this nightmarish track record of failure and incompetence, he feels no shame about handing out comedy advice. In fact, he also writes a humour column where he occasionally talks about how he (a man in his 40's) talks to teenage girls on public transport. Thanks for sharing.
These days The Age's arts coverage is a half-arsed mish-mash of poorly thought-out opinion pieces and grandstanding by journalists more interested in themselves than their subjects. It's a tragic fall for what was once one of Australia's greatest newspapers - and the fact the Schembri hasn't been packed off to the real estate pages to amuse home owners with his zany insights into how he felt scared when he saw a Muslim on a train only shows how rudderless this ship currently is.
But now, to accept the Robert Fidgeon Memorial Award for Worst Critic 2006, would you please welcome the winner, Mr Andrew Bolt...
BOLTANDREW BOLT APPEARS ON STAGE CARRYING A FISHING ROD.
Ladies and Gentleman, I assume there are no left-wingers in the audience tonight. I don't want to alarm anyone...
AUDIENCE GIGGLES.
Heh, heh, you know what I'm talking about. But to be serious for a moment, I believe there are some Marxist trout in the building. They're probably in a bowl, or something. Maybe a boot? I don't know. What matters is that they are Marxists and they have gills.
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I'm sure some of you saw Finding Nemo. I'm sure most of you, snerds excepted, read my column identifying the appalling leftist imbalance in that flick? Of course you did. This tripe the left are running through their Marxist fish proxies about how it's wrong to kill and all that drivel has to be caught and deep fried as soon as possible. If anyone has any bait see me after the show.
BOLT VISIBLY BEGINS TO GRIMACE AND SHRINK INTO HIMSELF. THE ORCHESTRA STARTS TO PLAY WALTZING MATILDA IN THE BACKGROUND.
I know what it is like to have the left cajole you through the television screen. I grew up watching Romper Room. I watched Mr Do Bee collect pollen and distribute it equally among the creche of children in that series. I nearly shared a tennis ball with a friend the next day, before sense prevailed and I knocked him unconscious with a tree root.
And don't think I wasn't very nearly swayed by Manning Clark's infamous appearance on Mr Squiggle in 1973, proudly brandishing his Order of Lenin medal whilst playing the role of Doormat, before assisting Mr Squiggle to scratch out a portrait of Fidel Castro in charcoal. Flattering portrait, too. Got the beard right.
Well, I won't be swayed again. I won't be fooled into even briefly conceding that Fabian socialism is an actually quite reasonable process of social reform. I won't let that well known pinko Barry Humphries convert children to the left, with his street directory talk and long running feud with everybody in the country other than Clive James, via an apparently harmless film about fish. Do you think I didn't notice that Doc Evatt had an aquarium of guppies in his residence in the 30's? Redish guppies they were, too.
I'm after all you cold-blooded vertebrates! Especially the gudgeon. Very shifty fish.
BOLT LEAVES QUIETLY, SULLENLY, WITH HIS ROD AT THE READY.BOLT PEERS OUT INTO THE FUNCTION ROOM LOOKING FOR COD AND CHAR FOR ROUGHLY TWELVE MINUTES, BEFORE THE AUDIENCE SILENTLY RISES AND GIVES THE MAN A STANDING OVATION.
NEWTON
Thank you, Andrew. And whenever Australian critics gather, the exaggerated praise for half-baked local product isn't far behind - we've got to support the local industry, don't you know, even if that means flat-out lying to the public about the quality of what we're meant to be reviewing for them. And so it gives me only marginal pleasure to announce the winner of...
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NEWTON
It's not that Working Dog's product Thank God You're Here is actively bad. It's that, presented with a local show that didn't totally suck and was doing well in the ratings (a ratings success none of them predicted, by the way, while aimless 'dramedies' like Tripping Over were hailed to the high heavens only to draw lacklustre figures, prompting the question of how these experts hold onto their well-paid jobs) the local media's been falling over themselves to proclaim it as the success story of 2006. Which it probably is, if you're only interested in ratings and being able to sell the format to overseas markets.
But as far as artistic merits go - and that's all we're concerned about here - to see the makers of the classic Frontline and the seminal Late Show churn out a gimmicky improv show is one step backwards for Australian comedy, and one giant leap back for Working Dog. It's hard not to think that the praise they've been getting has less to do with critics believing that they've made a good show, and more about critics being glad that Working Dog has finally sunk to their level.
If the people on Spicks and Specks had comedy shows to go to after taping this one, or this was happily and cheerfully in the second rank of 2006 comedies, it wouldn't look so bad. But in 2006 the ABC seemed to be putting this up as their number one comedy programme. Fresher than something like The Glasshouse, but just as empty and forgettable, hopefully it'll be recycled as soft drink bottles some time this year.
Then there was The Chaser's War On Everything, which promised so much, but only provided us with the unedifying sight of supposedly edgy satirists cosying up to politicians with cuddly pranks seemingly designed more to show that heartless government bastards could laugh at themselves instead of pointing out that, for example, their policies have done serious harm to the fabric of this always kinda pissy nation. This could have been forgiven if the pranks were actually funny. Oh, and if you can find someone who thought we needed a dozen parodies of rug warehouse sale commercials, let us know.
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NEWTON
Having set up, what was probably the best Australian humourous magazine of all time and made a couple of decent TV series, the Chaser team should finally be living up to their true potential in The Chaser's War On Everything. Heavily influenced in look and feel by The Late Show, The War was sadly missing that key ingredient that made The Late Show great - anarchy. Last minute, seat-of-your-pants, making it up as you go along, glorious, semi-improvised anarchy. Instead,The War felt staid, locked-down, lawyer-approved, pre-recorded, toothless and was - cruically - not that funny.
As for their attempts at satire, what was their response to the Howard government's years of winding the clock back on human rights, civil liberties, industrial relations and pretty much everything else? Nothing much. And no real opinions either. When you're watching a comedy team who've had at least four separate shows on the ABC, it seems fair enough to expect a little more from a sketch than just someone walking into a fast food restaurant and reading out the menu really loudly.
Thank God You're Here would have been a welcome surprise if it had come from a bunch of newcomers, and mildly shocking if it had been the result of network group-think, but to see Working Dog produce this tricked-up acting exercise, which only managed to waste the talents of pretty much everyone involved, verged on the heart-breaking. If it had been used as an opportunity to display new and unknown talent to a mainstream audience it might almost have been worthwhile - but instead each episode wheeled out some of the top comedy talent this country has to offer, from Frank Woodley to Tony Martin to Jimeon to Shaun Micallef to Glenn Robbins to Bob Franklin, and made them look like idiots. Because these days it's not whether you can carefully craft a classic sketch comedy show, or produce one of the funniest radio hours found anywhere on a daily basis, or are one of the best comedic actors around - it's whether you can think up smart-arse replies to random lines while wearing a funny costume.
At any other time Stupid Stupid Man would just have been a run-of-the-mill disapointment, the kind that any thriving comedy industry throws up on a regular basis, leaving viewers to shrug and move on. But this was the only sitcom made in Australia in 2006. I'll repeat that: these were the only eight episodes of professional situation comedy produced in this country in 2006. That's the real disappointment here. This addled, aimless, erratic and unfunny show should have been justly and deservedly forgotten by now. Instead it's the last gasp of the Australian sitcom.
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NEWTON
Mick Molloy's recent work really makes you re-assess his past and wonder if he should be given too much creative freedom. With the exception of Crackerjack and bits of The Mick Molloy Show, Molloy's post-Martin/Molloy work has been shaky at best and downright terrible at worst. Still, it's almost possible to forgive him his efforts this past year - after all, in between hosting the erratic sports highlight show Any Given Sunday and Tough Love, he was making BoyTown, the first Aussie comedy in years that dared to avoid the topic of fair dinkum battlers struggling against the system. Molloy possibly contributed the cheeriest Australian comedy moment of 2006 with his giddy Riverdance-with-a-twist dance moves halfway through the film, but little else he did overcame the black hole Tough Love dragged the good things into.
Only a little while ago Molloy was interviewing Mark Latham on the eve of a horrendous federal election, and somehow making the whole thing not horribly painful. Good grief, only a little while ago he was in Bad Eggs, and being very funny. Yet, it seems likely that in 2007 Molloy will serve up more of the same collection of limp apperances in shows that ten years ago he would have been laughing at, not with. In interviews he's able to come across as 100% committed to making decent comedy and smart enough to know how to go about it, and yet he still seems to think a steady stream of lightweight hosting work won't damage his career. In 2006 all he seemed to contribute was a brief jig to get Glenn Robbins smirking. A sad, sad demise.
Sadly, Mick doesn't seem to be with us tonight. He's probably at the pub.
As for the Chaser team, they've only ever promised to come up with great comedy. Pretty much all the work they've done has fallen into the 'must try harder' basket, and yet they're constantly being talked-up as the future of Australian satire. Perhaps if they were forced to be what they're clearly meant to be - a semi-decent wacky breakfast crew on commercial radio - then they'd have to work a little harder on their comedy to squeeze it in between commercial breaks and Nickelback, and we'd all be the better for it.
Molloy's fellow ex-Late Show-ers, the Working Dog team, have had a steady decline. After initial hits with Frontline and The Castle, the reasonable Funky Squad and an interesting documentary following Paul Keating on his 1996 election campaign, Working Dog went for a more relaxed approach to comedy with The Panel. And that is where the rot started. These days Working Dog only seem interested in overseas sales, making sure that their quirky comedy film The Dish wasn't too weird for America (it turns out it was) and creating the Thank God You're Here concept, with with the aim of flogging it to every 'territory' in the world.
What makes their downward spiral even more disheartening is the fact that they clearly can still come up with the goods when they can be arsed trying. Take a look at their Jetlag travel guides, or even sections of Tom Gleisner's Warwick Todd cricket parodies. They haven't entirely lost their abilities - they've just lost interest in using them as anything more than a way to make quick cash. Which could almost be justified if they were using that cash to fund a project of their own, but their long-awaited third film and the TV version of the Jetlag books made with the BBC, seem no closer to materialising after years of rumours. Which, sadly, means they were the most popular choice for this year's...
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NEWTON
Working Dog's fall is only notable because they've fallen from so high. Thank God You're Here isn't the worst comedy show on Australian television and for many of their current fans, their winning this award makes no sense - how is TGYH in any real way a worse show than The Panel? But whilst churning out such half-arsed pap, Working Dog achieved little more than help the likes of Ian McFadyen, Steve Vizard, Channel Nine, Rove McManus and everybody else pretend that The Late Show never went to air. The same people who did The Panel's Christmas Wrap made Frontline. Nobody will believe that in ten years time when Thank God You're Here winds up its latest season, featuring Fifi Box and some of her relatives. At this stage Working Dog aren't pissing on their legacy - they've zipped-up, and headed back to the bar for another couple of beers, before coming back for a second go.
Mick Molloy's legacy increasingly seems to be 'the guy who worked with Tony Martin', and he'd better watch out or Ed Kavalee will take even that from him. As for Andrew Denton, he seems perfectly happy to be the poster boy for people who think Parkinson is cutting-edge interviewing - problem is, his role creating Tench ensures his legacy will be that of one of Australian comedy history's greatest monsters. And Micallef isn't so much urinating on his legacy as pissing away his talents on a third-rate breakfast team that's a blatantly criminal waste of one of Australia's true comic stars. If Vega breakfast is the best this country can offer him, he should head overseas on the next available flight.
But back to our winners, unfortunately, the Working Dog team are unable to accept their award in person, as they're currently supervising the Icelandic pilot of Thank God You're Here, but they have sent along this message:
NEWTON
It wasn't so long ago that Working Dog were notorious for striking back at their critics, feuding with some of the biggest names in Melbourne TV criticism. Amazing how sitting on bags and bags of cash puts you above that kind of thing.
We're taking a break now, but there's more Tumbleweeds over on page 4...
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