The Best Australian Humorous Writing (15 page)

There are a million stories in the wonderful world of modern communications. This has been two of them.

DAVID ASTLE

Giddy, cotton-mouthed, I'm led down a maze of corridors with no sign of clocks or exits or daylight. I want to run. I want to pee. Famous TV people stare from the walls—comedians, chefs, weather chicks—watching me keep pace with the clipboard girl who's too busy smiling to speak. She leads me to a hallway where the names of various animals have been screwed to the doors and shunts me into the Rhino Room.

Inside, a blanket-sized mirror is framed by lightbulbs. There's a TV. Two couches. Three coathooks. “Show me your clothes,” says the girl, “before you hang them up.”

She scrutinises my three shirts—white, green and Hawaiian— like a paid-up member of the fashion police. “Too busy,” she says of the hibiscus. “The white's too staid. Go with the green. I'll be back with the forms.”

On her way out she scribbles something across the back of my door. It sounds like a texta writing my name. The cell now has its hostage.

I flick on the telly.
I Love Lucy
, circa 1957. Desi Arnaz pratfalls on a rug and slops his martini. (The canned audience laughs.) I turn down the sound and sit at the mirror, telling my reflection to relax. It's just a quiz show. It might be fun. You could win some money.
A plate of sandwiches lies at my elbow. Spam and lettuce. Spiced/ ham = spam, I tell myself as a means of reminding myself I'm cluey. I know my trivia. That's why I'm here. Trapped.

The forms when they come all but gag and bind me. Like Moses skimming the commandments, I read each clause (Thou shalt not be related to production staff. Thou shalt not collude. Thou shalt not on-sell your giftshop. Thou shalt not have a heart condition) and initial them.

Make-up is down the hall and requires a chaperone to get there. Contestants are forbidden to meet face-to-face before showtime, in case empathy—and deals—are struck. My escort, another clipboard girl, introduces herself as B2.

“After the banana?” I banter, banally. My cocktail charms have fled. My power of speech has fled. All traces of intelligence have fled.

“Belinda's the coordinator,” she deadpans. “I'm the second Belinda.”

My hair has undesirable wings, the coiffeur tells me. Wings are bad in studio light. I need “product” to tamp things down. Again that blank buffoon gazes back from the mirror, posing the question:

For a pick of the board, who am I? Born in 1961, the eldest son of a loving bourgeois family that had no desire to invite humiliation to its home, he went on to flop in
Sale of the Century
in 1981, and later
Jeopardy
, winning nought but embarrassment for his troubles. Not only did he forget where Angel Falls fell, or who put pussy in the well, but the same bloke omitted the “o” from diarrhoea on national television. To prove he's a slow learner, he's now competing in a gameshow that trades on impotence and disgrace. I am …

Fact is, I am a lot of Australians. As gameshow fodder we share a history of heartbreaks. Why do we do it? Why do we embark
on such flights of lunacy and greed, where tears and fears and ignominy are waiting at the other end?

Scan the telly guide and you'll see how pandemic the plague has become. Once upon a time Barry Jones picked-a-box, or Barbie Rogers embodied the
Great Temptation
, but now the dam has burst. Citizens have every chance to play the patsy in
Deal or No Deal, Rich List, RocKwiz, Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?, Wipeout, Gladiators, Con Test, Family Feud, The New Price Is Right, The New Wheel of Fortune, 1 vs 100, Hole in the Wall
and
The Einstein Factor,
leaving aside the mania of radio competitions, funny home videos and frenzied post-school quizzes for kids. We buy a vowel, risk snakebite, snog on camera, propose on camera, disappear through trapdoors, sweat to heartbeat music, stab colleagues in the back and risk the national debt of Argentina—for what?

If money was your answer, deduct $5. Because winning money, or a full-length Drizabone with interior stitching, is just a sliver of the gameshow story.

Greed is a primary human motivator, right up there with libido and revenge, but you can't tell me a thousand Australians every year spin fortune's wheel, catch Burgo's phrase and walk the walk of shame purely for the one-off shot of scoring a shekel. Okay, maybe half do. (Deduct $2.50.) But what else prompts such pathological behaviour? Why do so many ostensibly sensible people risk face-loss in the national loungeroom?

“I look at it in terms of playacting,” says Heather Cameron-Grey, a Melbourne psychologist who specialises in humiliation. “Because playacting is not a life-or-death situation, it can carry the sense we're invincible. I also think it's the fantasy of ‘getting away with it', like doing something ‘naughty', making love on the beach or something. People aren't aware of the real consequences.”

I'm too scared to ask, but I can't help myself. Consequences like what?

“Shame,” says Cameron-Grey, “which is very scarring. People don't realise the psychological damage. Because shame is based on memory, we replay it.”

But wait. Surely the buzz of taking part inoculates you against eventual blows of the being out-buzzed?

Cameron Grey can't agree. “When excitement is cut short so quickly, we're left with a high level of neural firing, a wash of chemicals which causes a heating in the face. In the face we get that caved-in look.”

Not my face. I'm pancaked, invincible and my wings are gelled down.

Back in 1981, so keen was I to be mocked by Tony Barber, I played dumb with the producers on
Sale of the Century
. To quote Rocky Rhodes, the non-flying rooster on
Chicken Run
, “I didn't lie Dollface, I omitted certain truths.”

The truth was this: B1's counterpart back in 1981 phoned me a week before the recording. She asked if everything was fine for the trip to Melbourne. Sure, I said, forgetting to mention I had 26 brand-new stitches around my left eye from copping a rugby boot at close quarters. Twice. The wound was grotesque, a no-no for family dinnertime viewing, but that's the irrational desire I'm meaning, the fantasy, the crazed urge to gamble with the ego.

(Channel 9 beauticians spent an hour trying to camouflage the welts and mercurochrome, all for me to forget where Angel Falls fell—and fall. Yes, I still have the stickpin.)

Face fixed, I walk back to the Rhino Room, a traipse down Death Row with my snake-hipped jailer in tow, and hear the cell door shut behind me. I feel like sobbing. Escaping. Not for the first time I realise that the gameshow system is Woomera with sandwiches. You lose all status, all claims to civility. Prodded into chutes
like so many milkers, you enter a subclass devoid of grace and surnames, a succession of wannabes who squint into Camera 3 when the red light flicks on. Meantime the paperwork, the dotted lines, the box-ticking cancels your last hope of being an individual. Clauses 1–22 as good as sew your lips.

Which may explain the secret scars among our neighbours. For all we know, every second ratepayer around us has undergone their own public putdown in half-hour slots, but the pre-show contracts swear our muteness afterwards. There is no victim support, no sob circle among the runners-up. Legally, we cannot divulge our trauma. (When this story first ran I had to rely on the pseudonym of Steve Bennett, the pet alias of Bart Simpson, to blow the whistle.) Worse than football injuries, the gameshow experience doesn't respond to suturing or iodine. It cannot be seen. Nor spoken of.

Little Johnny Green put pussy in the well, I say, and Morgan Freeman drove Miss Daisy. Just relax. Chill out. Have a sandwich. Watch Lucy.

I'm not a timid person. Zoologists might label me as an alpha male. Tallish, a firm handshake, polished shoes, a grab-bag of credible opinions, I can string a few words together. But put me under lights and ask me what arachnophobes fear and I'm likely to say Copenhagen.

The door opens. I have an inmate, a rat-spunky waiter called Tony. B1 helps him pick a shirt, tells him moccasins are too déclassé, and shuts the door.

Tony is booked for the episode after mine. Hence we can talk, assuming I won't be the carry-over champion, which is a fair assumption. We talk about tactics, and alienation, and the one-day cricket which we locate on the television. A Kiwi gets bowled first ball and slumps back to the pavilion with a weeping duck under his ribcage—the original walk of shame. TV has a long and rich history of degradation.

“So why do we do it?” I ask Tony.

My cellmate aspires to being a guinea pig on Channel 9's
Fear Factor,
the latest series of macho brinkmanship, a sort of
Gladiators
meets
Who Dares Wins
with a teaspoonful of
Survivor,
and maybe going on this “quiz thing” will help boost his chances. Like I say, jackpots and giftshops are just a smokescreen.

B1 is back again. “We're doing a walk-through in five,” she tells me. “Check out the set. Test the electricals.”

“Any chance of using the toilet?”

She frowns. Looks at her watch. “I'll have to go with you.”

Under my breath, walking past the other private rooms, seeing my competitors' names written on the doors and wishing I was elsewhere, I spell diarrhoea with an “o”.

Months before this gruelling day of Nivea and trivia were the auditions, fifty general knowledge questions in a disused studio, followed by a “personality” form that asked such zingers as:

 

• You have five minutes left to live. What will you do?
  
• Name a law that should be abolished.
  
• You and a friend are sitting in the bar of a five-star hotel, when you find a Rolex watch on the adjacent table. Do you tell your friend? Keep it? Hand it in?
  

 

In the column reserved for personal hobbies/interests, I made light of the truth. What's the point of putting down the obvious? To debase yourself properly, you need to err on the side of zany, claiming such pursuits as kite-surfing and fingerprinting in order to catch the producer's eye. At the
Jeopardy
audition, on paper at least, I boomeranged and ate fire. Only to be thrashed, come the hour, by a bilingual greenkeeper from Mona Vale.

A friend of mine, Becky, said her house was haunted for the sake of scoring a gig on the Roy/HG gameshow back in 2000. The
ploy did the trick at auditions, only for Messrs Slaven and Nelson to spend half the episode grilling my mate on the ghost's personal hygiene habits and choice of TV shows. Even before the gameshow concludes, the contestant knows that caved-in feeling.

Over and over. Like a custard-wearing clown who clean forgets the latest salvo of pies, I stand at my module awaiting the cameras to roll. With three gameshows behind me, am I an optimist, a masochist, a fatalist or recidivist? Or (e), all of the above.

“One of the wonderful things about human nature,” reckons Cameron-Grey, “is that we want to resolve the past. An example is people who continually go into marriages which are similar, and have similar outcomes. It stems from a wish to resolve the initial sense of failure, of going back into the same situation.”

Quizzes or marriages—seems the psyche is trapped in a win/ loss spool. “[Repeat behaviour] comes from a desire to heal, to conquer, to come out the winner, so that the future won't have that [negative] pattern.”

Spotlights swivel. An army of floor staff futz around with gaffer tape and light meters, barking into Britney-like headsets and monkeying up scaffolding. I notice one dude has a T-shirt saying “9 days, 24 surfers, 21 stops, 1 bus” and wonder if that's the sort of thing a focused contestant ought be noticing on the eve of triumph.

Just before the signature tune revs up, my fellow contestants have a chance to trade grimaces, and whisper “good luck” to each other. That's the thing, we understand suffering. We don't despise our fellow lab rat, despite the animosity that oozes from the home screen. It's just a game.