The Best Australian Humorous Writing (18 page)

Because the Logies take place in Crown Casino, another avenue is for the telecast to be fed from the security cameras in the pokies room downstairs. Slowly watching a grandmother fritter away her pension will be much more cheerful than the normal ceremony, and you may even catch the odd kneecapping from a stand-over man. In fact, for viewers in Victoria this may be the closest they get to seeing
Underbelly
this year.

Rather than showing “In Memoriam” packages for deceased people no one has heard of, we would like tribute to be paid to the far more tragic deaths of TV shows such as
The Power of 10, Yasmin's Getting Married
, and whatever show Nine gets Bert Newton to host this year.

The Logies feature performances by visiting musical guests from overseas, but in an era when all our own TV personalities are willing
to sing on
It Takes Two
, this seems an unnecessary waste of a galaxy of home-grown stars. Rather than being forced to watch Avril Lavigne lip-syncing her latest pap, viewers will instead watch Sandra Sully performing Britney Spears'
Toxic
and
Gardening Australia
's Peter Cundall crooning Justin Timberlake's
SexyBack
. We'll take anyone—the only rule being that under no circumstances will Daryl Somers be allowed to sing. In fact, we'll have the security personnel prevent him from entering the room at all.

We could make the Logies score a profit for the first time in history. If Nine really wants people to vote by SMS, they should give them an incentive: every voter who sends an SMS will receive an annoying ringtone and a picture of a horny Russian babe.

Yes, giving out a public number for people to text is risky, so an entire call centre will be set up specifically to deal with the thousands of dirty messages the nominees will receive from Shane Warne.

Furthermore, all the prizes will be announced using the
Up Late Game Show
method. The winners' names will be used as obvious clues in a guessing game for home viewers—so for the Gold, it might be KATE R-TCHIE. The drawback of this is that the Logies will have to be hosted by Hotdogs. Sorry.

Some nasty cynics describe the Logies as a shallow orgy of money-grubbing self-congratulation. We need to find a way to divert attention from the fact that those people are right. The best way to do that is to link Logies night with a good cause. In particular, the Logies should get on the climate change bandwagon by teaming up with Earth Hour—a 60-minute blackout during the middle of the ceremony would be a considerable improvement. Everyone would
feel better about themselves, not just because they'd be helping to save the planet, but also because they wouldn't have to watch those dreadful award categories SBS always wins like Most Outstanding Public Affairs Report.

But an Earth Hour tie-in would only be the start of an environmental initiative. To really eliminate noxious emissions, we'll also ensure Kyle Sandilands isn't invited.

Everyone knows (or at least suspects) the real entertainment at the Logies happens at the after parties. To ensure that this year's event goes off like no other, we'll appoint Corey Worthington as the official host—on the condition Max Markson doesn't get a cut. We'll invite everyone except for
A Current Affair
summer host Leila McKinnon, who'll be forced to gatecrash with her fella, Nine chief executive David Gyngell.

SHANE MALONEY

If Peter Cook hasn't done much in the past 12 years, that's only because he's dead. Before then, he did quite a bit—although the obituaries tended to infer that he had squandered his prodigious talent. Since that talent consisted essentially of being the funniest man in the world, it is difficult to imagine how he might better have expended it than pottering around, smacking the occasional golf ball, pretending to be a Norwegian fisherman, having a few drinks and leaving ever-expanding ripples of laughter in his wake.

In 1987, his rigorous gift-frittering regime brought him to Australia as guest of honour of the inaugural Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Far too unpredictable to be allowed out on his own, he was allocated a minder. That task fell to me. It was the best job I've ever had.

For the previous three years, I'd been employed by Melbourne City Council to run its cultural program. This consisted mainly of wangling free concert tickets for the councillors. Elton John, if possible. The opera, if there was nothing else up for grabs.

The allure of this task had begun to wear thin. I was ready to jump ship. And when a rag-tag collection of small-time theatre promoters knocked on the town hall door, jester's cap in hand,
asking the council to bankroll their plans for a comedy festival, I saw my chance.

From Barry Humphries onward, Melbourne has long been a fertile breeding ground for comedy. By the mid-'80s, comedy venues were springing up all over town, television was tapping into the talent and even the city fathers wanted a piece of the action.

They weren't too sure, however, about handing a bucket of cash to a bunch of shady-looking joke-brokers. I suggested that instead of money, they be given in-kind support. To wit, a council officer on secondment. Somebody to see that the jokes ran on time, that the books were kept in good order and that dodgy promoters didn't abscond with the takings. Somebody like me, say.

The councillors bought it. Lock, stock and whoopee cushion.

John Pinder, proprietor of the Last Laugh and the Sydney Greenstreet of Melbourne comedy, took me under his voluminous wing and we set to work to hammer out a program.
The Age
agreed to run a spoof front cover on our launch date, April Fool's Day. The chief magistrate volunteered his court as the venue for a mock trial. A trio of young actors of ethnic persuasion put together a show called
Wogs Out of Work
. Marching girls were booked and Wendy Harmer was put on sedatives.

The only thing missing was a marquee attraction. A comedic luminary of global proportions, a name so big that even journalists would recognise it. Peter Cook, for example. Assuming, of course, that he wasn't too busy pulling lobsters out of Jayne Mansfield's bottom or teaching ravens to fly underwater.

Cook had a longstanding connection with Australia. In 1971, he and Dudley Moore toured here for nearly five months, test-driving
Behind the Fridge
before its premiere in the West End. Australia loved Pete and Dud, revelling in their irreverence and surreal wordplay. The tour was a triumph, the shows were sold out and the media couldn't get enough of them. Several weeks into the run, they performed a sketch on the
Dave Allen Show
on the Nine Network. Called “The
Gospel Truth”, it took the form of an interview by Bethlehem Star reporter Matthew (Dudley) of Mr Arthur Shepherd (Pete).

The skit created an immediate furore. Hundreds of irate viewers besieged the switchboard with complaints and the Australian Broadcasting Control Board immediately banned the offending satirists from live appearances on every television and radio station in the country under pain of loss of licence.

One particularly obscene word had been used. “Something a lot of us sit on,” Dudley later explained to the National Press Club. “Not a chair. Short word. Starts with ‘b', ends with ‘m'.”

I was 18 at the time, in my first year at Monash University. Student protest was at its height, and when the terrible two appeared on campus, fresh from their monstering by the forces of wowserdom and cant, they were greeted as heroes. The allocated venue filled to capacity within minutes of the doors opening. Speakers were rapidly set up on the lawns. When these proved insufficient for the crowd, lectures were cancelled and the show was piped campus-wide on closed-circuit television.

In the 15 years since, Pete and Dud had plumbed the scatological depths as Derek and Clive, then gone their separate ways. Dudley became Hollywood's resident sex thimble, starring opposite Bo Derek in
10
and playing someone not entirely unlike himself in
Arthur
. Peter made some middling to bad movies and created one of the funniest, most biting satirical speeches ever written, a monologue parodying the judge's summing up in the trial of Jeremy Thorpe, that “self-confessed player of the pink oboe”, who once headed Britain's Liberal Party.

“Whereupon,” Peter put it, “I immediately did nothing.”

Nothing which—miracle of miracles—included agreeing to return to Australia for a week as the official guest of honour of the Melbourne Comedy Festival.

As he staggered from his London flight, fabulously dishevelled, golf sticks slung over his shoulder, partner Lin Chong at his side, the
assembled comediocracy of Melbourne could scarcely refrain from prostrating itself at his feet. “You come as an emperor,” declared producer John Pinder, “to accept the homage of your subjects.”

With the wryly amused air of an infamous rake being invited to inspect a mining camp bordello, he allowed himself to be duch-essed around town, making guest appearances, dispensing trophies and generally enjoying the hospitality of the burgh.

The mischief began almost immediately. As he checked into his hotel, he was informed that its manager, lately of Zurich, had requested an autographed photo for the celebrity guest wall of the cocktail bar. Peter immediately launched into an impromptu dissertation on the contribution of Swiss hotel management to the development of modern comedy. Was not the knock-knock joke invented by a Swiss housemaid, he asked? And that mint-on-the-pillow idea was sheer comic genius.

Drawn by the chortling, the manager bustled across the lobby and joined us, a look of comprehension settling on his face. This must be his celebrity guest, the famous English clown. Peter, oblivious to the identity of the man in the pin-striped trousers, continued his monologue. Herr Metzger, taking his cue from the rest of us, roared with laughter. While he was in charge, nobody could say the Swiss didn't recognise a joke when they heard one.

Then it was off to the Town Hall for lunch with another fan, Lord Mayor Trevor Huggard. They talked architecture and His Honour, an early champion of urban conservation, mentioned plans to restore the Regent Theatre, then derelict. It took little encouragement from Peter for the keys to be found and the two of them spent the afternoon wandering through the picture palace's cobweb-draped rococo smoking lounges, Roman Empire Wurlitzer pit and late medieval projection box. It was just the place, Peter decided, for the world premiere of his forthcoming musical based on the secret diaries of Queen Victoria's gynaecologist.

The high point of Peter's official agenda was the press conference to launch the festival, a task he shared with Barry Humphries, the festival patron. Humphries appeared in the guise of the salivating, varicose-nosed Sir Les Patterson. It was the big-ticket draw of the day. All the networks sent camera crews and a seething mass of journalists packed the room. When the terrible two walked in, all the photographers popped their flashes simultaneously, triggering a thermo-nuclear explosion. Peter, rendered the colour of cheddar cheese by the glare, and beaded with perspiration from the heat of the sun guns, sat in benign bemusement while Humphries basted him with reminiscences of their early careers.

At the crack of dawn the next day, Peter and John Clarke headed for the nearest golf course at 11am in deference to Cook's customary routine. “My driving hasn't been very good lately,” Cook warned. “But my short game is among the shortest on Earth.” Positively glowing with ill-health, he wheezed his way through 18 holes, club in one hand, Dunhills in the other.

Although an invitation had been issued by Royal Melbourne, Peter's stated preference was for somewhere a little less starchy. Clarke took him to Yarra Bend, a public course favoured by off-duty taxi drivers and shift-working bakers. As they neared the clubhouse, Peter spotted a player who had taken off his shirt. He demanded to see the pro. If people were allowed to wander about half-naked, he complained, the course should post a notice to that effect. “Had I known, I would not have bothered wearing clothes.”

One of the festival's main attractions was a somewhat anarchic mock trial, organised by a bunch of barristers and conducted in the magistrate's court. Spirited away by a team of admiring lawyers and fed a persuasive lunch, Peter agreed to appear as a judge one night. He did so in full regalia with a bottle of gin on the bench in front of him. Presented with a farrago of trumped-up charges and fabricated evidence, he had no hesitation in handing down his verdict—half
extemporised nonsense, half reprise of his Jeremy Thorpe monologue. “The sentence I am about to hand down is sponsored by Tanqueray gin,” he sombrely pronounced. “You always get a result with Tanqueray.”

As might be imagined, my minderly duties were far from onerous. They consisted principally of dragging an ever-amenable Peter away from one cluster of admirers and delivering him to another. Then came the “abscess incident”.

Since early in the festival, I'd been conspiring with Lin, Peter's partner, to protect his liver from the excesses of Australian hospitality. A few days before their departure, Lin confided that Peter was suffering from a persistent toothache. Self-medication was keeping a lid on his discomfort, but she was worried that his condition would not be improved by the long flight home. Could I recommend a reliable dentist?

Peter was duly chivvied into a taxi and dispatched to my own dentist in nearby Carlton. Lin remained in their hotel room and I returned to the festival office, awaiting the call to pick him up. Awaiting and awaiting and awaiting. Finally, I gave the dentist a call. An abscess had been discovered in Peter's root canal, I was told, and he'd been referred on to a specialist in Collins Street. Who, it transpired, had forwarded him to a nearby colleague. Poor Peter, it seemed, was being passed around the fang mechanics of Melbourne, all of them keen to have a dig at his gums. As of last report, he'd been drained dry, shot full of drugs and ordered back to his hotel to rest.