Yarn About You 010 Andrew Mercado

Episode Transcript
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Music.

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Was recorded, a Wabagal country, and the elders, past, present and emerging,
for their contribution and wealth of knowledge that they pass on from generation to generation.
Music.
Today's guest is Andrew Mercado. Andrew's an Australian television historian,
documentarian, educator,
writer, author, presenter, producer, commentator, podcaster,

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MC, trivia host and former cinema owner, who I've known for a number of years.
Music.
We're actually introduced by our mutual friend, Adam Presland,
who was the ringmaster at Stardust Circus for over two decades,
but that's a whole other podcast. Stay tuned in the future for that one.
Andrew is one of the most passionate supporters of television and the people who make it happen.

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He's been a fixture in the Australian television industry for over 30 years,
featuring in regular segments on TV shows, radio, podcasts, blogs.
Music.
Newspapers and magazines.
Andrew's also a genuinely lovely person, and I'm very happy to call him my friend.
I hope you enjoy our yarn.
Andrew Mercado, welcome to Yarn About You. Thank you, Clay.

(01:45):
I'm so excited to be here. It's always great to catch up, but I always start
at the beginning. Tell me about your parents. Well, my parents...
It's interesting how they got together. So my mother grew up in Australia and
she grew up in a pub because she grew up in a pub and was around men that drank a lot.
She'd made this pact that she was never going to marry an Australian man who drank.

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And so she probably would have been a spinster for the rest of her life,
except she also, when everyone went overseas to London to, because that's what
everybody did in Australia,
she went to America because she'd been, all the American soldiers had been around
Brisbane during World War II.
So when it came time for the fifties, she had girlfriends that had married American

(02:31):
soldiers and gone to America.
So she went to America and you couldn't get a visa then, a green card, nothing like that.
You could only work at an international embassy.
So she went to Washington. She got a job at the Indian embassy. see.
And then would you believe it when she comes back to Australia,
she meets my father and my father was born in Burma and had grown up in India.

(02:53):
And that's what they had in common when they actually met.
So he was, uh, as she described it, he had manners and he wasn't an Australian Yobbo drinker.
And so India was their connection.
Fantastic. I was born in Brisbane and my mother was quite, was,
had me at 39 years old, which was considered really incredibly late.

(03:15):
In fact, they put her into hospital, I think for the last three months of it
and ordered her to bed. And that was considered a really, really late pregnancy.
So unfortunately I was an only child, although that probably worked out better
for me in the long run because I never, ever got spoiled as such.
And, you know, my parents always made a big deal about my cousins,

(03:35):
you know, to try and make them, sorry, get brothers and sisters I get.
So look, I had a great childhood. I grew up in Camp Hill.
Brisbane, Queensland. And really my life was sort of set because I was an only child.
My mother used to sit me in front of the TV set and then she cursed herself
for many, many years after that and beat herself up about that because I've

(03:58):
got such an obsession for TV.
And even when I made a career out of it, I think she was still in the back.
My mother was very, my father was very easygoing, but my mother was very,
things had to be done a certain way.
And she wanted me to work in the public service for my entire life in one job

(04:18):
so I could retire with a huge superannuation.
That was as far as her ambition for me went.
And because I didn't do that, I guess I sort of disappointed her in a way that
I wasn't that, you know, I moved around a lot.
And then when I got got into TV, the work was very, you'd do a job and then

(04:38):
it would come to an end. I mean, that did her head in.
It never did my head in because I always knew it would work out,
but that was not what she saw for me.
She just wanted me to be in the public service for the rest of my life.
My parents were exactly the same. They were always really proud of me.
They always supported me. They
were always there, but they wanted me to do something that was regular.

(05:00):
And I guess it's there. Everything goes back to the childhood they had,
you know, you know, if you're being born during the depression and growing up
during World War II and all of that, a safe, secure job.
But you see, of course, I came of age then in the 70s.
That's the decade that real, and of course, that was the decade of change in Australia.

(05:20):
And that's when a lot of those things were really changing. Of course,
the 70s too, the other thing was there was massive unemployment and inflation.
So that was the concern that I was going into this world and the way to safeguard
yourself against that world would be to have a safe, secure job in a bank or
the public service somewhere.
That's why when you talk about the instability of the industry,

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I can never understand big EOs in the industry because you're only as good as
the job you're doing now.
You're going to be able to work again tomorrow and don't understand why people
are difficult to work with because it's such an exciting industry.
There's so much that can be done.
But what shows were you originally into? What were the first shows you remember
that got you excited about?

(06:01):
The first show I can remember watching on TV was Beauty and the Beast because
my mother would watch it.
And I do have this very vague memory of it.
I said that to Maggie Tabra the first time I met her.
I was doing this thing with her at Foxtel and I said, oh yeah,
you know, I think you were the first person I ever saw her on TV.
My mother said she used to organize her feeds around being able to watch you on TV.

(06:25):
And she was horrified by that. And I went home and told my mother and I said, why is she so upset?
And she said, well, cause you've just told her how old she is.
You know, that's not the sort of thing you say to an older woman. But yeah, I remember.
That show. So that was, um, that was a panel show eventually done by Stan Zamanek,
but was it Stuart Wagstaff at the time?
It would have been Stuart Wagstaff or Eric Baum.

(06:47):
He was the original host there. Alwyn Kurtz did it for a while there.
So it was on channel seven back in the sixties. Yeah.
And it was what my mother was a very, my mother was not a housewife.
She couldn't wait for me to go to school so she could go back to work.
She was not a housewife, but, and she She refused to listen to talk back radio
and do things that most housewives did, but she did watch Beauty and the Beast

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because my mother was very political.
And if she wanted to have a conversation with someone, she wanted it to be about politics.
And I guess that show Beauty and the Beast where someone would write in a letter
and the beast was this male chauvinist who would sit there and the women would
give their opinions and he would say, oh, you're all mad and all of that. That was the show.
So I remember watching that with her.
The first TV shows that I really was obsessed with was Adventure Island,

(07:35):
which was a kid's show that eventually got axed for Sesame Street,
which was very controversial back in the day.
But I've realized now that Adventure Island was actually a soap.
There was a story they told over five episodes, Monday to Friday,
and they would conclude it on a Friday, but they kind of finished with a cliffhanger every day.

(07:56):
So I think that's where my love for soaps came from because of that serialized
way they told a children's story in that ABC classic kid show.
A continuing story. So what was your first soap that you remember?
I was fascinated by Number 96.
I was 10 years old when it came out. I was fascinated from the first promo.

(08:17):
I remember a promo on TV for it.
And I remember turning to my mother and saying, I want to watch that show and
the look of horror on her face.
And I remember her trying to do this reverse psychology thing on me once.
She came home and said, oh, you know, this woman I work with,
her little boy wanted to watch the show.

(08:37):
And so they put it on for him. And after 10 minutes, he said, this is really boring.
I think I'll go to bed. And I was infuriated that she was even trying to do
reverse psychology on me.
And I spattered her and said, I don't care what that other kid thinks.
I want to watch it. So that was always an issue. But the first soap I think
I was watching was, I was at my friend's place during school holidays.

(09:01):
And the mother drove her car in under the house where she parked, slammed the brakes on.
She came running up the back stairs. She had a bag of groceries.
She dropped the groceries at the door, ran through the living room and the TV was on.
We were watching something and she said, turn the channel. Addie's taken an overdose.

(09:21):
She turned the channel to watch Days of Our Lives. And the kids all rolled their
eyes and went out to the yard to play.
But I thought, what's going on here? I'm going to, I'm going to stay here. in and listen to her.
So then I started, it used to come on in Brisbane at three o'clock to four o'clock.
So I'd get home from school around 3.30 so I could watch the last half hour of it.
So I started watching Days of Our Lives. And then Class of 74 was the first

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Australian soap that I was allowed to watch because it was G-rated and it came on at 6.30 at night.
And so my dad had walked through the door at 20 past six every night and we'd sit down to have dinner.
And I was allowed out to watch that show because then at seven o'clock,
the TV got changed to the ABC for most of the night after that.
So the class of 74 was a big thing for me.

(10:08):
So was that like heartbreak high about a school?
I guess in a way it was Leonard Till was the headmaster and there were all of
these students and it was one of those shows where they had started off trying
to make it really racy at the beginnings because Reg Grundy just basically copied
everything that number 96 did.
The word is that he took one of the episodes home.
He, he, he timed how many scenes there were, the ratio of comedy to drama,

(10:34):
how long it was before you went to a commercial break.
And then he just said to his guys, there's the formula, make me a show like
that. So they made Class of 74.
And, you know, that, that, uh, publicity trick of this is the most sensational,
raunchy thing you've ever seen on TV.
They tried to do that with Class of 74 in the high school. There was a virgin
getting deflowered in a tent on a school trip in the first episode.

(10:57):
You're going, are you guys for real? This is like a 6.30 kid show. You can't do that.
Yes, there were massive censorship issues around it.
And the broadcasting control board actually stepped in and said,
you are not making this show.
So they had to drastically rewrite it and turn it into more of a comedy,
which is what they should have been doing in the first place.
You're going to make a show at 6.30 at night. It should be for kids,

(11:19):
not going after the sex shocks of, you know, number 96 in the box.
Well, I was, I was born in 73, so I missed number 96, but I know the importance of it.
And I know the massive impact that it had at the time. Yeah.
And I didn't realize that it was.
So iconic until the last couple of years when I've had more involvement in the

(11:41):
groups and all of that sort of stuff that's happening and the excitement about number 96.
But I didn't realise it had such an influence on the industry and other shows
as well. Yeah, it had a massive, I'm convinced that, I think it's the most groundbreaking
show in the history of TV anywhere in the world.
I mean, you could go to the really obvious things was it's the first TV show
in the world to have a full range of LGBT characters in it when homosexuality is illegal.

(12:07):
But it's not just that. It's also the fact that they showed Australia a multicultural
view of life and Australia wasn't really a multicultural.
That's how far ahead of the time it was.
You're talking about a show where you had a Jewish Hungarian running the delicatessen
and a South African dress designer and the whinging palm and all of that.

(12:29):
And they really went out of their way to put as many nationalities as they could into that show.
And if you look at everything else on TV in the seventies, it's all very white and heterosexual.
And so number 96 was doing all of these crazy things in terms of,
look at this, there is this other thing that's going on.
So, but also you have to look at it in terms of production.

(12:52):
So they were doing five half hours a night, five episodes, Monday to Friday, 8.30 at night.
Nobody in the world was doing that in prime time, except for Australia.
Peyton Place, the most they ever did at the height of their fame in the sixties
was three half hours a week over three nights.
Coronation Street, which Nominated Six was based on, two half hours a week.

(13:14):
In fact, they were still making two half-hour episodes per week when Neighbours
started going on air there five nights a week and briefly outrated them.
And that's when Coronation Street said, wow, maybe we better make more episodes
per week to deal with this Australian soap.
So, you know, the fact that we showed that you could make five half-hours of TV a week.

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At the time they did a survey, it was the highest rating show in the world per capita.
You're talking about all of these new subjects at a time in Australian society
where people were ready for change.
We'd been under conservative rule for years and years.
And then in the 70s, they elected a Labor government for the first time, I think in 23 years.

(14:02):
So everyone was up to learn new things. So here you've got this show that's
actually really delivering new concepts to people and people watching it five nights a week.
And that show saved the O10 network.
If that show had failed, Channel 10 would have gone bankrupt.
They were literally on their last legs.

(14:23):
And the success of number 96 gave them the profit to buy better shows from overseas
and actually compete Pete against seven and nine in a way that they couldn't do.
So, you know, I think there's so many things that that show did that it truly
is, I think, the most important show.
Maybe you'd say Homicide as well in the 60s, because Homicide was the first

(14:47):
Australian TV show that actually people watched.
So that was incredibly important in showing, yes, Australians would watch a
TV show, but But then number 96 multiplies that by five and go,
no, we'll get people watching a show five nights a week, which was unheard of back then. But.
Was a huge success. But when you talk about topics that they broached,

(15:09):
we spoke earlier about Vera Collins.
Yeah. And topic of husbands raping wives.
Transgender. We had Carlotta on the show. There was the first homosexual relationship
with Joe Hashem. It was iconic.
I understand it. But I'm yet to know anybody who said they were allowed to watch it.

(15:29):
Everybody says that they weren't allowed to watch it. So I don't know how people
saw it. The other amazing thing about that show was the female characters.
Because Number 96 was written by gay men,
David Sale and Johnny White, they were trying to recreate the great Hollywood
heroines, the Joan Crawford movies and the Bette Davis movies where you had a strong woman.

(15:53):
So they built character, they wrote characters like that. So if you look at
number 96, you've got Vera Collin.
Now she has a succession of horrendous love affairs through the show,
but that's not the point.
The point of her character was she didn't actually need a man.
She was a self-motivated, self-employed dress designer.
Maggie Cameron was a businesswoman. And if you actually look at every couple

(16:17):
in the show, the woman ruled the roost. Dorian Herb Evans.
Herb was hempacked because Dorie never stopped talking.
Norma's bar. Norma ran the bar while Les Whitaker ran around in the back,
try and think up of stupid inventions.
You know, in every single relationship, the woman was actually,
even though the man thought he was the man of the house, if you actually study

(16:41):
it in every relationship.
So this is also that, that period where the seventies were showing you,
you could be a different type of woman.
And if you look at the other shows around that, the women are just so underwritten.
If you look at the cop shows, it's all about the men.
The men solve the police. There's no police women.

(17:03):
The men are solving everything. Number 96 actually showed that you could actually
write really interesting stuff for women as well.
Yeah. And the shows where the wives were housewives. They were at home,
they had their aprons on and that was all they were. You were a housewife.
That was it. You didn't, most of them didn't even have jobs.
So you grew up in Brisbane. Yeah. What happened after school?
After school, I got, my mother made me apply for a job.

(17:28):
She found the cutting in the newspaper and said, you need to apply for this.
And so I went in, my school marks were pretty bad because there was this huge,
you know, the last two years of my life were awful because I was basically told
I had, the school said you had to study three hours a night. So that was the rule.
So I would just sit in this room for three hours and stare out the window.

(17:50):
We had a house that overlooked Brisbane.
I could tell you where every building was. I just stared out the window for
two years and I was never a study. I was never going to go to university.
My marks weren't very good. So there was this massive, what are you going to
do for the rest of my life?
And then I go along to the first job interview and get it just like that.
Because what had been going on that I don't think my parents ever gave themselves

(18:14):
enough credit for was the one
really, really smart thing that they did was because I was an only child,
they said, you have to find some
activity to do on the weekend outside of school. They tried the sports.
I wasn't going to be a sports person. I had cricket, football,
tennis, none of that was sticking.
And in desperation, my mother was actually at a polling booth handing out how to vote cards.

(18:38):
And there was only one other person she would speak to on that booth because
everybody else was from the parties that she didn't like.
And she said to him, I don't know what I'm going to do.
He needs to do something in the weekend. And he said, why don't you send him
to the Brisbane Youth Theatre? It's a theatre group. They do plays.
My daughter will take him and introduce him to everybody. And that was the making of me.
Me going to that group is actually what taught me how to project my voice.

(19:04):
I was never going to be much of an actor, but it gave me confidence.
And I actually had a group of friends outside of school and I had girls as friends
and I was going to an all boys school.
So I should have been actually bullied and bashed at school because it was pretty obvious that I was gay.
And I think most people knew that, but that never, ever happened.
I don't have a single story to tell you about anything awful that happened to

(19:26):
me because I threw these amazing parties that had girls.
My parents were always like, you can have a party whenever you want.
There's the garage, out, go for it. Very encouraging.
So I could throw a party, invite all these girls and the kids I went to school
with, even the ones that really didn't want to hang around me much in the schoolyard
would still come to my parties.
So that gave me, I think, a bit of confidence to get through life.

(19:48):
And so that's what helped me at that first job interview I went for. I had that confidence.
I I remember making the interviewer laugh and I remember walking out of there
thinking, I think I'm going to get this job. And I did.
So I was working for the Queensland Tourist and Travel Corporation.
So I was sent to Rockhampton, uh, for training and then Melbourne.
And then I came back to Brisbane. Then my father died, which was awful.

(20:10):
I literally just left home and he died.
So then I was, I was sent back to Brisbane to look after my mother who really
kind of fell to pieces and I stayed there for five years.
And then I continued to Newcastle. Then I went to Melbourne and then I got in
posting overseas to be the manager for Canada.
And I went over and lived in Toronto, Canada for five years,

(20:34):
traveling back and forth across Canada, selling Queensland in the wake of Crocodile
Dundee and Paul Hogan doing his put a shrimp on the barbie.
Everyone in America and Canada wanted to go to Australia, but it was a big concept.
They didn't quite know how to do it. So, you know, Queensland,
along with a lot of the other states started opening up offices in North America

(20:54):
to take advantage of Australia suddenly becoming the most desirable holiday
holiday destination for North America.
So I was over there for five years.
And so when was that? Well, that was from 1988 to 1993.
And I loved it there and I loved Canada and I loved Canadians and I could have
stayed there a mind for the rest of my life.

(21:15):
They closed the Queensland office down and brought me back to Australia.
And I was still like, Oh, I think I'd like to be in Canada.
But But when I came back to Brisbane, I thought, well, hang on,
maybe I should listen to the universe. If I'm being brought back to Australia,
there's probably a reason for it.
And I thought, well, I think I will stay in Australia, but I thought I'm not
going to work in travel anymore.

(21:36):
I'd done that. And I'd gone as far as I could. And they wanted me to work at
head office. And I was like, I don't want to work at head office.
So that's when I quit and said, I'm going to work in TV.
I had wanted to work in TV from a little kid, but I couldn't put into words what I wanted to do.
Because I couldn't say I wanted to be a cameraman or an audio guy or whatever,

(21:59):
then it was pushed to the side.
When I quit my tourism job though, I was able to say, I'll be a location manager
because I knew Queensland.
I particularly knew Southeast Queensland from that thing. So I basically,
my first job was location manager on Paradise Beach,

(22:19):
which was my dream job and on a soap on a soap i was finally working on a soap
and then i was there for about six
months and the show got the axe but the producer said to me hang around.
We're going to get another one up and I'll get you to do publicity on that.
It was funny because I had, I had literally gone around every department at Paradise Beach.

(22:47):
I'd been to the editor's suites. I'd been everywhere trying to figure out what I wanted to do next.
Cause I knew I couldn't be a location manager for the rest of my life because
he had to be the first person on set in the morning.
Sometimes that was a 3.30 AM
start. And I was like, well, I'm not doing this for, I've got to find it.
And then I went to the publicity department and there were the two girls in
there and one of them had her feet up on the desk reading TV week and there

(23:09):
was a TV going and I was like, I think I'll be a publicist.
So yeah, so then I, I did hang around, just did odd jobs and stuff.
And then I got a job as publicist on Pacific Drive, which was the next Village
Road show, show they did.
And then I started doing publicity for all the shows they were doing at Movie
World, like The New Adventures of Flipper with Jessica Alba, et cetera, et cetera.

(23:31):
And then all of those shows that I was working on were all, none of them were becoming hits.
And I was looking at that going, what's wrong with this picture? I can't stay up here.
And particularly as a publicist, it's so draining, you know,
to say, this is a great show and look, and I've got these great pictures and
all of this, and then it would flop.

(23:51):
By that stage, Foxtel had started up. And so that's when I went,
hang on, if this is a brand new industry, I've got to get down to Sydney and
get in on the ground floor of this.
And who knows where I could go to from there. So I moved to Sydney and then
spent six months again out of work, just like I had waiting to go from tourism
to travel, waiting to get a job where I could get my foot in the door.

(24:14):
So why don't you think when you look at Paradise Beach and Pacific Drive,
what didn't work? because it had great production value. It had great people in it. Yeah.
What was it? What makes a show? Well, for a start.
Well, there's two answers to that. The first is that they were making,

(24:37):
the network that was asking for the show ultimately didn't want that type of show.
So Channel 9 asked for Paradise Beach, screened it at 5.30 PM and as a lead
into the news. The first episodes were terrible.
So then they were playing catch up after that.
It was actually going up in the ratings and that show was working and that show
should still be on air today. day, we were able to film on the Gold Coast anywhere we wanted, no charge.

(25:02):
I had a key to every lock on the Gold Coast, city council lock.
So I could open up a gate and we could go into a headland and park all the trucks
and all that. Like I could shut down Cavill Avenue.
They would shut down the center of Surface Paradise for us.
And as the show, we were doing those last episodes, people were starting to

(25:23):
arrive. It had been pre-sold all around the world and it was going off in the Nordic countries.
It was going off in Norway and Sweden and all that. And they were starting to
come to the Gold Coast going, we've come to look for Paradise Beach.
Nine axed the show because it was delivering them the wrong audience for the
news because there were too many kids watching Paradise Beach.

(25:45):
And it's like, well, why the fuck did you commission the show?
Who did you think was going to watch the show? show.
Then they asked for Pacific Drive to screen in a late night time slot.
So we made a show for a late night time slot. Then they started repeating it
during the day where it got better ratings during the day.
And they said, oh, now we want a daytime soap and all that sexy stuff that's

(26:05):
in it. You're going to have to get rid of all of that.
So I'd been watching all of that going, well, what's wrong with this picture
is the networks aren't, you know, the fact is that if Paradise Speed had been
on channel 10, for example, they would have loved it. It'd still be on air to this day.
The other thing that was going on was some years later, I met a guy who told

(26:25):
me that he, he was providing, he was one of the investors in Village Roadshow TV.
And I said, hold this, I've been wanting to talk to you for ages.
And he had a room in his house. He had an office and he had this whiteboard.
And I said, tell me how the money worked. How did you make the shows with this money?
So he got up and he was doing all of these, you know, diagrams and all of this.

(26:48):
And he was doing that and he went on and on and on and on and on.
And then he finally said, so did you get any of that?
And I said, no, you lost me about 15 minutes ago. But I said,
I think the basics of what you're saying to me is that.
You're moving a bunch of money around and pre-selling a show.
And at the end of the day, it doesn't matter whether the show's good or bad,

(27:09):
you're still going to make money. And he said, yes, all pleased with himself.
And I said, and don't you understand that's why none of those shows were any good.
If you're making shows where nobody cares whether or not the show is going to be good or bad.
And he said, oh, well, but if the show's rubbish, we'll just make another one.
And I was like, no, why would you do that? If you make one show and set it up

(27:30):
and spend all the money on the sets and establish it, don't you realize that
when that show goes into the second and third year, you don't have those startup costs.
You could run that show for 20 years if you get it right at the beginning.
He said, no, no, no, we just make another show.
I walked out of there. I remember thinking, wow, that's why none of those shows
work because, and that's basically what I think is wrong with TV today.

(27:52):
Day. It's about a whole bunch of money guys who want to make money and nobody
gives a shit about whether the product's good or bad.
Whereas once upon a time, believe it or not, people actually did care.
Kerry Packer was famous for it. Kerry Packer would be sitting at home.
He'd ring up and go, what's this crappy movie? Change it over. I want to watch it. Okay.

(28:15):
He was a scary person to work for, but he loved TV and he had his finger in
everything and he wanted Channel 9 to make the best shows possible.
And I think those sorts of people don't work in free-to-air TV anymore and it's
probably why their industry's dying.
It's funny because I look at my boys, one's 19 and one's 23,

(28:37):
they don't watch television at all. No. Everything they do is on streaming. That's right.
They watch YouTube. They've got a completely different audience.
I think about, I'm looking at our beautiful Abigail behind you in a picture
on the wall and I think about,
You know, the seventies when, when number 96 was massive,
there was such a small pool for people to see that if there was a show on television,

(29:00):
it was likely that more people saw it back then where now it's so hard to get
an audience to see a show. And if they do, they see it quickly and move on to the next one.
Or even to get a national conversation about something because nobody watches
the same thing together anymore.
That's why if there's an Olympics or a Matildas, everyone's talking about it
the next day. Hey, back in the day, they were having that conversation about number 96.

(29:23):
Because that was the thing you just said before that none of the kids were allowed
to watch it. But you know what?
There was always some kid at school who was, and he could tell you what was going on in that show.
And I remember when the infamous black mass sequence of number 96,
where Abigail's character was going to be sacrificed to the devil during a black mass.

(29:45):
And I was in the car with my mother. I can even remember where we were driving
and I said to her, you know, this kid at school said they were going to sacrifice
Abigail because she's a virgin. What's a virgin?
And my mother turned and said, that's exactly why I don't want you watching that show.
They were fighting a losing battle because we were all going to find out about that stuff eventually.

(30:07):
Yeah. But when you talk about the attitude of, of that guy you were talking
to about making it, whether it's good or bad, that's, that's kind of the attitude
now that young people have watching shows is that, um, oh, that's terrible.
Watch the next one. Watch the next one. Watch the next one. Whereas back then
you only had four channels.
No, it's amazing. So you're in Sydney. Yeah. You're out of work for six months. Yeah. What's next?

(30:30):
I went, I started, I found out that there was a job going in the Sydney Star
Observer, the gay free newspaper that was, went out every week that the TV guy
who wrote about TV was leaving.
So I was straight down there. I could write this column for you.
So I started writing the TV column there and I was being invited to functions.

(30:52):
And one of these functions I went to.
Somebody said, oh, the publicist for Channel V just resigned today.
And I was like, what, what? Is there anyone from Channel V here? Oh yeah, go speak to her.
There you go. It's all about being in the right place at the right time.
So I became the publicist for Channel V and I was still writing that TV column.
And so we were doing this late night show.

(31:15):
You couldn't get anybody to come down to Piermont at 1030 at night.
So one time they said, oh, do you want to come on and talk about what's on TV, like your TV column?
And I said, sure. So I went on air and then I started doing that on a regular basis.
And then one day my boss came to me and said, right, we're going to get another

(31:37):
publicist and you're going to go on air full time.
They made me the entertainment reporter.
And what I think was actually going on there was that I actually should never have been on Channel V.
I was like way too old to be on a youth music channel.
I celebrated my 40th birthday while I was on channel V like that's,
you know, channel V should have been hosted by 20 somethings VJs.

(32:00):
And it was, but I think that when I started there,
you would have the on-air talent and there would be a team of producers around them,
writing everything for them and putting it up on the autocue and all of that
and creating the person, the talent just had to turn up and read off an autocue
and do all of that, but that wasn't how it was going into the future.

(32:23):
And I think I was being used as an example of, because I was an independent guy.
So the first thing I ever did as part of my new role was I went down to the Logies.
I did the red carpet. I knew a lot of the actors because I'd been the publicist
for Pacific Drive and half of them were in the cast of All Saints Now.

(32:44):
So I stood on this red carpet. They were all coming to me. I...
Stayed up all night, partied all night, got on a plane, went back,
went into an edit suite and put this five minute package to air of me on the
red carpet that afternoon.
And I think that was sending a message to everybody. You all need to be able to do that.

(33:05):
The days of you reliving on it, you know, as Channel V goes forward,
you're going to need to be independent and be able to do your own stuff as well.
So I always worked by myself, but as the years went on, I saw that as the on-air
talent was switched around.
They got people who then wrote their own scripts and produced their own segments
because that was where we were going as a channel.

(33:26):
So I think part of me doing that was that I was a person that they thought that
I could do that and then I could kind of lead the way for some of the others.
Well, you had access to some incredible people during that time. Yeah, I really did.
Let's talk about a few. I know that there's clips of you on your YouTube channel
with Paul Paul Walker? Yeah.
That must've been an incredible thing. You were in the car. Paul Walker took

(33:48):
me fast race car driving twice.
He came out for the first Fast and the Furious, and then he came back for two Fast, two Furious.
And once again, I got into a hotted up car with him, did the interview with him from the front seat.
And then he said, do you want to go for a ride? And I went, yeah.
And he just revved that engine and we took off at like, God knows what speed.

(34:11):
And Paul Walker was the loveliest, loveliest man. So, yeah, I started,
uh, doing every, every person that came to town to promote a movie. I would interview them.
And then I was shifted across to also be on Music Max, which was being aimed at an older crowd.
And so Music Max was playing the older artists. So then I'm interviewing Olivia

(34:35):
Newton-John and Fleetwood Mac and the Village People and pulling out the LPs
from my own record collection and taking it with me to the interview and saying,
oh, can you sign my LP too?
I never wanted to take selfies with the stars, but I wanted something to go.
So, and for me, it was like, you can sign a magazine cover or if they're an
artist, I had one of their records.

(34:56):
So I'd say, can you autograph my LP?
You know, so yeah, I interviewed all of these incredible idols of mine and that
went on for years and years. Oh, Fleetwood Mac, the Village People.
I know, I'm looking around. Robbie Williams. Yeah. Katie Lane.
Yeah, it was crazy. It was crazy, the people that I met. Duran Duran.

(35:20):
Like it was amazing. And I see a picture of you with Joan Rivers in there.
Yeah. Joan Rivers was amazing because I had been over to America and done the Emmys red carpet.
And it was a horrendous experience because it was five days before the Olympics started in Australia.
So I was standing there in this press pack that wasn't friendly like a press pack in Australia.

(35:44):
And every time I got to ask a question, I could, if I managed to get a question
in, I would say to them, the Olympics are starting in Australia in five days
time. What sport are you into?
And this person said, can I give you a tip? And I said, sure.
And she said, can you ask them what they're wearing first? And I went,
yeah, okay. So I'd say, oh, what are you wearing?
And they'd say, oh, and then I'd go, so I'm from Australia and the Olympics

(36:06):
are starting in Sydney on Friday. What sport are you into? Okay.
Complete silence.
Asking them something outside that zone of the Emmys, they couldn't answer the question.
Ellen DeGeneres, a comedian, she just went and walked away.
Edie Falco from the Sopranos snapped at me and said, I don't even know what I'm doing next week.
I'm like, why is this such a hard question?

(36:30):
It's the Olympics. It's every sport in the world. So that was a horrendous experience.
And then when it was over, we went down onto the red carpet after everyone had
gone in and Joan Rivers was there doing it for E.
And I went up to her and said, can I do an interview with you?
And she said, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
And so I interviewed her quickly there. And then when she came to Australia
two years later, she said to me, I know you.

(36:53):
And I said, we've met once. And she said, where?
And I went, well, it was at the Emmys Red Cup. That's right.
She said, that's right. That's right.
Now she could have been pulling my leg, but wow, that's pretty amazing if she did remember that.
And what was crazy about it was that I had written a fan letter to Joan Rivers in 1984,

(37:14):
when she was on the Mike Walsh show and she
had replied to me with letterhead and I had this framed letter and I took it
that day to interview her and looked at the date and it was the exact same date
and I was like look at this you wrote me this letter whatever it was 23 years
ago or something. Yeah, it was quite incredible. Fantastic.

(37:35):
It's just an incredible time when you get to meet your idols.
Did I hear you say once that you met Cyndi Lauper?
I did. Yes. I interviewed Cyndi Lauper once. Like all those seventies artists
that I had grown up loving and watching on Countdown, I pretty much met them all.

(37:56):
Countdown was pretty iconic. The only one, the only one I didn't meet at the
time that I really wanted to, but then I didn't really want to do it was I got
to interview Kylie Minogue a couple of times and she's always been my favorite.
And I'm sure she thought I was a freak because I pulled out that picture that's
framed on my wall there now, Clay.
And as you can see, it's a picture montage of hundreds and hundreds of images

(38:22):
from her cut out from magazines over the year and put together in the display.
And when I pulled this picture up in the middle of an interview and said,
you've had a few looks over the years, haven't you?
And she said, oh my God, who did that? And I said, I did.
And I saw that look come across her eyes like, he's a freak.
But you know what? At least she remembers me right.

(38:44):
Yeah. The only person I never, I interviewed Deborah Harry from Blondie.
I mean, it's insane who I got to meet.
The only person I never got to interview was Madonna. And look,
probably, even though I said I really liked her back then, I want to interview her.
I'm glad I didn't because I think she's a tough interviewer. Yeah.
And I think she was probably one person I probably shouldn't have interviewed.
So yeah, but just about every other favorite person.

(39:08):
But you know, Having said that, I still get more of a thrill meeting those Australian
stars that I was watching on TV.
So, you know, I've been obsessed with number 96 in the box and those 70 soaps all my life.
And, you know, when I went to this, uh, taping of where are they now with the

(39:30):
actors from number 96 and they had flown out Joe Hashem and Chad Haywood.
And we went to this bar afterwards to have a few drinks and they decided they would go on to dinner.
And I said to Elaine Lee and Sheila Kennelly, who I knew fairly well by this
stage, I said to them, oh, look, I think I'd better go now. You guys just want to go off and do your.

(39:51):
And Sheila said, no, you're part of our family now.
Now that is the most mind blowing thing to me, to think that the TV show that
I was most obsessed with as a child, old.
As an adult, I know those actors now and that they would say to me,
you're part of our family.
Like that is probably the most exciting thing that anyone has ever said to me

(40:16):
in terms of what work I've done.
Well, it's incredible that you've, um, you had no idea where you wanted to be
in the industry, but you just knew you wanted to be in here.
I just wanted to work in TV. It was as simple as that.
So what shows did you work on when you're in Sydney? I know when Max came up Up, Channel V.
When Foxtel first came out, I've been joined Foxtel the day it came out.

(40:36):
So I followed all of the shows and I remember how big the channels were at the
time. They were massive.
Now there's just so many out there. They don't seem to have the pull that they used to have.
See, when Foxtel first started and we were the last Western country in the world to get cable TV.
And it did take a while for it to take off here in Australia.
Australia, but Channel V was the first 24 hour music channel.

(41:01):
MTV had been going 12 years in America by this stage.
And here we were in Australia, finally getting our version of it.
And I always used to say to the people I worked with, there are kids who will
be watching us 24 hours a day, and they're going to remember everything you say about music.
So don't get get it wrong, because I remembered this day that one of them had

(41:26):
said, System of a Down is going to be the greatest rock and roll,
the greatest heavy metal band in the world.
And I pulled that person to the side and said, did you know that?
In 1981, Molly Meldrum said that the Human League were going to be bigger than the Beatles.
I said, because he said that on Countdown. And I remember listening to that and going, really?

(41:51):
Bigger than the Beatles? And I said, he turned out to be wrong.
He got overexcited in the moment. And I've never forgotten it.
And I'm telling you right now, there are kids out there hanging on every single word we say.
So don't make broad predictions like that. because you'll end up with egg on your face in the future.
And yeah, so there weren't a lot of people watching it, but if you're a kid,

(42:13):
there were other kids probably coming over and watching that.
And we certainly did have this thing. I used to do this thing where I used to
put my email address super at channelv.com.au.
I used to put it on the screen on every segment I did.
So I had hundreds of kids writing to me and I would reply to every single one of them.
And some of them would write again and again, oh, I just went and saw this great
movie, blah, blah, blah.

(42:33):
You were right. It's really good and all that. But yeah, I thought that was really important.
The other thing about that was that I was on air as an openly gay person.
Now I had been writing a gay TV column to this stage and there was nobody on
TV who was saying from day one, hey, I'm gay.
And I had from day one, the first segment I'd ever done was the fact that we

(42:58):
weren't playing the coming out episode of Ellen and I had started this boycott
against channel seven to embarrass them into screening it.
And so I was on that channel, a channel that was beaming into kids' homes.
And I was this person that they knew that I was gay.
And then with that, I started bringing in drag Queens to do stuff.

(43:21):
And so there was all this gay content that we were putting kids And so,
yeah, we were kind of giving them in a way a diversity.
And I was trying to be that person that I had grown up watching Number 96.
Joe Hashem playing Don Finlayson on Number 96, who was such a nice guy and,
you know, was something really inspirational.

(43:43):
I was very, very aware when I was on that channel that I had to be somebody
that people could look up to because I had had the...
Fortunate privilege of having that myself. And I think you can't be what you don't see.
And so I've always believed that TV should be a diverse place that we should

(44:04):
have all sexualities, all multicultural.
And now we've got people with disability on the screen like Dylan Alcott.
I think that's a great thing.
I think everyone, every kid should be able to see someone on TV and go,
wow, maybe I could grow up and do that one day.
That's what it's about. So yeah, I was really, that is probably the thing that I'm the proudest of,

(44:25):
that I was at a channel that was ahead of its time a little bit and was prepared
to show kids that we weren't just going to be an all white, all straight group.
The one thing I will say that we didn't do though, was when I look back on it
now, sometimes I look back at it and cringe, we were very sexist and even the girls were sexist.

(44:47):
You know we would make jokes about christina aguilera you
know she did that film clip where she was really slutty in it and now
you would if you were having a conversation about that you'd go oh now
hang on that's her artistic freedom to do that let's
not slut shame her back then we didn't
have that nuance we would do it all just make jokes about
oh christina aguilera oh isn't she trash all

(45:09):
of that and none of us kind of pulled back and went hang
on a second we're kind of of joining in on a pile on here
lots of pylons back then we would pile
on to victoria beckham posh spice because she
was the one that married david beckham and she was in the tabloids and everybody
made fun of her oh but her designs are horrible oh her
solo single it's awful we never ever decided to step back and go let's be the

(45:33):
people that don't criticize her we just kind of joined in because i think we
thought it was funny and we were trying to be funny and that's the one One area
that I look back at it and go, wow, through a 2024 lens.
We probably could have been a bit more sensitive in that area.
Well, it's funny you talk about Beckham. My mum and dad were watching a documentary
about Beckham yesterday.

(45:53):
Yeah, right. And I spoke to mum last night and she said, you know what?
I had Beckham and Posh completely wrong. Yeah.
And yeah, it's interesting that you spoke about that because last night mum brought it up. Yeah.
I think sometimes you need some history and some years to go past to look back
at it and And go, yeah, we did all treat that person really,
really badly. Oh, terrible.

(46:14):
You don't realize it at the time. I think we're more aware of it now because
now pylons like that are so, it's so obvious it's going on on social media and
you see, and it's much nastier on social media.
So I think the fact that it's so nasty makes some people straight away go,
whoa, do we really, is the situation really that bad that we have to say things like that?

(46:35):
So I think, I think we're better at it now, but back then, yeah,
I think there was some really unfortunate pylons going on. There really were.
And it's really hard for...
People of my children's generation to understand that life was like that.
We've got so much happening.
First of all, they can't understand that television ended, like at midnight

(46:58):
television went off or 10 o'clock or whatever it was. There was,
and they said, well, what was on?
Well, nothing. There was this picture that was there and that was it.
And also the diversity, you know, my sons go to school with transgender people.
They've, they've got that in their life. I, I didn't really have that.
I did, you know, I've got a lot of friends who are gay, a lot of friends who

(47:18):
are transgender, but society back then didn't have it.
It was kind of shied away from. Yeah. So.
And in terms of, if we just look at that transgender issue alone,
if you look at Carlotta being the first transgender actress in the world to
play a transgender character on number 96 in 1973.

(47:39):
And if you talk to Carlotta, she's written her book, look, they've made a movie about her life.
She's a little boy growing up in Balmain that knows there's something different,
but doesn't understand what it is.
It isn't until she gets a job at David Jones when she's still living life as a man.
And someone at David Jones says to her, oh, you'd look really good in a dress and puts her in drag.

(48:02):
And from that moment, she goes, oh, this is what I want to do all the time.
So that's the beginning of that. Then I've got a trans friend who tells me the
story of how she was a little boy growing up in Western Sydney.
What's wrong with me? Why do I feel so different?
Watching the Don Lane show and Carlotta comes on TV and she looks at and goes, her, I want to be her.

(48:22):
What we're at now, there's all this trans panic, which I think is based on people
thinking that somehow, you know, we're out there recruiting and turning kids
trans, which is so ridiculous.
The only thing that's different now is that because we're more open about it
now, parents and kids are able to recognize it from a much earlier age.

(48:44):
They're not like my friends who were sitting there for the first 10 years of
their life going, I don't understand what's wrong with me.
And so I don't think there's more trans people today than there ever were.
I think those trans people have always been there. They just led very secret
lives and some of them never did anything about it.
But now we live in a world where a child, if their first word is,

(49:04):
if you've got a little girl baby and the first words out of its mouth when it's
learning to speak is, I am boy.
I think now you've got parents who go, oh, wow. Okay.
Once upon a time, that would have been completely, the parent probably would
have smacked the kid and said, no, you're not. You're a girl. You're a girl.
Forced it on them. Whereas now you've got.
People who are much more open and aware who go, oh, and that's going on for

(49:27):
years and years and years as a little child growing up, the parent eventually
goes, we need to go talk to some doctors about this. This is not a phase.
This is something that they've been talking about from the moment they could speak.
So I think we're a lot more aware of it, but the panic around that,
and it really disgusts me because, you know, I thought we were getting to a

(49:47):
moment in history where, Thank God we're at this moment now where it's not a
secret and kids like that.
And now you've got this whole ridiculous movement held up by JK Rowling who
are just out there being so hideous and cruel to kids.
And at the end of the day, I always bring it back to kids.
All of this anti-trans stuff you're doing is going to affect some little kid.

(50:09):
I just said that every kid should be able to see themselves on TV.
I believe that every child should be able to do what they want to do when they're
a child. I thought we lived in a world now where we're really encouraging to
children and that we wouldn't sort of do that.
But yeah, that's, uh, that's the world we live in today.
I was lucky enough a couple of years ago to assistant direct an amazing man,

(50:30):
Daryl Kirkness at Gosford Musical Society for Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Wow. Yeah.
And it ended up being an incredible production.
I wish he'd come down for that, but the dates didn't work out right when we tried to organize it.
But it was the most incredible time with the most diverse group of people and
it was celebrated and the audience loved every minute of it. It was so inclusive.

(50:54):
It was so just a celebration of life. Everybody just loved it.
Australia's always had a really great history with this. Carlotta and lay girls,
that was considered the height of sophistication in the 60s for suburban housewives and.
Husbands to come into sydney for the night go to king's cross and look
at female impersonators go to lay girls um if you
came to sydney on a holiday you went to see lay girls everyone in

(51:16):
australia saw carlotta back in the heyday you
go somewhere with carlotta you're at a bar there's just this constant procession of
people coming up to her all night going i saw you in 1971 with
my husband you know we led the way dame edna
everidge priscilla queen of the desert all of these these
things we've actually been really accepting as a
country and uh been on the front foot with

(51:36):
this for a long time i was lucky enough to come
up here to newcastle actually a couple of years ago and
saw dame edna yeah when she was on here and i got to meet barry afterwards yeah
i'm so proud that i did i got to interview barry humphries too for the uh when
we were bringing up umbrella brought out barry mckenzie holds his own on no

(51:57):
les patterson saves the world which was his big flop movie.
So that was a very, like, how do you have a conversation about someone who talked
about one of the biggest disasters of their life? But of course,
Barry responds with humor.
And I guess, you know, to me, it's like, if you look at the history of Barry
Humphreys, you know, destroying sacred cows and all that, Barry Humphreys never,

(52:17):
ever apologized for anything his entire life.
I do wish though, that he had stepped back from those anti-trans comments that he made.
It's look, he's a man. He was an old man when he said it and he's from another era.
And I kind of understand why he said it, but he had such a huge intelligence.

(52:38):
It still kind of disappoints me to this day that he couldn't see that as a man
who had spent how many years in a frock playing Dame Edna,
that he could then turn around and say something as cruel as what he said and,
and not see how that would upset people so much.
Do you think, do you think he meant it as a cruel thing?
I think, no, well, this is the, yes, that's very interesting because I think

(53:01):
that Barry Humphreys liked to say shocking things.
He'd spent his entire career doing this and he never, ever apologized for anything he said.
And so maybe he really believed that, or maybe he was just saying it because
Germaine Greer was a friend of his and he wanted to back her up.
Or maybe he was doing it because he thought it was funny and that was a way

(53:23):
that he could prod the bear because he was a provocateur.
This is the thing about him. I just think it's really sad that he couldn't see
as someone who said that.
It really upset Carlotta. Yeah. You know, she took that as a personal insult
and she was a friend of his,
you know, it's like, wow, dude, how could you say something like that when your

(53:44):
entire career, your entire worldwide fame hinges on the fact that you've been
dressing up as Damien Raybridge all these years. Disappointing. Yeah, absolutely.
So your book, Super Aussie Soaps. How did that come about? It was amazing.
So when I got to work at Channel V, I used to walk up and down the corridors
at Foxtel, you know, ingratiating myself with every single channel there.

(54:08):
And eventually I would say to them, why aren't you screening more Australian
shows? Like, what about some Aussie classics?
Finally, TV One took the bait and said, all right, we'll do the best of number 96.
You pick, you know, 24 episodes, we'll do it over a three-week period. So I then hosted that.
So Tony Moore from Pluto Press was watching that and he got in contact with

(54:29):
me and said, do you know about any other soaps? And I was like, yeah.
He's like, do you want to write a book? So that's how it happened.
They asked me to write the book.
And so I wrote that book and it came out in 2004 and yeah, that kind of,
and then that led to me doing a whole bunch of DVDs through Umbrella,

(54:49):
bringing the shows out on DVD.
And that work continues to this day. I still work for Umbrella Entertainment.
And now, along with the beautiful...
4k high definition box collectors additions that we're bringing out.
They're also getting into streaming through Brolly.
And so now I'm talking to them about, you should get this show,

(55:10):
you should screen this show on Brolly and all of that.
So yeah, I've kind of, I started calling when I left, Channel V and MusicMax
when the book came out, I decided then that I was, I was working at MusicMax
and I was, I was going more and more into music.
And I, I never felt authentic doing music a hundred percent of the time.

(55:32):
My specialty was TV and movies.
So I walked away from Max and decided that because I couldn't see anybody extolling
the virtues of Australian TV.
You had Molly Meldrum and Glenn A. Baker, who are our Aussie music specialists.
And we had Bill Clinton and David, Bill Clinton, Bill Collins and David Stratton as our movie experts.

(55:55):
Where was the person talking about TV?
I decided to be that person. So I just invented this term TV historian and I've
basically been working at that ever since.
I actually spoke to somebody today about you and they said, what does he do?
And I said, he's a TV historian. Yeah. And see, I was doing that because I really
believed that I always had this thing that TV was considered the lesser,

(56:19):
you know, that film was, you know, oh, you know, but film is so much better
and that's like, you know.
You look at an Australian film, particularly an arthouse film,
that might be fantastic and it might win a whole bunch of actor awards,
but this many people see it.
Whereas back then when TV was this great force, you know, TV had a much bigger impact.

(56:41):
And I was always saying we need to give more respect to Australian shows and remember them.
And particularly because we live in a country where we don't really,
we're not very nostalgic.
We don't repeat our old TV shows. We kind of move on.
And so I was always like, no, no, no. We need to remember these great things
that we did, where we were sometimes the first in the world to do it.

(57:04):
Let's never forget that.
And the amazing people who helped make it happen. Yeah. We really do have some
legends out there. Yeah. I was lucky enough to work with people like Willie Fennell.
Oh, yeah. In the time. It's just incredible that the stories that these people have.
And that's kind of where my podcast
came in to be. Yeah. Because I know everybody's got a story to tell.
Yeah. And I'm looking forward to catching up with some of my friends from the

(57:27):
past and to get it out there. Tell me about your podcast.
Well, I do a podcast called TV Gold, where James Manning, who was the editor
of Media Week, he and I talk about new shows on TV this week.
We have a particular predilection for British drama.
We love our British dramas, American dramas, all of that.

(57:48):
I've also got a YouTube channel where I'm trying to interview some of these older actors.
Like I did Gaynor Martin, who was in Skyways and Cheryl Rickson from The Box
and did a, like you're doing now, a one hour chat about their career.
And it's just like, why has nobody ever done it with these people before?
You know, these people were huge stars back in the day.

(58:11):
So I do really want to keep doing that like you're doing, go around and get these stories put down.
There was a while there, I was doing a lot of audio commentaries for the National
Film and Sound Archive and I would do that.
And now with YouTube and after COVID, when everyone started doing TV via Zoom,
it's like, oh man, we can just do that on YouTube.

(58:32):
Someone can just sit at home and open up their computer and do that.
So yeah, I really think it's really important to keep a lot of our history.
I don't know who's going to care about it in the future, but hopefully somebody will.
But yeah, you know, times are getting on and we've got to get these stories
before they all fall off the perch.
Oh, absolutely. And there's so many that are. When I look back over the shows

(58:55):
that I did that were in the 80s and 90s, there's so many people on those shows
who are no longer with us. And I wish that I'd spoken to them more or written down more.
Yeah, there's a lot of stories out there to tell, but how much television do you watch a week?
I watch a lot. I mean, there's TV I watch for work where I try and watch at
least two episodes of everything before I say what I think about it.

(59:19):
And then there's TV that I put on in the background and I do other things and
I'm only half watching it.
And then there's stuff. I mean, I just, you know, watch as much TV as I can.
But yeah, there's so many channels now and so many shows.
And I do get to this point where I feel like everything I've seen, I've seen before.

(59:39):
Feels like they're, everyone's just remade, you know, someone goes,
oh, this is great. And I think, oh, I think I've seen, I've seen it all before.
You know, I'm getting really tired of some of the genres and I am becoming quite
jaded and cynical. technical and part of me thinks, oh, it would just be easier
just to sit here and pull out a DVD of some old TV show and watch that.

(01:00:00):
You know, if something happened tomorrow and the internet broke down and I'd
be fine, I've got a thousand DVDs over there.
I'd be quite happy if they never made another new TV show tomorrow.
That's great. I'd rewatch Knot's Landing. I'd, you know, I'd spend that time
watching some of the great shows.
And I do think you do watch, I do watch so much watch TV.

(01:00:21):
Not a lot of it stays in your memory.
Recently, I had some friends staying with me while their house was being renovated.
And so I said, let's, so I made a real effort every night to find something
that we could all watch together.
And we were going through some stuff and it was like, oh, let's,
they'd never watched this show.

(01:00:42):
And so I said, oh, let's, I'd love to watch it again. This is a great show. Let's watch it again.
So we watched it all through and I was, I'd probably watched it maybe three
or four years beforehand, maybe
five years if you go back to the first series, if one came out a year.
And I was really shocked at how I –.

(01:01:04):
Couldn't remember major plot
points, but I could remember something really innocuous and not important.
Like, oh, they're talking under that bridge. Oh, I remember this scene.
I remember this. Why do I remember that?
But I don't remember that major character falling out the window to her death.
The second time I saw it, I was like, oh, oh, I was like, well,

(01:01:24):
how do I, how do I not remember that? That's how she died. So it's really funny
how your brain operates.
And I do think that But if you love a show, you do need to watch it all through
a second time for it to really stick in like you would with a movie.
You see a movie you love, you watch it again.
And there are some movies, you know, some people watch, you know.
You at Christmas day, I'm sure you sit there and watch It's a Wonderful Life and all of that.

(01:01:47):
And everyone has those films they go to. And I think it's the same.
I think you need to see them a couple of times for it to really register with you.
And because I'm watching so much TV all the time, It kind of goes in one and out the other.
Well, thank you for doing that, by the way, first of all, because I never miss
an episode of TV Gold and we have found so many great shows from what you're

(01:02:09):
saying that we never would have seen had we not listened to TV Gold.
Well, nobody really curates today.
This is the thing. You've got all of these streamers and you go on there and
you can search, search, search, search, search forever and ever and not find
anything you want to watch.
Yeah. And you've got all these different ones. And like, it just about did my
head in during the Olympics, because if the Olympics are on,

(01:02:30):
I'm looking for certain events.
I'm looking for gymnastics and synchronized swimming and all of the camp sports that I want to see.
And I couldn't find them. And so, you know, I'm sitting here on free-to-air
TV going, what's on channel nine?
Oh no, that's golf. I don't want to watch golf.
Now I have to punch in nine gem. What's happening on nine gem?

(01:02:53):
Couldn't just change the channel. Cause they're like on the Foxtel grid,
they're miles away from each other.
And then it's like, well, what's happening on Stan?
So then you'd go to Stan and they'd have all this light, but you couldn't like
once upon Upon the time you could just sit there with a TV thing and just go
up, down, up and down, however many channels there were.
Or you could open up TV week and you'd have a two page spread with everything that was on.

(01:03:16):
And you'd circled in advance from if you wanted to watch and you'd plan the night out.
Yeah. You can't do that now because it's all these different operators and all
these different apps that you've got to go in and out of, which I guess is why
Foxtel are trying to sell this Hubble product, which I haven't used yet.
But my understanding is that it makes that a lot different, that you don't have
to exit one app to go to another show.

(01:03:38):
You can kind of do it within the app because that is kind of what's needed now.
But I'm kind of finding now is when I get frustrated because I can't find anything
to watch for my personal time,
I'll go onto YouTube and start poking around rabbit holes there because there's
so much stuff that people are uploading on YouTube.

(01:04:00):
And sometimes you'd think, oh, you go, oh, you remember this great thing and
you look for it and it's not there. And two years later, you look for it and it is there.
And I go, wow, someone uploaded that. Thank you.
YouTube's incredible. And it's so easy for people to make content now.
Yeah. But also it's sad because it's harder to see it. Yeah.
Because there's so much out there. There's so much out there.
And it is a shame that we don't have, I always thought this thing, this really.

(01:04:25):
This chord got cut when Countdown finished because Countdown wasn't just a show
about Australian music.
Countdown was a show where we were all on the same page, including our parents,
because Countdown started at six o'clock and it finished at seven o'clock.
And the last thing they did on that show, like Top of the Pops,

(01:04:48):
was they counted down the top 10 songs in Australia and then they played the
number one song. So that was playing
while your parents were sitting there waiting to watch the ABC News.
So my parents were across music.
They would sit there and say, oh God, this is dreadful. Oh, this is absolute
rubbish. How can you listen to this?
But then ABBA would come on. Oh, they quite like ABBA. Oh, they tap their foot.

(01:05:12):
Oh, they like that. But they were really in on that experience.
And then when Countdown finished, it's like the kids went off to their bedroom
to play their music and the parents never again kind of had that connection with them.
You know, those things that are sort of lost now. There is this nice thing,
you know, where it is nice for us for all to be on the same page for something.

(01:05:35):
And it's rarer these days than ever before. It's really rare.
I was in Coles at Wyoming in Gosford a couple of years ago and I was standing
in the deli and this man leaned in front of me and looked at me and said,
sorry. and it was Billy Field who sang Bad Habits and other songs like that.
And I said, oh, hello, I'm a big fan of yours and just started talking to him and he walked away.

(01:05:57):
And I went home and I started YouTubing and I found on Countdown when there
was a big buildup for him releasing True Love. Wow.
And it was the most incredible rabbit hole I went into all about Countdown,
but it all started from bumping into him in the deli at Coles.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, Countdown was another one that was a massive, massive program.

(01:06:19):
Yeah. But once again, about music. About music, yeah.
And we've kind of lost that now. And now there's not even Australian music.
There's barely any Australian music.
Everybody's streaming. All the record industry has been disrupted.
Everything I loved in life is kind of pretty much gone now.
Once upon a time, I could go to the city shopping and spend all day walking

(01:06:43):
around HMV. HMV. Looking at the CDs.
Virgin Megastore. Go to the Virgin Megastore, look at the DVDs.
Go to the bookstore. Go to Borders Books.
We could stand there and read all the air freight magazines internationally,
the books and all of that.
It's all gone now. In 1991, 92, I was in Europe and I went to Paris and there

(01:07:05):
was a six level Virgin Megastore there.
And, you know, the HMV store, they were just massive. They were massive.
You thought they were never, ever going to go. They were going to be there forever.
And now when you look at the way life is with streaming, I've got so many DVDs
and like you, I've got so many CDs and movies and, you know,
incredible shows on DVD.

(01:07:25):
You've got to keep them though because you can't rely.
People think, oh, everything's streaming now. No, it's not. No, it's not.
It's only like, you know, 5%. I don't know what the number is.
Maybe it's higher than that.
But yeah, there's always some title that you want to watch that it can't be seen anywhere.
Sometimes those films sort of fall out of copyright and then they pop up on YouTube.

(01:07:46):
And I've been watching a lot of old films on YouTube recently.
I watched one and now it's suggesting others. It's like, oh yeah,
I do want to watch that again. I saw that back in the day.
So, but yeah, at any given point, there's something you want to watch where you can't find it.
You know what I got into a few years ago, which I loved all of the Alfred Hitchcock
presents and Alfred Hitchcock hours and Twilight Zone series,

(01:08:10):
like all of those old black and white shows where it wasn't about the effects.
It was about the story. That's right. And some of them were incredible.
Really, really ahead of their time. Yeah. Yeah. Those anthology things were huge.
I mean, that was a whole, that was another thing. You could always,
whether it was a Friday night or a Saturday night, they were the two nights
of the week where I was kind of, my parents would go to bed and they'd go,

(01:08:32):
well, if you want to sit up all night, you can.
You didn't sit up all night because TV went off at midnight,
but there'd always be a horror film on.
So you could sit up and watch something scary by yourself. And I remember as
a little boy watching Wake in Fright, which I think is the greatest Australian
film ever made, but it's immensely disturbing.

(01:08:55):
And as a little kid, I was so horrified by it, but I didn't really understand why.
And then they re-released it in cinemas 25 years later, whatever it was.
And I rocked up to see it again and was completely horrified by it because I,
as an adult, I then understood what was going on. I was like, oh, is that what it was?
I knew there was something bad, but oh my God, I didn't realize that.

(01:09:17):
So yeah, I can remember sometimes watching things like that and there was nobody
you could talk to about it.
You go to school and say, did anyone watch that thing on TV the other night?
You couldn't tell your parents. You particularly couldn't say to Mum and dad,
I saw something on TV last night that I was really disturbed by.
Do you think you can help me? Because they would say, well, go to bed early and don't watch it.
So you just have to kind of bottle it up. But yeah, I love those days where...

(01:09:42):
Horror films, you know, if you set up late at night, you could see something
like a Halford Hitchcock or the, there was an Australian anthology show called
the evil touch where it was a different story every week.
And Anthony Quayle would come on in this sort of smoke and give this kind of introduction.
And then it would go into the story and they're flying out American actors like

(01:10:02):
Darren McGavin and this to do it.
And then they would have Australian actors like Jack Thompson in the car.
So you're watching this American TV show with Australian actors and that was
always like the ultimate to me.
But yeah, it's like, even to this day, I'm like saying to Brolly and they're
like, yeah, yeah, we're working on it. I'm like, you've got to get the evil touch.
You've got to find that show. It's like the most amazing performances in there.

(01:10:25):
And then Brian Brown brought out Twisted Tales. He did. He did his version of that.
And it's a great way to bring out different directors and different actors doing quality stuff.
I love all that sort of stuff. There was a show called Ghost Story in the 70s
and it was Sebastian Cabot would introduce it.
They always had a host and he'd be sitting there in this big cane chair and

(01:10:45):
looked like he was sitting in Jamaica and he'd be sitting in a cane chair and
he'd go, you know, you know, la la la.
And he'd do this introduction and then it would tell the story and it would
go back to him at the end. He'd say, well, you know, it all comes for you at the end, doesn't it?
But I love those scary anthologies.
I got Ghost Story on DVD. DVD and eventually I bought it and I just madly went

(01:11:07):
through the disc reading every story like, Oh my God, I remember that.
You put it in and watch it again and go, yes, yes.
These things, things you, cause that's the other thing. If you saw something
on TV in the seventies, you might've seen it once. Yeah.
And you never ever saw it again, unless they repeated it. There was no videos back then.
You'd see something and then it'd be gone. I think about all of it. Same with music as well.

(01:11:30):
I remember how many times I sat there waiting to record Cyndi Lauper songs.
And you always got all of the CDs that you made, all the, sorry, CDs were even around.
Cassettes. All the cassettes you made always started with triple M or something
at the beginning of the song.
And then sometimes you got that a few times because the song wasn't the song
you were waiting for. Yeah.
And sometimes that would be like my first, I had a reel to reel tape recorder

(01:11:57):
before cassettes came out.
And that was why I got my first job. I said, I want a tape recorder.
And my mother said, well, get a job.
And so I got a paper run and you could sell them. The newspaper was 7 cents in the afternoon.
So if you were lucky, you got a 3 cent tip. Someone would give you a 10 cent
piece and you'd get a 3 cent tip. So I just did that until I saved up $40,

(01:12:21):
which is what I needed. And then I bought a reel to reel.
And then all I wanted to do with that was it had a little microphone and you'd
hold it up against the radio to tape a song off the radio or tape it off TV.
You could put it up against the TV and have like an audio recording of a TV show.
So for someone who was obsessed with TV and movies, you obviously ended up buying a cinema. Yeah, I did.

(01:12:47):
Tell me about that. I bought a cinema in Southwest Rocks in, I went up there in 2017.
Which is mid-north New South Wales. Yeah, it's out from Kempsey.
It's between Port Macquarie and Coffs Harbour.
And it's the most beautiful, beautiful town.
And the cinema basically is.

(01:13:07):
You know, it's really hard to run a cinema today because you don't make a lot
of money from the movies because the distribution company takes 50% boom just like that.
So you don't make a lot of money doing it. So you've got to make money on the food side of things.
And that's why popcorn is so expensive. I never complain about it again,
because that's what keeps the cinema afloat.
But it was really, really hard to do. It was so hard because I knew that it

(01:13:31):
was something you had to work really hard at.
I knew that if I put on a decent movie or something that are older,
particularly ladies would want to watch on the weekend, the husbands were off
playing golf and fishing.
They would come to the cinema every weekend.
So I could, I could cater for that. And during school holidays,
you could play cartoons and put stuff for families because kids are on school holidays.

(01:13:53):
The group in between though, which is the 20 somethings, that whole thing of
like you and I did when we grew up, where you all, you went to the movies on
a Friday and Saturday day night, you'd see what's on at the drive-in,
what's on the suburban cinemas.
That doesn't exist anymore. The kids who don't watch free-to-air TV don't go to the movies anymore.
They'll go to a couple movies per year, but good luck trying to predict it.

(01:14:15):
So, you know, all of a sudden, all the kids in town start saying,
you're going to get it, it, it, it, the clown movie. You're going to get it.
So you get it and to hit and you go, oh, they're into horror.
I know I'll get another horror film. No, they don't want to see that horror
film. They only wanted to see it.
So ultimately I was like, I can't. And it also did my head in that I could gamble

(01:14:35):
and go, I think that film's going to be a hit. I'll get it.
And then the film gets there and it's terrible and nobody comes to see it.
And you've made no money that weekend.
And I was like, how can I, the movie expert, not know what's going to be?
There's no way of guessing what the public are going to do. It's a gamble.
It's like betting on a horse on the Melbourne car.
So in the end, I sold the cinema. I decided to get out and it was the best thing

(01:14:58):
I did because I sold it just before the bushfires and COVID.
So I got out and I, I, I moved away and otherwise I'd be still up there trying
to make it work, trying to sell it on to another person to this day.
And it's really hard to run in cinema today because now the movies are really bad.
The writer's strike, whatever COVID, you know, I could, I once upon a time,

(01:15:20):
I could go to the movies every weekend and now I look at what's on and just
go, Oh, actually there's nothing to see.
It breaks my heart because it's such an incredible thing to do, to go out to the cinema.
And a few years ago, I got into it again, probably around the time that you had your cinema.
And so I started going to see shows.
And sometimes I was the only person in the, and how does that happen?

(01:15:42):
I'm in Gosford and the cinemas are huge and there's nobody in there playing it for me. Yeah, I know.
That's heartbreaking for anybody, for small businesses.
It's really hard. and for people that are kind of making movies.
But, you know, I look at our life now, and Amanda and I probably go to the movies
once a year, and every time we go, we say we have to go again,

(01:16:05):
we'll do it again, and end up getting stuck at home on streaming.
Mind you, though, the fact that a film can play in cinemas and be available
to rent on your screen at home four weeks later, that doesn't help. Yeah.
That window that they used to have, it used to be six months minimum.
And so if the new Mad Max film came out and you go, I really want to see it.

(01:16:28):
But then you think, oh, I don't think I can wait six months to see it.
Whereas now, you go, oh, I really want to see it. And then it's in cinemas one week.
And then suddenly you see it on TV and go, oh, I could watch it at home now.
That's quite an enormous effect, I think, on saying to people,
cinema's not something you have to do.
Just wait long enough, it'll come to you at home. They're not given a chance.

(01:16:51):
They're not given a chance. They should.
And I actually think that the film companies do that on purpose.
You just sit there and do the maths. Even do the maths on a big film like the Avengers.
Yeah. It's the number one film in cinemas, blah, blah, blah.
Do the math on how much money they make from cinemas and how much money they
could make if they're charging everybody at home in their house,

(01:17:12):
whatever it is to watch it.
You know, they know they can make more money streaming, cut out the cinemas,
cut out the middleman, make you as the consumer pay them direct for the product.
It almost feels to me like the studios are doing it deliberately.
Deliberately and to me i don't think cinema will
ever really die because i don't think you can get away from that communal experience
of everyone being in a room and it also envelops you

(01:17:35):
the giant screen the sound you don't pick up your phone and look at what's on
you're actually there in the moment whereas at home no matter how good the film
is if someone texts you message you can just hit pause and go i'm just going
to do this yeah sorry spell broken yeah but yeah it feels It looks to me like
the movie companies are very much trying to,
they just want to give it to us direct and make us pay them direct.

(01:17:58):
So what do you think is the best episode of TV that you've ever seen?
Well, I will always say that Number 96 is my favorite show, and I will always
say that Knot's Landing is my second favorite show.
And Knot's Landing, which was a spinoff of Dallas, an 80s primetime soap,

(01:18:19):
it's streaming for the first time in America right now, and they're running it on a 24-hour channel.
So they're burning through 365 episodes, I think over two weeks.
And to sit here on Twitter and see people commenting about each episode and
putting up little scenes from it in real time.

(01:18:40):
It's like, I can't believe this is happening. So if you wait long enough,
everything comes there.
They are the two shows that if you said, I'm on a desert island,
I can take two shows with you. I'd go, great. I'll take those two shows.
I could watch those shows from beginning to end and just go over and start them all over again.
I find it a lot harder to say what's my favorite movie. I don't have one movie

(01:19:02):
that stands out, but if you look at that poster on the wall there,
it's the Poseidon adventure.
Yes. Cause the Poseidon adventure is the first film I remember when I really had my mind blown.
It was the first time I'd gone to the cinema on my own without an adult,
but with a school friend.
Wow. And it wasn't that It was the fact that we went to see this incredible

(01:19:26):
film that maybe was filmed in 70mm on a giant screen and the ship turned over.
Yeah, it was terrifying. And the special effects.
And I just remember thinking, wow, I've never seen anything as spectacular as that in my life.
So I say The Poseidon Adventure is my favourite film because even though I don't
think technically it's the greatest, you know, there's probably better films.

(01:19:49):
Films it's the first film that I remember being really blown away from and that's
the thing that really made me love cinema I think anything that makes you feel
something whether it's good bad scary I think.
That takes you somewhere else is awesome. Poseidon Adventure,
yes, that did that for me as well.
That horrible feeling of being upside down in the boat, stuck in that bubble.

(01:20:12):
And do you know why you identified with that?
It's because they had a 12-year-old actor, Eric Shea, in it.
They had a little boy in it. That's the brilliance of Irwin Allen.
If you look at all of his disaster films, Lost in Space, Land of the Giants.
There's a kid there because the kid is the way that you as a kid in the audience relate to it.
So you can almost see yourself in that because

(01:20:33):
here's all these adults trying to get off the ship but there's this
12 year old boy who sometimes is smarter than all
of them put together so as a little kid you can identify with that and go oh
yeah right and it's funny how you know they knew that and they did that deliberately
that's why that little boy was in the film because the little boys like us who

(01:20:54):
saw the film then went we could identify with it Oh, wow.
It's, it's, it's such a, a wonderful medium. I love getting lost in other worlds and other things.
And I think it's really exciting that you found where you want to be. Oh, totally. Yeah.
And I, look, I love it because I know there's always going to be fans and there's
always going to be people who love it, but I really love that I've been able to preserve something,

(01:21:20):
get some stuff preserved and get these histories down and, and,
and remind people how important they am.
Like I've got a new book coming out soon, Outrageous Queer History of Australian
TV, where I talk about the fact that all through the 70s, we were doing these
incredible things with queer representation on the screen.
And so that's, I'm really proud that I'm able to record that.

(01:21:44):
And lock that in so that it's there forever. Well, you've already done the documentary.
I've done the documentary. Tell me about how that came about.
Well, when I wrote the book, I always wanted to, as I started writing the book,
I realized that it would have always worked better as a TV series,
that you need to actually see it to understand how groundbreaking it is.
So the book came first, but then the television. I wrote the book,

(01:22:05):
but I didn't do anything about getting it published. I just used the book as the blueprint.
And we tried for years and years to get someone to make it into a TV series. and nobody would.
So we went crowdfunding. We got some funding from some government bodies.
Thank you very much. And like Screen Australia, we got some funding and we did

(01:22:26):
some crowdfunding and we had one really generous donor.
And so we had $35,000. So we just made a half hour pilot.
And I put into that pilot what I thought were the most important things so that
if If no more of it ever got made, at least we'd put that part on film.
So we did that, then shopped that pilot around. Nobody still made it.

(01:22:47):
So now when the book comes out, I'll use that pilot documentary to promote the
book, maybe do some screenings, launch the book, and then I'll put it on some streaming service.
So it's there to be watched forever as we go through.
So yeah, it's, I think, you know, you say to a young person,
like I remember, because Because Shane Jenick, who plays Courtney Act, is in the doco.

(01:23:11):
And I wanted, when we were pitching as a TV series, I wanted to be hosted by Courtney Act.
Because I think that Courtney has a wonderful way of explaining difficult concepts
to people really, really well.
And I was, I'd been talking to Shane about this for months and he,
you know, we'd known each other for a long time. He's like, sure,
sure, I'll do it. I'll do it.

(01:23:32):
And then somehow along the line, at some point he watched a clip and then he
got back and he's like, oh, I had no idea.
I just saw it right now. I get what you're trying to say. And that's when I
realized, oh yeah, right.
It's really important. You could read about this in a book and like,

(01:23:53):
yeah, you actually, actually need to see, see it to understand and then go, see that?
They did that in 1972.
When homosexuality was illegal, that's what we were doing on TV then.
That's when you can really blow people's minds because sometimes you're showing

(01:24:13):
them something that they can't even get their heads around being on TV at all,
let alone on black and white TV 50 years ago.
And yet decades and decades later, Ellen gets cancelled.
You know, for something that was really quite tame. Yeah. At the time. Yeah.
Well, that story I told before that, you know, Channel 7 literally took Ellen

(01:24:36):
off air when they found out that her character was going to come out.
What they did was they moved the show to a Saturday night.
When do you ever play a US sitcom on a Saturday night on Australian TV? Never.
Pull it off after four weeks. It doesn't rate.
Someone at Channel 7 told me they're never, ever going to screen the show again.
And that's why I organized this boycott, because I had that inside information.

(01:25:00):
And they just kept saying, oh no, it doesn't rate. It doesn't rate. And it became a thing.
It went into the mainstream press
because I was calling for a month-long boycott through the gay press.
It became a mainstream story. And they were interviewing the programming manager at Channel 7.
And he was like, oh no, it's got nothing to do with homophobia.
It just doesn't rate. It's a very difficult show to program.
Very difficult show to program. Really? really.

(01:25:21):
18 months later, when the CEO of Channel 7 resigned, and just out of the blue
resigned, he resigned in the morning.
That afternoon, they sent out an urgent program amendment, Ellen back on the schedule.
So it clearly was homophobia. Clearly that person didn't want it to go to air.

(01:25:44):
It's quite obvious the fact that they put it back into the schedule on the day
he resigned, that there'd been an issue there.
And yeah, it's, it's incredible to think that a country that had once been so open to it.
So you've got to understand in 1972, if you were living in Australia somewhere,

(01:26:05):
you probably didn't know any gay people.
You probably didn't know, you certainly didn't know any transgender people or
lesbian people, or you weren't aware that you knew them.
Maybe they lived in your community and you just didn't know.
And here suddenly is this This TV show where these people are being presented
as regular, normal, working people who contribute to society and are good people.

(01:26:30):
And suddenly you've got people going, actually, I have seen gay men on TV.
Honorable Justice Michael Kirby, former High Court Justice, says in that documentary that.
Number 96 helped Australia deal with the AIDS crisis in the 80s better than
any other country because we were the only country in the world where we had

(01:26:52):
shown people that homosexuals were regular people.
No other country in the world was doing it. They were doing one-offs all in the family.
A gay man would come in, like, oh, you're a fag, you're a fruit,
you know. Oh, actually, no, you're all right. You can stick around.
You never, ever saw them in the show again.
So yes, in that moment in American TV, they did something incredible.

(01:27:12):
The difference with Australia was we did it five nights a week,
42 weeks a year with a tiny little break for Christmas for five years.
So that's the difference. That reminds me when you said fruit,
I remember Billy Crystal's character in Soap and they called him a fruit all the time. They did.

(01:27:34):
Yeah. And it was like a joke. It was like a big, big joke. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, we've come a long way. We really have. We really have.
Yeah. And thank you for keeping us up to date with what's going on out there.
Thank you. So how can we listen to your podcast?
You can get it through all podcasts, Apple, Listener TV, you can get the TV Gold.
And you have to search really hard to find my YouTube channel because I haven't

(01:27:55):
got many subscribers at the moment, but honestly type in Gaynor Martin or Cheryl
Rickson and my channel's called TV Icons and then you can get in and see the other ones.
I've also got Rebecca O'Maloglu, Shane Porteous from A Country Practice,
Eric Thompson. And so, yeah, they're all there and I'm going to do some more soon.
Fantastic. Well, I'd love to share them. So I'll put everything on the website

(01:28:16):
as well. Thanks. And if there's anything else that you'd like to run through.
No, I think that's it. No more plugs. Beautiful.
Thank you so much, Andrew. It's always wonderful to have you in my life.
Thank you. And I really appreciate it. And thank you too, because I know that
you do a lot of really great things for people in the industry behind the scenes
and you look after them and, you know, thank you for what you do too.

(01:28:38):
Oh, we're family. We're family, you gotta do the right thing by people.
Music.

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