MOSH!! *Operator: Cris Pearson(cris@notme.com)*
And the Mikey one
Tuesday, 26-May-98 01:45:52
203.17.154.45 writes:
A FORMULA FOR LAUGHTER
To celebrate the Australian Science Festival, Mikey Robins and the Good News Week team will be in Canberra to record a program which will test the properties of humour.
Mikey Robins hated science when he was at school. He studied it for the obligatory four years, the got out as fast as he could.
"I ended up doing 3 unit economics in Year 12, so I wouldn’t have to do science. To me science seemed to be studying sedimentary rocks year in and year out - I never got past shale," he says. "It is just one of those things, you start doing something and you just realise you aren’t that good at it.
"I thought, well, there are smarter people than me in the world, they can take care of it. You go off and invent and discover stuff and I’ll be here waiting for you to sell it to me."
However, he has managed to set aside his distaste for science to take part in a special Australian Science Festival episode of Good News Week, which will be filmed in Canberra for the first time on Wednesday at the National Convention Centre - the show sold out two weeks ago - and broadcast on Friday.
In addition to the GNW team of Robins, host and ringmaster Paul McDermott and Julie McCrossin, the guest panelists will be the Chief Minister, Kate Carnell (who will get the chance to show off her scientific knowledge gained as a pharmacist), scientist and author Tim Flannery, Quantum host Adam Spencer, and Susan Stockelmayer, the deputy director of the ANU’s post-graduate science communication course.
While he is known for his humour, he wasn’t always as quick to elicit a laugh in the lab. He would sit quietly at the back and pray he wasn’t asked a question. Another Robins, his sister, was known for something very different.
"My sister was famous for throwing a tray of bull’s eyeballs into an overhead fan, she got banned from biology classes for about 6 months," he says.
However science class provided Robins with a chance to be creative.
"To me science - apart from sedimentary rocks - meant one thing and one thing only, an ongoing four year experiment in how much time a standard Biro can spend over a Bunsen Burner," he says. And what were his results?
"You’d be amazed. Forty minutes at a very low heat and you could end up with some wonderful shapes."
He has a plan for winning this episode, despite all the science. "At the end of the day they are academics and you can shout at them."
"I’m lucky because of the radio show (Triple J breakfast) and because of the fact that I am a news junkie anyway and I do the show, and the same with Julie. We tend to be across the main stories of the day and fortunately if we are not, guests usually have a few weeks notice and they have boned up as well. Fear is a great informer."
Contestants, Robins included, are expected to keep track of the news. Before the game, they are locked away and are told the areas the questions will cover and given their three clues to think about. There are no newspapers and now no telephones - after someone, Robins won’t say who, was caught trying to phone out for answers.
Robins and his team then go on stage and go to work. A show takes about 50 minutes to film, although it sometimes goes a bit longer, "because everyone wants to show off a bit".
Robins’ job on Good News Week is to remind his team there’s a game to be played and to get an answer from them. He says it is the best job he has ever had.
"I go out on Thursday night, I have half a beer before I go on and a sandwich, I get to make a whole bunch of gags about the news in front of a live audience with Paul (McDermott) and Julie (McCrossin). Then someone goes away and magically makes it into television by Friday night. Which is good because Friday night I get to watch it before I go out," he says.
His team changes weekly, although there are many regulars. While Robins says it’s nearly impossible to pick his favourites, there are a few people he really enjoys having on the show.
"I always love it when Margaret Scott is on the show…and Kate Fischer - for so many reasons on so many levels. In terms of having fun, it is always good to have Morgs (Anthony Morgan) on the show."
Although having Morgan on his team isn’t necessarily a good thing for Robins’ chances of winning. He isn’t always there to win and "almost perversely" seems to enjoy losing, which Robins likes. "Because you get people on and you have to stop them halfway through the show and remind them there is no prize here, but people get incredibly competitive".
Guest competitors aren’t the only ones to forget this. Robins says he often has people tell him how many he has won and how many the other team captain McCrossin has won.
"I’m going ahhh, right. You tend to forget that, but it does make you feel slightly better on the night if your team wins. I don’t know why, it is such a random thing. For God’s sake the host is so brain-addled he can barely count. If the scores go past 10 he has to take his shoes off."
His favourite game is another tough one for Robins. He enjoys the crowd-favourite "Warren" and likes watching the other team play "Bad Street Theatre".
"I’ll tell you one game we sometimes (play) which I hate: when someone is blacked out in a photograph and you have to say who it is. It’s damned near impossible, you always end up looking stupid."
This week Robins’ team will consist of Kate Carnell and Tim Flannery. They’ll be up against McCrossin and her team, Adam Spencer and Susan Stocklemayer.
With Spencer on the show - who is a bit of a "science boffin", Robins says - it will be a good show. "Once he gets going, Paul will get going, and Julie will get going, and everyone will have a ball."
One of the things Spencer enjoys about Good News Week is it’s spontaneity.
"The joy of Good News Week is that you literally turn up and do it," he says.
"I mean, you read a few papers and all that sort of stuff, but the reason I enjoy it as much, and in some ways more, than anything else I do is that you just walk in and it happens on the spot. There really isn’t much point preparing jokes in advance because you have no control over where Paul is going to steer the show and you just respond to it."
The spontaneity is something Robins enjoys as well. "There’s generally that feeling of ‘well, let’s see what happens tonight’, I think that is sort of missing on telly at the moment."
With Robins enjoying the show so much at the moment, there’s no possibility of him leaving it.
"As long as the show is there I think I’ll be there. As I said, I go out Thursday night, I do the show, I have two beers, I go home and go to bed. This is the most fun I’ve ever had."
However, how long will he stay at his day job, as a breakfast announcer at Triple J, is less certain. He says while he "loves Triple J dearly - I get really emotional about the old radio station, it’s a great place to work and does great things", he hasn’t decided if he will come back next year. He got an offer from a commercial network at the end of last year and thought long and hard about it, before deciding Triple J was where he wanted to be.
"The other thing about Triple J is it is a breeding ground for new talent and maybe I have hogged the chair for long enough, we’ll see at the end of the year. I always say every year is the last year."
While he is yet to decide where he will finish his days as radio DJ, he has decided what he will do when he does.
"I’ve always said my aim in life is to open up a little newsagency on the central coast, I’ve changed that now, I think I’d like a little antique shop in Toukley," he says. "I’m not joking. Wouldn’t it be nice to buy nice little things off recently - deceased grandmothers and mark them up to exorbitant prices an sell them to tourists from Sydney?
"Ceramics and dusting, I see that. I can see a lot of that in my future.
"I live to dust. Those solvents now are the only legal way for an older gent to have fun."
By David McLennan (The Canberra Times, The Guide)
May 4, 1998
Ziyal
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