'Ullo, ullo, a veritable idiom box Phillip Adams The Weekend Australian September 20-21, 1997 ... So let's move from Dalziel and Pascoe to another engaging double-act on the ABC - the intelligent nonsense of Mikey Robbins (now, there's another hubcab face) and Paul McDermott on Good News Week. Back in the Golden Age of telly, Graham Kennedy was gloriously irreverent - thumbing his nose at the new medium that most treated with excessive deference. Paul Hogan, at his best, treated TV with the contempt it deserved, refusing to take it, or himself seriously. As did TDT in its glory days - when Peter Luck and Co. approached public affairs with a mixture of healthy scepticism and satire. Irreverence is one thing. Professionalism is another. And there have been very few presenters who, over the years, have really known how to work a camera, whose relationship with the lens has an easy intimacy. But now we've got McDermott. There are few in the business with comparable mastery of the medium. McDermott successfully juggles the needs of his panel, the studio audience and the distant viewers. Fast and witty, he has, like Kennedy before him, extraordinary timing. And he also has Robbins, who can not only find the essential absurdity in a given topic but has the gift of running with it, of widly extrapolating a comic idea. At their best the two are as well matched as Torvill and Dean - it's cheek with chic. Aided and abetted by Julie McCrossin - who's as smart as a whip - we get a convincing illusion of spontaniety. If the program is semi-rehearsed, if some of the ad libbing has been prearranged, [it hasn't!!!] then at least it doesn't show. In America, what passes for live TV is frequently bogged down in overproduction and in a reliance on backroom writers and the Autocue. Whereas GNW takes risks and, as a result, takes its audience with it,. Because they're clearly enjoying themsleves, so do we. McDermott's ability to hold it all together verges in the awesome. It would be so easy for the program to spiral into indulgence and incoherence. Well, sometimes it does - for a few moments. But then McDermott will pull it back into line. Albeit the sort of lline that an inebriate might walk in police custody. [my god what a rap!!!]