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When you're growing up, a brother can be your strongest ally or your most ruthless enemy. Jeanne Ryckmans discovers two siblings who became friends rather than foes. I was walking home from primary school one afternoon and had just turned into the cul-de-sac where we lived when my prized possession - a candy pink Barbie campervan - hurtled past with my petrified cat squashed behind the plastic steering wheel. Tom Thumb firecrackers were attached to the wheel axis and exploding violently. Giving chase to the run-away vehicle were my three brothers, who whooped when it came to a crunching halt in the gutter - a sorry mound of smoldering pyrotechnics, pink plastic and matted fur. This incident came only days after my eldest brother had "accidentally" run over my pet guinea pig, Bean, with the Victa lawnmower and one of the twins had killed my sea monkeys by tipping washing-up liquid into the fish bowl to give them a "bubble bath". My mother blamed herself for having for my brothers' antics. She said it was her fault because she had us "too close together" (four children under the age of five) and that I should feel special and grateful because I was the only girl. If "special" meant having the three boys break into our neighbour's house when I was on my first babysitting job and use plastic magnetic letters to spell out "have you checked the children" on the fridge door in an effort to traumatise me (it worked because I bolted home leaving the toddler on his own), then I'd rather be ungrateful - and preferably an only child. It's hardly surprising that I made a habit of telling people I was adopted. Twenty-something years down the track, I can look back and laugh. If truth be known, on occasion my brothers did do something kind. Like the day I cried and cried because my mother refused to buy me "Baby Alive" (a doll that had the appearance of a real baby that pooped and pees when fed a pink paste or liquid). In a display of ingenuity, my eldest brother used his pocket-knife to bore a hole into the bottom of Prudence - my favourite doll. The only problem was that the food I fed Prudence didn't come out of her new orifice as well as I'd hoped. Months later, when Prudence had grown a horrific internal mould, she had to be "disposed" of. But it was the twins who gave her a decent burial in the backyard - next to Bean, the guinea pig. Across the hill from us, in another Canberra suburb, resided the Fidler family. Richard Fidler claims that as a child he never tortured his younger sister Jane - or terrorised her pets. Jane Fidler concedes that despite one of two attempts to humiliate her "big brother", neither party has ever inflicted indignities upon each other. So what sets the Fidler siblings apart from the rest of us? Are they straight out of The Stepford Children", or just very good at bullshitting? (After all, both work in media.) In an effort to understand the complex rapport that bonds brothers and sisters, Richard and Jane agreed to share the secrets of their relationship. Richard: There was never any real rivalry between us as kids, apart from the trivial kind like fighting over the front seat of the car. Jane: We shared a room until Richard was six and I was four, but we never really played games together as kids because Richie spent most of his time reading and drawing. I was the more gregarious one. Richard: Although there was only a year-and-a-half between us, it seemed that there was a bigger age gap. Jane used to round up all the kid in the street and put on shows for them. I don't think a slightly boring and overbearing brother was particularly welcome … Jane: We became much closer as teenagers. Richard: One of my earliest memories is being horrible to Jane and she was furious with me. Dad was rather amused by this so he asked Jane what he should do with me and she shouted: "Kill him! Kill him!" So dad dragged me up to the bathroom where he removed his belt and started whacking it against the edge of the bath which made this awful noise while I was pretending to cry out in pain. When we walked out, Jane was … Jane: I was sobbing. I was really quite upset! Richard: She had this look of complete horror on her face. She was so sad - sweet really! At this point in the conversation, it's obvious that both are sickeningly nice to each other. But I'm still not convinced that they never fought. Richard: When I was 17, I brought home two girls and Jane thought it was enormously funny to fling my undies on the table in front of these girls I was trying to impress. Jane: I don't remember that. Richard: Don't worry, I do! This is much better. More credible. Jane: My worst memory of Richard was trying to kill him in front of Mum's horrified lunch guests. Richard: I never hit her back though. Jane: No … Richard: I was too nerdy. I wasn't a wrestling of bullying kind of brother. Jane: He was a nerd. Richard: Yeah, I was nerdy and Jane was violent! Jane: People can't believe that as siblings we didn't fight. Richard: That's true. Jane: I think it's because we moved around so much when we were kids. I went to 11 schools … Richard: You learn to be each other's best friends in those circumstances. I went to a smarty-pants school, so I think Jane compensated by being more socially successful. I endure another half-hour or so of mutual flattery and fond memories until the subject of dobbing rears its ugly head. Dobbing, as we all know, is the ultimate sneaky, lowest-of-low things to inflict upon a sibling. Jane: He was a big dobber. He dobbed me in for smoking. Richard: I'm still not thrilled about the smoking…(laughs) Yeah, I did dob her in. Jane: But I never dobbed on him. I was the naughty one. I made up for all of it. Richard: That's not quite true. You were normal. I was the geek. Jane: Our parents swear we were the easiest kids in the whole world. We all had even temperaments - my father was a bit difficult at times because he was working so hard - but there's a lot of humour in our family. Our parents are thrilled we get along so well. I think Richard and I have only had two falling outs in our lives. Richard: Nothing we couldn't get over. If we are pissed off with each other we'll pull each other up. It's rarely become a major row. Only a couple of times. We see each other all the bloody time! Janie lives down the road. Jane: Every second day. Richard: She baby-sits for us regularly. Jane: We'd still see each other all the time because we have the same friends. Richard: But I buy better booze than she does so she'll be around to drink it! Did either ever dislike the other's choice of partner? Jane: adore his wife - always have right from the beginning. Richie and I both knew we would never chose the wrong person because we've both like the same people. I was married and my husband and I are still close. Richard: He and I were very close and still are in some ways. Jane: We've all stayed mates - but Khym (Richard's wife) is divine. The comfort of having a brother is knowing that he'll always be there for me. My mother had a health scare some years ago. Richard was living in London and although my husband whom I dearly loved was with me, I recall freaking out at the time because I desperately needed my brother with me. Richard: I wasn't in London - I was coming back to London via Thailand and couldn't be reached. Jane: I really needed you! Richard: I wasn't there and didn't know anything about it - just as bloody well that Jane was there to support Dad. Jane is always first on the scene, I'm a couple of days behind. Jane: I remember trying to be brave because Dad wasn't coping very well and Mum wasn't coping at all. I kept thinking, "Where's Richard?" I badly needed him. Luckily it was all okay in the end. Richard: Kind of nice really because I avoided this terrifying plunge into despair and then the emergence into sunlight. I'd rather not have those kids of ups and downs in my life. I'd prefer to come back and have Dad say: "Where the fuck have you been?" So what is it about each other that they most admire? Jane: You know what I really appreciate about Richard? It's a bit embarrassing, but what I admire most about him are his principles. He's a very good friends to all of his friends, as well as being an incredible brother. Richard: What I love most about Janie is her kindness. She has this profound sense of injustice - when she was small, a cruelty or an injustice would bring her to tears. Lots of people get hardened by the world, but Janie is so giving, which can make her vulnerable. Jane: Oh? Richard: She's like out Mum in that kindness comes very easily to her. Mum was a nurse and Janie shows that same generosity and kindness to others while I'm often flummoxed and confused in those situations. Jane: Thanks! Richard: We have a lot in common. We're both great readers. God that sounds pretentious. Jane: And we've also got a similar sense of humour. Richard: We love poo jokes. Jane: Lots of poo jokes. Richard: Lots and lots of poo. Elle, Oct 2000 New string to Fidler's bow New job for Richard Fidler at the ABC, although getting details of the show is harder than pulling teeth. But the word is that Fidler is moving to Melbourne for six months to present a 13 episode series, which began production this week. The whisper is it gives an entertaining twist to the social impact of the technological age. Daily Telegraph, 8/2/01 Richard Fidler: Entertainer On lying to journalists, upsetting fans, breaking down the chat show formula, the dinosaurs of pay-TV, the youth who should be running television, and what the future holds. It's right at the end of our lunch. We've spent two hours at Wine Banc, an underground restaurant in Sydney's CBD, and we're getting in synch with the day-meets-nightclub gloom. The plates have been cleared and we've ordered a whisky to go with our short blacks when Richard Fidler tells me a story which makes me question everything he has said. Best known these days as the host of television shows such as Mouthing Off and Race Around the World, Fidler is a former member of the Doug Anthony All Stars, a comedy team which prided itself on offending as many people as possible. Recalling the period in his life, Fidler casually confesses that the group members sometimes amused themselves by lying to journalists. "The art of it was for one of us to tell a lie and watch the other two embellish it without laughing," he recalls. "The journalists would never check the facts behind the lies we told and they would usually be printed verbatim." The private joke continued undetected until one of the group told a journalist they had been cast as the Penguin's henchmen in a Batman movie. Someone else added that they'd become great friends with Jack Nicholson and that he'd taken to calling them "little asshole buddies". "It's details like that," Fidler remarks, "that give your story verisimilitude." Articles appeared around the country and the Melbourne Herald decided to run the story as a cover on their TV guide. Fidler recalls that he "got up one morning, went down to get the paper and there outside the front of the newsagency was a sign that said, 'Funny Men Go Bats'." He opened the newspaper to find himself and his fellow All Star comedians, Paul McDermott and Tim Ferguson, superimposed "in front of a giant picture of Jack Nicholson talking about our Hollywood success". It didn't take long for the newspaper - and the rest of the media - to discover that they'd been had. No reporter had the chutzpah to go public about the hoax. Fidler says evenly: "they repaid us by trashing our TV series instead." The Doug Anthony All Stars weren't content with annoying journalists - they liked to annoy and even appall their fans as well. "We were inclined to the left politically, but we found our audience were getting a bit too smug with leftism," says Fidler, "So we started going on stage and saying things they didn't want to hear. We started doing Christian rivalism and later Satan worship on stage." Their devotion to iconoclasm was repaid by an audience of screaming teenage girls. "We thought we were in the Sex Pistols," says Fidler. "But then we discovered we were in the Bay City Rollers instead." He pauses. "Actually, I sort of came to like that audience. They tended to be girls who wrote bad poetry, the misfits in the classroom, the girls who were probably a bit too bright and read way too much Sylvia Platt. I related to them - I was a misfit at school myself." The latter remark says a lot about Fidler's social persona. Despite possessing a shark-like wit, he doesn't take pleasure in putting others down. Fidler is a generous conversationalist and he even laughs at other people's jokes - a rare trait in a professional comedian. But then comedy has always been a stepping stone to somewhere else for Fidler. As the host of Mouthing Off on Foxtel's Comedy Channel, he used humour to break down the chat show formula. "The idea of that show was to use comedy and even obscenity to tear open a panel debate and make it colloquial," he says. "We wanted to get people away from being constantly conscious of their reputations." The result made Channel 9's The Panel look like Lateline. Guests were frequently ambushed by the format. Fidler recalls a show he did on the babyboom generation, which included feminist elder Anne Summers. "She came all ready to play a role and take part in a serious discussion and then I introduced the topic by saying, 'About the time of World War 2, a whole lot of people started rooting themselves stupid - hence the baby-boom'," To her credit, Fidler says that Summers dropped the pretension and got involved in the ensuing bunfight. Mouthing Off, which Fidler describes definitely the cheapest show ever made", exemplified the find of raw, uncensored television he thinks people want to watch. "When people are on a panel discussion, they act out the role of being an expert and they sit in a certain way and talk in a certain way which is completely different to the way they were speaking to you before the camera light was on." Fidler is a big fan of John Safran, the Race Around the World contestant who became a cult figure because of his anarchistic stunts - the most important of which included taking Shane Paxton (an unemployed youth who was hassled by A Current Affair for not taking a job) to ambush Ray Martin and ask him why he wasn't working at 9:30 in the morning. Said Fidler: "John was one of the reasons I agreed to host Race Around the World. I said no at first - I had this idea it would be like Simon Townsend's Wonder World on the ABC. But then the producer showed me Safran's audition tape and I thought this could be a lot of fun." He still believes that the ABC was mad not to give Safran a show. But he's equally scathing. "It's run by a bunch of blokes who live on the North Shore of Sydney who think the rest of Australia think exactly the same way they do," he says. "They have that one-size-fits-all approach to TV which is going to cause them a lot of trouble as we move towards a niche-based rather than mass market." But wait, there's more. Fidler hates Australian pat-TV, too. "Their big stars are Billy Collins, Molly Meldrum, Stan Zemanek and John Laws. In the US, pay-TV was the wedge that cracked open broadcast television and made it exciting and edgy and competitive. But here they've pretty much decided to just recycle these old main-stream dinosaurs." So who ought to be making television? "Foxtel has the best promos on television - they should get the kids who are making those promos and get them to make programs. Their outsider status makes them invaluable - they have a critique and we should let them come in and tear stuff down." Fidler grins. "Including me - I'm going out to smart lunches with The Bulletin. I should be done away with." He might be rhetorically inclined to consign himself to the bonfire of popular culture, but at 26 Fidler is just hitting his stride in mainstream media as someone who is able to combine a comic depth with intellectual breadth. The synthesis of these talents will soon be on show in a new program Fidler is developing with the ABC. The political machinations that our public broadcaster is enduring make him wary of talking too precisely about titles and timeslots. But he will say that the show is concerned with the future and has particular focus on ethics. "We'll be talking about some wild, insane things that are coming our way at 100 miles an hour, things no one is talking about right now, in a colloquial, informal way. Things like nanotechnology, immortality and the prospect of online referenda may come to have much more impact on politics that a poll." Fidler, a voracious reader of non-fiction, says he became interested in the future because the wealth of literature around, "which suggests we are heading towards some grand transformative moment in human history." A history buff, Fidler says he's always amazed by how foreign people look in early photographs and wonders if we'll look as bizarre to people in the near future. "I find if you look back at early photographs - the people at that time seem like they're from another planet," he says. "And this is how we may seem to people in the very near future. We live in a time where energy is dirty, technology is fallible and not very intuitive and we are subject to all sorts of putrescent diseases. In the future, maybe we'll look in this time as a disgusting period." Not that Fidler has an entirely utopian view of what's to come. "Of course, it could all go horribly wrong," he says. "Take nanotechnology. A nanotech swarm could be used to clear cholesterol. But what happens if you have a nanotech swarm which doesn't stop replicating and they just keep turning matter into products. Imagine if they filled the planet with toaster and Leyland P-76's. It's a plausible nanotech disaster." Humour will inevitably be part of the program, as it's an organic part of any project. Fidler involves himself in. He resists seeing comedy as something divorced from reflective of intellectually rigorous culture. Good comedy, in Fidler's books, should unsettle people and make them think. "I really don't like stand-up comedy because it's so painfully untruthful," he says. "You have a guy in jeans go on stage going, 'G'day - how are you going - and that John Howard: what's going on with his comb-over'. There's often a lot of crowd-pleasing - it's really a process of ingratiation." Indeed, the line between the comic and the intellectual has always been blurred in Fidler's work. He recalls the origins of DAAS Kapital, the show the Doug Anthony All Stars made for ABC television in the 1990's. "We said, 'OK, we want to do a show that's set in a sub-marine in the future because spaceships are really old hat and we don't want to be dystopic because everyone has done dystopia. We want a boring future where there is no history and we're the custodians of all the world's historical artifacts at the bottom of the ocean'." His description is self-mocking and he now says that the show taught him and his colleagues that you need to start with "a simple premise and not try to show of how many books you've read recently". But if DAAS Kapital was a little conceptionally overburdened, it certainly gave Fidler the opportunity to grips the aesthetics of television, with what he calls "it's exceptional intimacy" and its story-telling potential. Erudite, passionate, sharp as cut tin and unpredictable, Fidler bears no resemblance to the traditional commercial TV host. But that doesn't mean he's immune to the charms of Bert Newton or Don Lane. Fidler might have a strong views on where television ought to be going, but he also has a healthy respect for where it's been. The Bulletin, 23/1/01 Richard Fidler Richard Fidler is the current presenter and co-writer of The Hub, arena Television's Australian arts and entertainment show with attitude. Richard also works in digital media as a writer, graphic artist and animator. He has contributed to the development of several interactive projects both in Australia and in the UK, and has won an AIMIA award for his work as script writer on Real Wild Child, an interactive history of Australian Rock and Roll for the Australia on CD project. Formerly a member of Australian comedy trio The Doug Anthony Allstars, Richard worked as co-writer and performer for several TV series with DAAS, in Australia and the UK. Within the group he was a co-contributor to three books, four music albums, two comic books and seemingly endless live tours. He has written a regular monthly column for internet.au magazine on the digital media world, and contributed an essay to the Australian Constitutional Convention website. www.onlineaustralia.net.au Left or right, ABC has no direction on youth By RICHARD FIDLER
It might help, but there are many views in the community that just don't fit into the current boomer left versus the neo-conservatives stoush. There has long been a generational struggle going on in the ABC as well. In the '90s in Britain and the United States, there was a generational turnover - new blood came into broadcasting and brought in a different, more accelerated aesthetic to television. Throughout the '90s, ABC programming that appealed to people under 35 was dubbed youth programming. In Britain it is simply called programming. Youth programming was carefully quarantined to a small playground well out of earshot of mummy and daddy. Then in the late-90s, 18 to 35-year-olds were abandoned by ABC TV - the station figured they would come to the ABC once they reached middle age and were ready for "serious" TV. High-rating shows such as Race Around the World and Good News Week were downsized or chased out of the ABC by a management that wanted a quiet life, away from programs that might generate controversy or an angry phone call from the federal Liberal Party director Lynton Crosby. As the boomers have aged, they've needed to redefine the concept of youth, in order to make those younger bastards serve a very long apprenticeship in the marketplace of ideas. I'm 36 and yet I'm still often regarded as a young person. The ABC very kindly had me on Stateline as a "young" republican in 1999, when I've been voting now for 18 years, I'm married and have a child. My humor might be undergraduate, but as far as a 20-year-old is concerned I'm an old fart. With John Safran, the ABC had a seriously brilliant 20-something maverick on their hands who holds no brief for anyone. John has the best cultural bullshit detector I've ever encountered in TV and is a kind of hero in the community for puncturing Ray Martin's self-importance by hanging around outside his house with a camera, wearing a Mike Munro mask, demanding to know why Ray wasn't at work at 9.30 in the morning. Safran made the best series pilot I've ever seen for ABC TV comedy, which was only ever aired in part - on Media Watch. After assembling his first edit, he found himself dealing with an executive producer who insisted (I swear I'm not making this up) that he watch a few episodes of Mother and Son to get a better grasp of how TV comedy really works. I could go on with other examples: The brilliant relegation of Recovery to a 10.30 Friday night timeslot - the one time of the week when anyone in their 20s is certain to be out for the evening. This was a prelude to its axing (no doubt due to low ratings). The effective quarantining of non-boomers on ABC radio to JJJ, keeping the metropolitan stations free for twee, comforting pap for the mums and dads. The annoying consistency with which the 7.30 Report turns in stories on "how we're helping the damaged kids out there". Kerry O'Brien always manages to assemble that look of deep concern for those teenagers who were too underprivileged to ever know what a Whitlam government was like. The net result of all this was wholesale abandonment of the ABC by anyone under 35. The current management has been accused of being ratings obsessed. But in 1999 when Jonathan Shier took the job, the ABC did not have a single show in the top 50 most-watched programs in that demographic. Not one. When that happens the ABC does indeed have a ratings problem. As the Nine network struggles to retain its dwindling old-fart demographic it is forced into intergenerational hot-button issues, which will only alienate younger viewers even more. The old boomers at the ABC see their loss of younger viewers differently. They see it as evidence that young people just aren't as serious, as committed as the boomers were when they were - gulp - young. So amid all the calls for the ABC to adequately represent both sides of the spectrum, I'd ask you to bear in mind there are other struggles - generational, class-based, regional - that often work at right angles to the old boomer left vs the neo-conservatives tug-of-war. Comedian Richard Fidler has worked on and off for 12 years for the ABC as a writer/presenter. His 13-part series, After Shock, goes to air on ABC TV from May 3. This is an edited extract of his address for a recent Institute of Public Affairs conference about the ABC. |