>>>Mikey Robins' Articles<<<
Ask the icon - Mikey Robins
Television host
Q Can you remember the last time you cried, and why?
The last time John Howard opened is mouth about reconciliation.
Q Which household duties do you take responsibility for?
Fifty percent of the cooking, bringing the bins in and out, and grunting at tradesman when they come around.
Q Would you ever have your chest, back or legs waxed?
No way, I fear the wax. Clipping my nostril hair is painful enough. I have one of those Ronson things and if you don't keep the blade clean, it's very painful.
Q Have you ever been on a diet and, if so, did it work?
I'm constantly on a diet. I lost 20kg last year - that was the "get diagnosed with an ulcer diet".
Q How would you feel if you put on 10kg?
I'd feel like February had come again. I finish work at the end of November and for three months over Christmas, every year, the weight just creeps back on.
Q Do you have an exercise routine and, if so, what does it involve?
I exercise with a trainer a few times a week. If she's not around, I do nothing. She takes me for these death marches all over the Eastern suburbs. She knows every flight of steps between Bondi and Bronte. If it wasn't for her I'd probably be twice the size.
Q What's you remedy for bouncing back after a big night?
Coca Cola, bacon and hours of gazing at the weather channel.
Q Are you comfortable discussing your partner's exes?
Totally, but only in a derogatory way.
Q Is there one thing you would find very hard to give up?
Just about anything that's bad for me. Cheese is my weakness. I love good, stinky blue cheese. I was left unsupervised in the cheese room at a deli the other day. By the time my wife caught me the Amex was screaming.
Q What is always sure to embarrass you?
Watching myself on telly. Remembering what I said the day after a big night. I'm still apologising for last Sunday night.
Q How important do you think marriages is and why?
It's the most important thing in my life. It changed my life completely. It makes you complete. It's like the bedrock of your existance.
Q If you could change one thing about yourself what would it be?
I'd like to fit into the same pair of jeans I wore in year 12, that would be nice.
Q What part if your body do you like the most and why?
My mouth, because it makes me money.
Q What part of your body do you like the least?
The bit between the mouth and knees
Q Is there anything that is guaranteed to make you angry?
Intolerance and stupidity. Australia's becoming an international pariah over reconciliation, mandatory sentencing, our stance in Kyoto, the fact we're the world's fourth biggest clearer of virgin rainforests. I don't want to sound hippy-ish as a conservative left-wing guy, but this Governments turning me into a hippy.
Q Do you have an ultimate dream in life and, if so, what is it?
Twenty-four hours with no phone calls.
Q What are you most passionate about in life?
Working with my friends. My new barbecue - I have four burners of testosterone, meat altering technology in the backyard. I love to clean it.
Q What was the last thing that made you laugh?
I just spent half an hour driving with Sandman while he tried to find a computer shop and it was the funniest half hour of my life. My friends make me laugh.
Q If you could be anyone in the world, who would it be?
I'm happy being who I am. If not, I'd like to be the head of the NRL so south Sydney could be reinstated.
Q Do you have a favourite place and, if so, where is it?
My lounge because I feel comfortable there. I really like the South Coast, Jervis bay, Highams beach.
Q What's the most fun you can have by yourself?
That's a very naughty question.
The Sunday Telegraph - 23/4/00
The Weekend Australian
Good Brews Week
Mikey Robins has spent the past few months on a dream assignment, traversing the eastern seaboard in search of that intangible ingredient that makes a pub something special.
And it has nothing to do with alcohol.
He's looking for pubs that have a certain community atmosphere- or what he and his crew dubbed the "Cheers factor".
The Good News Week regular has visited scores of watering holes in Hobart, Melbourne and Sydney, attempting to define what makes a pub great.
It's thirsty work but somebody's got to do it.
The fruit of his labour is a documentary called Mikey, Pubs and Beernuts, and features celebrities including ALP leader Kim Beazley and Whitlams frontman Tim Freedman revealing their preferred places to bend an elbow.
And Robins discovered during this odyssey, pubs, they are a'changing. Sticky carpet has been replaced by polished floorboards; schooners by Lemon Ruskies and the community spirit which was once an integral part of the public house is disappearing.
"It's an institution that we're not necessarily losing but it's changing and it's becoming franchised, " he explained over a lemon squash, as the sun is not yet over the yardarm.
"And times have changed since my parents' generation. The older generation would go down to the pub to drink with their mates and it would be all guys, but now when I say I'm going for a drink there could be women as well. One of the things about the documentary was we were trying to say that drinking is important but there's a lot more to it than that."
Robins is frank when asked why he decided to make the documentary.
"Well I spend most of my time in the pub so I thought I may as well get paid for doing it." He said.
"We wanted to explore some of the finer pubs in the eastern suburbs."
Robins got his start in show biz as a comedian in a Newcastle bar and laments the demise of pubs as venues for live entertainment.
"The pubs used to be a place of bands and comedians but now they're full of pine furniture and pokie machines which kill conversations." He said staring grimly into his glass.
"At the pub where The Whitlams started, the stage area as turned into an area for pokie machines."
Propped up at a table at his favourite watering hole, the Waverley Bowling club, Robins is very much part of the furniture.
The locals gathered at tables around him barely glance in his direction as the make up artist and photographer fuss over him. Apart from a quick hello from one of the bar staff, it's as if he isn't even there.
In fact, the regulars seem determined not to make a big deal out of his star status- he might be a television celebrity in the outside world but in the bar he's just another drinker.
"This is my favourite pub and i moved a black around the corner from it about a year ago," he said. "But no, i didn't move to be closer to the pub."
The surroundings underpin the modesty of Robin's lifestyle despite his popular status among Triple J fans and Good News week viewers.
Mikey, Pubs and Beernuts focuses more on celebrities and their favourite pubs, but Robins said a second documentary would examine rural pub life as opposed to the urban variety.
First, however, he must recover from working on the current project, the first day of which involved copious amounts of alcohol- something he quickly regretted.
"I think on the first day we did about one interview because i kept getting a new beer to keep the shot looking fresh," he said sheepishly.
"But towards the end i was drinking only 25 percent beer in the drink- just enough to make it look dark- and it was terrible."
However, Robins admits that even he was a bit surprised by a couple of things he learned on his extended pub crawl, such as the fact that his GNW colleague Julie McCrossin eschews the demon brew.
"Julie is a total teetotaller, she doesn't drink at all," he said. "And I'm getting really fed up with that pub smell- it's the smell I won't get over."
- Television magazine, July 9-15, 2000.
A MAN WALKED INTO A BAR...and emerged with a television special.
GNW's Mikey Robbins has shot a special about sticky carpet, stale beer and trough lollies. It's called Mikey, Pubs and Beer Nuts, and somehow Robins suffered only one hangover during the entire shoot.
"The first day I went out I tried to drink all beer., but I was like, nup. After that I was on light shandies - and the shandies got weaker and weaker and weaker."
When it was all over, although his love of shandies had grown weaker, his love for one of our greatest institutions remained undiluted. Over a schooner (or pot), Robins had chatted with Kim Beazley, Allan Border, Annalise Braakensiek (of course), Andrew Denton, Amanda Keller, Wil Anderson and Tim Freedman.
"I wanted to do something as different as possible from GNW - something with a more gentle sense of humour. It's more about talking to people and through a series of shared anecdotes you start to build a picture of what and Australian pud's like, I hope/ The quick one liner has put a roof over my head for 10 years, But it's nice to try something different"
Naturally, Robins travels to Hobart to interview the cricketing swiller David Boon ("he was scary") and to Melbourne to meet a couple of neighbours lads, Dan Paris and Ryan "Toadfish" Maloney.
"I'd always wanted to meet toady. I've always been a fan. I remember at the aria'a or the logies or one of those a couple of years ago, he was just a really really nice bloke. So i just thought, 'Yeah I'd like to see where toady drinks'"
Gnw regulars Flacco and Sandman score a cameo in a wonderfully retro sketch, while Paul McDermott pops up to croon the beer soaked finale.
"That was Paul's idea, it was a great way to finish it, but we had to throw my suit out. After eight hours of being covered in flat, warm beer, it stunk."
Melbourne Age, 11/7/00
"It's just what we watch between food and sleep. Which takes us to the vicinity of Mikey Robins, an eerie, walking evocation of both, and tonight's beer-mat-scented, carpet-sticking special Mikey: Pubs and Beer Nuts (Ten, 9.30pm).
No great leaps of emotional faith in this comic-celebrity guided tour of favorite Australian pubs, other than the momentary double-take brought on by the appearance of a studiously bespectacled and impressivley sober David Boon. But televison, at its best, aims to capture the novel and rare.
We leave Mr Boon thumbing a dog-eared Proust and perhaps contemplating the evening's first crisp, but not over-chilled, unwooded chardonnay, to find a buoyant HG Nelson at the stoop of Sydney's Clovelly Hotel; we breast the bars of Bondi with Annalise Braakensiek; take yet another voyage to the outer limits of inflated ego with Nick Giannopoulos; brown bag it with Richard Stubbs (the man without a pub) and soak in the well-timed wit of Amanda Keller and Andrew Denton.
We even spend a perhaps overly long moment ogling the strippers at Emma Tom's local. Whether this was for Emma or Mikey's benefit remains unclear.
Quite a parade of genuinely amusing Australian celebrity Mr Robins has compiled here, so good that we forgive him the somewhat forced inclusion of his GNW pals: an ageing Castanet Club era viddy of Sandy, Flacco and Mikey was studiously, how to say this, unfunny. Yes, unfunny is the word."
- Jonathan Green.
Never leave the chair
--Newcastle University paper