My television experience reads: two appearances on TVTV, in which I was interviewed by Simon Townsend and looked very much like Coco the Clown chatting to a coffee table; an audition for Play School, in which I couldn't stop my hands shaking long enough to build an eensy-bloody-weensy spider out of the egg carton and pipe cleaners; and a guest panellist spot on Good News Week last Friday. For those who have turned on the ABC at 8pm on Fridays for the past few weeks, expecting to encounter Judi Dench or Hyacinth Bucket, the slot has been filled by the leering Paul McDermott leading a game show modelled on the British Have I Got News For You?

The local version, while still following the original's brief of dissecting news events in a way that encourages wit as much as accuracy, leans towards a baser, more anarchic style. In truth, it is only now discovering its level, deciding just where the lines are drawn. The baby of Ted Robinson, GNW features McDermott as host and Mikey Robins and Anthony Ackroyd as team captains. The remaining two panel spots for each team are farmed out.

The invitation for The Guide to appear was either a clever ploy by Robinson to ensure that the show wasn't bagged in the Spectrum TV column, a cheap thrust for publicity, or a charitable offer to see life on the other side of the camera.

I'm here to tell you it ain't so easy. We have all had conversations in which we have struggled to express exactly what we'd intended. We have staggered away with a head full of I-shoulda-saids. In programs such as GNW, your failure to find the right words is taped, packaged and shipped off to be replayed on screens across the country.

My preparation for the gig was pretty simple: read newspapers and trashy magazines and watch telly. Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing just which piece of nonsense will be thrown at you, leaving you at the mercy of your own brain. The gags that come so readily to the tongue after several shots of hard liquor on a weekend afternoon tend to linger in a dark corner of the head when you are confronted with television cameras, lights and a studio audience.

The team going to battle was led by Robins, with Melissa George from Home & Away and me in support. Our opponents were Ackroyd, Amanda Keller and the comedian Linda Gibson.

In our pre-show briefing, Robinson insisted that accuracy was unimportant, winning wasn't everything, and the important thing was to have fun. This immediately went against everything I stand for. Hell, GNW may just be a jumped-up parlour game, but it ends with winners and losers. I love to shunt visitors out my front door after giving them a right walloping at cards or Pictionary on my home carpet.

Our first task was to identify a bit of television news footage. From memory, I managed to offer 'nice house' and 'Skasey'. Actually, Melissa George might have said 'nice house'. But I was thinking it. Then I was confronted with the following list of tabloid headlines and asked to pick the real one:
* Palace gardener sacked after corgi eats weed killer.
* Prince Philip named as other man in Fergie-Andrew divorce.
* Royal love child bombshell ... I'm the Queen's Aussie cousin.
I should have regaled the audience with the story about the Australian Rules footballer who, it is claimed, is related to royalty after some outback snogging in the family. What I said was, 'Ah, three ... the third one.'

I warmed up, but didn't set the screen on fire. I'm saving that for next time. Afterwards, we sought the safety of the green room, longing for reassurance from those in power, desperate for any reaction other than 'the set looked good'. Meanwhile, the taping of the night's second show, to be screened this Friday, was under way, with the writing team gathered around the green room monitor riding every gag.

Me, I drank a lot of red wine really quickly. Oh, and we won.

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 skepticism 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 Robins, who can not only find the essential absurdity in a given topic but has the gift of running with it, of wildly 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 spontaneity. If the program is semi-rehearsed, if some of the ad libbing has been prearranged, 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 themselves, 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 line that an inebriate might walk in police custody.

"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 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 core 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 panellists 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, Quanturn host Adam Spencer, and Susan Stocklmayer, the deputy director of the ANUs 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 six 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 cauhgt 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's 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 a 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's 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 half way through the show and remind them that there is no prize here, but people get incredibly competitive".

Guest competitors aren't the only ones who 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's 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 anoter tough one for Robins. He enjoys the crowd favourite "Warren" and likes watching the other team play "Bad Street Theatre".

"I'll tell you the 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 Robin's team will consist of Kate Carnell and Tim Flannery. They'll be up against McCrossin and her team, Adam Spencer and Susan Stocklmayer.

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 I'll get going, and Julie will get going, and everyone will have a ball."

One of the things Spencer enjoys about Good News Week is its 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 enjoty it as much, and in some ways more, thank 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 that generally feeling of 'well, let's see what happens tonight', I think that is sort of missing on the 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 he will stay at his day job, as 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 station at the end of last year and thought long and hard about it, before deciding Triple J was where he still 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 says every year is the last year."

While he is yet to decide where he will finish his days as a radio DJ, he has decided what he will do when he does.

"I've always said my aim in life is to open 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 byt nice little things off recently deceased grandmothers and mark them up to exorbitant prices and 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."

And then there were ... well, how many exactly? How that H.G. Nelson and Roy Slaven, long the biggest cheeses in Aunty's comedy pantry, have announced they are to adorn Seven's Olympic TV platter, the number of TV comedy programs carried by the ABC can be counted on one finger. And it's a finger that may well be pointed accusingly - perhaps even rotated rather rudely - at ABC management by audiences nationwide as they discover that the occasionally gigglesome "BackBerner" is now, as they say, "it".

Management has responded a little queasily, pointing out that Greig Pickhaver and John Doyle will continue to present "This Sporting Life" on Triple J. And ABC head of publicity Lesna Thomas says the pair will be producing TV specials at some time in the future ("there are plans, but nothing on contract yet").

For now, however, the fact remains - H.G. and Roy are gone. And the question in many viewers' minds is not so much how could Aunty let this happen, but rather, how could she let it happen again? Over the years thegutting of ABC-TV's comedy stocks by the commercial networks has become something of a ritual. Norman Gunston, Andrew Denton, "Good News Week" and practically the entire "Late Show" team are just a few examples of ABC talent picked up like ace strikers for spots in the premier league. But it isn't the lure of more cash, as many might suspect, that draws these stars from the ABC's grasp. A lot of the time, it seems, the ABC just doesn't know how to hold on to a winner.

"The one thing the ABC can't deal with is success," says Ted Robinson, executive producer of "Good News Week", both at Ten and the ABC.

"They're very supportive when you're struggling, but the moment you're successful they don't know how to deal with it... they've just never had a great ability to manage the lives of their stars and evolve them through to the next stage of their careers. It's become a bit of an embarrassment. They hit a kind of glass ceiling, a point where no-one knows what to do with them."

Although Robinson, who spent the best part of three decades with the ABC, concedes that "Good News Week" left partly because "life was getting a bit easy", he stresses there is a great reluctance to leave the national broadcaster.

"I don't know of anybody in my experience who's ever regarded the ABC as a stepping stone to commercial TV. Most people make shows for the ABC because that suits their sensibilities. The ABC audience is going to be the natural constituency for the sort of program they'd like to make."

Nonetheless, Robinson is sanguine about H.G. and Roy's future away from Aunty's fumbling embrace. With just one reservation. "They're almost the perfect vehicle," he says, "and probably impervious to any problem commercial TV can throw at them. But the dilemma that every program that goes from the ABC to commercial TV faces is whether your established ABC audience goes with you. Often people are philosophically opposed to watching programs interrupted by commercials.

"Three are greater rewards somwtimes," adds Robinson, "but there are also greater perils. You're never quite sure whether you're not going to disappear in a puff of smoke."