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His basket contained:
$18 worth of pistachio nuts ($12.99 a kilo)
$0.89 A large bottle of mineral water
TOTAL $18.89
Why did you buy these items?
Because they are full of vitamins and minerals and easy to prepare.
Where did the inspiration come from?
Staying up late and watching the cricket.
Who benefited from what you bought?
Me, me, me.
Who would you most like to shop - and cook - for, given the chance?
My girlfriend, Laura.
Best shopping Tip?
Always aim to shop on an empty stomach.
And if the trend away from real manhood is not arrested soon, it could spell disaster not only for Australia's Real Men, but for it's women too.
Triple J breakfast host and TV Good News Week wag Robins makes a plea for the time when snags were something you covered in tomato sauce in a backyard barbecue and the men's movement was a bunch of blokes playing cricket in his new book, due to be released soon.
Big Man's World, co-authored with fellow Triple J-ers Steve (Sandman) Abbott and Tony Squires, is a celebration of track pants and meat at barbies instead of fish.
"Your traditional man needs a bit of improvement, like the knowledge that feminism isn't going to threaten him," said Robins, who is about to take over Roy and HG's prime time spot on a Saturday night.
"But there are other things worth saving. I just find it hard to talk to someone these days who doesn't follow a sporting team. That's what men have traditionally had instead of intimacy: sport.
"You've always got to be able to have a conversation with anyone about sport - a barman, a bus driver or a cabbie.
"I don't want to know what my mate feels about something. I don't care about his deep inner thoughts. I don't want to know his mother's Christian name."
Robins believes the eclipsing of traditional male values is turning yesterday's men into today's pale imitations, who define themselves by what bread they eat, like focaccia or multigrain.
But, says Robins, the backlash has begun. "People are realising that crystals don't cure anything."
"I relate to Cary Grant's character in To Catch A Thief, the way he looks after himself, keeps himself in tip-top shape," said Robins. "If I hadn't ended up working as a radio announcer or as a television comedian, I would have been a cat burglar. I'm agile, I'm lithe, I can scurry around rooftops and barely make a noise. And I look damn good in black cashmere!"
Sitting at a little round table in the faded rooms of the Waverley Boawling Club in Sydney watching Robins suck on the straw of this lurid-colored drink, it's not hard to imagine what the kid Mikey might have been like. Chuckling between yarns about The Goon Show and old Morecombe and Wise reruns, he recalls watching his beloved rugby league team the South Sydney Rabbitohs fight it out against the North Sydney Bears on Souths home turf in June. Norths won, but that didn't stop Robins and mate Steve Abbott (Triple Js The Sandman) going troppo - shirts off and rubbing stomachs.
"I find it very surprising that I am 38," Robins says. "There are times when you think about your responsibilities and there is a little voice in your head that says, 'Well, actually, no, I'm just a big high school kid'."
Fortunately, the little voice didn't speak during Robins' recent wedding ceremony. In August last year the Good News Week star married long-time partner Laura Williams, a petite former actor who is now his business manager.
"She is phenomenally organised which is good because she also looks after the business side of my work," says Robins. "When she took it over I hadn't filed a tax retum for seven years. I'd paid all my tax. I am notoriously disorganised. She just gives me a list. If I'm out somewhere I ring her on the mobile and say, 'Do I have to be somewhere else now?"'
Williams, also 38, is the daughter of a pilot. She spent her early youth in Hong Kong and later worked in the superannuation industry in the United Kingdorn. The couple met four years ago at a Republican Party fundraiser in Sydney.
"She wasn't invited so she gate-crashed and grabbed a name tag of someone and the name she grabbed was mine," Robins recalls. "I heard her saying, 'Who in the hell is this Mickey Robins and I turned around and said, 'It's Mik-ey actually'. And we started talking." Robins describes her as "the love of his life". "She is incredibly generous of spirit, she's very forgiving, not just towards me. She's a very girly girl. She has a cream for every inch of her body. The latest thing is the electric toothbrush. She is incredibly neat."
I wonder how the fastidious, feminine wife manages Mikey's, blokey pastimes, Robins assures me she is relaxed. "It's fine," he says, puffing on a cigarette. "It's like, I'm going to the pub now darling'. (And she says) 'OK'. The only condition is I take the mobile. She can ring me at whatever time and tell me to get in a cab and come home, and I will.
"She's always saying she wants to come to the football with me, but she admitted at the end of the season that, she hates the game. The only thing she hates more than football is cricket."
Born Mikel Mason Robins, the comedian grew up in a laidback beachside locale of Newcastle in the 1960s. There are vivid memories of the swarms of aged pensioners who resided in his street, the broad suffbeaches, and large family gatherings with jovial Irish-Catholic relatives who told silly jokes, including a grandfather wag who took his teeth out for fun.
Robins' father worked as a weekend announcer at surf lifesaving carnivals, while dabbling in stand-up comedy at local events. "It was my introduction to talking into a microphone, Robins remembers affectionately. "My father was the centre of attention, and (I thought) that looks like fun. It was a good feeling, I think he would have wanted to have gone into show business, but the pressures of having a family..." His voice trails. "Times were different. He became a travelling salesman."
Selling hair-care products to salons, Bill Robins spent much of his week on the road. "Every now and then he would drive to Gosford. He would always pick up chocolates for us. He used to tell us there was a man in Gosford who made Bertie Beetle chocolates especially for us, I believed it completely until he kindly told me one day that he just bought them at the newsagency. That was a big year. I think there was no Santa and the first 'where babies come from' conversation, so they decided to destroy all three myths at once."
They were not the only childhood illusions to be destroyed. When Robins was eight his father was diagnosed with cancer and died two years later. There was always trips to hospital, and having to go to Sydney, and relatives crying and all that sort, of stuff. I'm not overly sentimental, but there was a sense that it probably would have made Dad proud (to know his son inherited his sense of hurnor). It probably would have made him happy."
In an effort to lift the grief, Robins' mother Leda decided to take Mikey and younger sister Gina as far from Newcastle as possible. Using Bill's life, insurance proceeds, she packed up their belongings and booked three air tickets to London. That six months abroad was an amazing awakening for Robins. "We went from living in this working-class suburb in Newcastle to living in the Green Park Hotel in London. It was the first time I discovered room service, catching cabs. I'd never been to an airport before, never been on a plane. It gave you a sense that there was more to life. Doing that at an early age made me realise that you could do things differently.
"She had a clogged sense of ambition," Robins says of his late mother. "She went to uni when she was 40 and became a teacher (Previously she had a job at K-Mart.) She wanted to change her life. She got her HSC, then studied for four years, to become an (English) teacher.
"It was a single-parent family, so yes, we were very close. I don't often talk much about my childhood. Not that it was that traumatic or anything, but people all think, 'Oh well, his father died early.' It was actually much more mundane than that. All childhoods are relative. People grow up in horrific circumstances and find happiness. It was sad that my father spent two years dying, but as a kid you are more worried about bikes and football."
And his weight? "It (his father's death) was the start of my ongoing battle with food. Nothing psychological. I always loved shoving food in my gob. I was always a chubby kid. But I think my mother just decided it was time to do something about it. She was very conscious of her weight. She was slim."
Sending him off to Weight Watchers with 15 middle-aged, overweight women may have been a mother's well-intentioned way of expressing love, but for 10-year-old Mikey there was only one word to describe it, "Appalling!"
Today he laughs about it, remembering it as a "weird" and "funny" thing. He jokes similarly about being teased over his chubbiness at school, but says he was no more picked on than the "kid with red hair or the kid with big ears."
"It was just playground stuff, You know what kids are like. Like any fat kid you're going to get picked on so it's best to get in first. I think anyone who has survived a public-school playground is pretty well grounded to get through life, I was hideous. I used to taunt people awfully."
Robins' carefree attitude to the "fatman" epithet belies a more basic human reality in which a large man, passionate about food and drink, is forced to succumb to salad sandwiches and personal training. "I hate it," he says. "I hate denying myself things. I hate exercise. The only way I did it (he lost 20 kilos after being diagnosed with an ulcer a year ago) was to become the sort of person I make fun of and get a trainer.
And she's great, I feel sorry for her though. She doesn't need an hour of me whingeing and scheming and pretending I've got cramp. "It's amazing. You have this mindset and suddenly you're at school and doing gym. You pretend your ankle's sore, you pretend you've got cramp. And at the end of it all you say, 'Hey, I got out of it'. I virtually did nothing, and it cost me 30 bucks. I can't help myself."
Mention the word food and Robins almost salivates. "He loves cooking it, eating it, and he writes great restaurant reviews," says freelance TV producer and long-time friend Helen Linthorne. Asked what he would do outside comedy and Robins is tongue-in-cheek, "I was in a deli today and I thought that'd be nice. Running a really good deli. Mind you, giving me a deli would be like giving Charles Manson a shotgun.
In the comedy business Robins is known for his flair for combining the gross with the intelligent, a lightning-quick wit and a natural ability to develop audience rapport. "He is the master of the strangely appropriate comment," says Sandman Steve Abbott, who studied arts with Robins at Newcastle University.
Good News Week co-star Julie McCrossin describes hirn as a "screamingly funny person", bounding with energy and never stuck for a word. She recalls Robins saving the day when filming Good News Week at last year's Brisbane Writers' Festival, which was hit by a freak electrical storm blackout. "The water was pour ing down and because of the wind it was blowing sideways directly into the performance area (with a 2500-strong audience). Well, Mikey just leapt up and started telling jokes, Bang - they were coming like a six-gun Western shootout... And absolutely good humor. You got the feeling that with a stubby of beer in his hand he could have told jokes until dawn."
Over the years Robins has earned his quid doing clown acts at children's parties, washing dishes at a Sydney pub, performing in a cabaret band called The Castanets (alternating between Elvis impersonations - "It was just me in a white jumpsuit playing Love Me Tender through a recorder up my nose" - and belting out tunes on conga drums). He has also co-written two books: Three Beers and a Chinese Meal (with Helen Razer), a best seller, and Big Mans World (co-authored by Abbott and Tony Squires), a series of musings on the ebb and flow of a male existence. A seven-year stint as Triple J breakfast show host ('91-99) launched his career in TV comedy, appearing on Live and Sweaty, and McFeast before joining Paul McDermott on Good News Week in '96.
His smart exterior - grey suit, black polished shoes and designer cufflinks - is an interesting guise for a man whose humor largely feeds on a drink-swilling yobbo image. What Good News Week fans want to know is whether the off-screen Mikey Robins is also a yobbo. "That's me," he volunteers. "I like going to the football. I like drinking vast quantities of alcohol with my mates, I'm a slob. I remember when I was living in share households, my flatmates used to charge admission for guests to see my room."
There is certainly a gross side to Robins. He burps, makes crass coments, swears intermittently, but The Sandman - best man at Robins' wedding - says, the yobho image is more perception than reality. "The stereotype is that you look at him and you think he's a yobbo, but there is more to him. He's also a real pussycat. For a big guy he's actually very gentle, he's incredibly well-read and super intelligent. He loves his cat Jasmine. Jasmine's the dumbest cat I've ever seen in my life and the guy loves that cat. He loves art. He's a renaissance man. He's like a conglomerate rock. In the end it just moulds into one giant."
Robins is at ease with the two personas. What defines yobbo-ism, he says, is lack of pretension. "I think them's an honesty there. Just because you're a yobbo doesn't mean your mouth moves when you read. I see no dichotomy between using the word dichotomy and having a rugby league team which I love dearly. Just because you read certain books, you like certain films, doesn't mean you have to enclose yourself in a red wine, Volvo, designer-clothed enclave. It is possible to enjoy rudimentary aspects of Australian life as well as having high-brow pursuits. I think that's a great thing about Australia."
Colleagues and friends speak highly of Robins' generosity, loyalty and relaxed disposition, his "lack of affectation in the face of success" and down-to-earth Aussie spirit. Says McCrossin, "He's proud of his Newcastle origins. He's passionate about South Sydney rugby league. He is a person of strong views about society and particularly social justice, and that comes through strongly when you're with him away from the tellly. On TV his views are always packaged in a ajoke."
Mikey Robins doesn't mind talking about his sensitive side. He says he's emotional - cries at anything from soup advertisements to Titanic - loves history, and is a keen collector of Edo-period Japanese porcelain. But, at present, the thing he is most passionate about it Laura.
"I am a very lucky man," he says with faint disbelief. "I married the love of my life. We both met each other in our 30s. To meet someone in the relationship game, that's actually leaving it to quite late in the day. To meet your perfect partner then.. you're thankful every day."