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And so it is that, seated in McDermott's chilly office in the GNW warren at Fox Studios (Yes, he has bumped into Tom Cruise in the corridor), I find myself asking him what exactly these Journals of his say.
The thinking woman's breakfast choice (crumpet, muffin, brioche, whatever) folds his arms and shrinks into his chair. For a moment is seems that he is not going to answer the question, but then he cackles and finds the words.
"Mikey's been looking, obviously because I don't think I've shown him," he snorts. "He's been going through my bag. That's what it says. It says more about him than it does about me..."
It's a neat deflection, the kind that turns up often with the intensely private McDermott, whenever conversation approaches a doorway he doesn't feel like going through. As he speaks, he shoots a sideways glance at the nondescript blue notebook lying on his desk, but his hands stay firmly tucked under his armpits.
"They're just notes," he says dismissively, "ideas, thoughts, things I have to do..."
Pushed a little further, McDermott explains that he has "stacks" of those journals at home "food for the silverfish". He has been scribbling away in them for the best part of two decades, spurred by an experience at the Canberra School of Art when an installation was dismantled before he had the chance to document it. Since then, he has been fastidiously keeping a record of himself, not for posterity but for his own reasons.
So, given his long-term artistic bent, are these journals visual as well as verbal? There's another pause, then McDermott sighs and relents reaching for the book, holding it open on his lap while he flips quickly through its densely inked pages.
"Well, look, I wasn't going to show you," he says, his head down, his voice lowered. "This isn't a very good one...it's just this sort of stuff...notes...drawings...crap...rubbish, basically..rubbish...rabid..."
He trails off. Closes the book. Looks at the floor. I change the subject and he seems relieved.
The reluctant, oddly shy individual sitting opposite me is a considerable distance from the Paul McDermott we all think we know from television and stage.
When the big lights flash on, he is the smiling, power-suited cattle prod, the savage wit, the angry satirist, the vanilla-sweet chanter, the acidly sexy front man, the playfully satanic choirboy.
But while the real Paul McDermott is probably all those things, he is also the charming, carefully spoken, physically slight person here now. Whereas long-time pal and co-worker Robins is pretty much the same on and off camera, McDermott can seem the polar opposite, a mild-mannered Clark Kent to his onstage Superbastard.
"It's odd, because I don't think people expect what they get," he says. "After they've seen the show, they get quite disheartened when they meet me because they think I'm going to be something I'm not - loud. I do have moments when I drink and this other side comes out, but most of the time I'm fairly quiet."
All this makes more sense if you know McDermott was not destined to be a performer. He was not dancing on the table for cheering Auntie's at age six. He was not precociously wooing casting agents at nine. He was not making a name for himself in soaps in his teens.
Instead, he fell into performing while studying art, motivated not be the usual heady mix of egotism and insecurity, but by financial necessity.
When he began his career with the Doug Anthony All Stars, back in the mists of the early 1980s, he was finishing his degree and desperate for the cash to keep himself in canvas.
After three years of happily scrichting away in his burrow with a mapping pen, the would-be hermit discovered the instant gratification that audience applause could bring. Emerging, blinking, into the limelight he decided to stay there, surprising himself by doing so - he had not thought he could be so extrovert.
Since then there's little in media terms that the 36-year-old McDermott hasn't done. He has performed on stages around the world. He's written a book and a TV show. He's been a newspaper columnist. He's released records and videos (and even a comic). He's survived breakfast radio. He's been captain of the goodship GNW.
Through all of it, he has continued to experiment in the visual arts (he loves small drawings and making books , but also paints and sculpts) for his own amusement and sanity. Which makes it even stranger that, with a bulging CV like his, the one glaring omission is: art exhibition.
"I think it would be very difficult for me to have an exhibition," he says, "because I would feel very exposed. All this [he waves at his GNW surroundings] is like a front, a facade.
"It's the idea of having strangers look at these things that are so personal, at what's in my head. I can do what I do on television, but to open a book and show someone is still difficult for me. Even showing you before, I felt uncomfortable."
According to McDermott, there is no single reason for the defection of Good News Week to Ten this year. There were instead a bunch of small reasons that just seemed to add up.
He says ABC budget cuts would have made it impossible for the team to make both GNW and Good News Weekend. He points out that had they stayed at Aunty, they would have been absorbing dollars that could be better used developing new talents and ideas.
"Also, we were comfortable and whenever I'm at the point where everything is going smoothly and comfortably in my life, I have always unfortunately destabilized it.
"All those things were working towards us doing something a bit radical. So when channels Ten, Seven and Nine offered us the chance to jump..."
What, SBS didn't?
"No weirdly, SBS didn't come through...Ten was the only one I was interested in at all. My favourite program at the moment it the World's Wildest Police Videos. Have you seen it? It's a gift from God.
"I just think Ten has shown a bit of foresight lately. It's heading for a certain demographic, focusing on it. It hasn't done what the networks have been doing for years, which is wanting all Australians to be watching 24hrs a day, ensuring a level of mediocrity."
So the GNW move is all philosophical, then, and not just a question of great stinking wads of commercial television cash?
"Oh, God, no!" he says, appearing genuinely taken aback. "My wage has gone up a little bit, but nothing compared with what people think."
If the remuneration situation is not hugely improved, it has to be said that even less has changed elsewhere for the GNW team. Produced out of house for the ABC, the program is made in the same way, by the same people, for Ten.
The network switch (the contract is for one year and he can't see the show for going longer than two, even if it is turned around the flat ratings and becomes a success) has fired up McDermott, giving him energy to overcome his restless urges.
McDermott concedes that he is "fairly" self-analytical, but declines to offer motivations for why his onstage self behaves the way he does, other than to say that the aggressiveness is the legacy of the Australian male childhood, with its rituals of peer abuse, its barrage of testosterone truths. He says he used to save himself with his mouth rather than his fists, but when asked if he's a pacifist, reveals that "if I was physically capable, I would be a bully".
Asked to nominate his strengths, he fires back: I'm cheap, I don't talk back. And I make tea for everyone." Left to fill the gap, I venture that the core of his appeal is his ability to shift performance gears with going through neutral, to instantly change direction and emotion. As a viewer, you are never safe with McDermott around, never certain that where you think your going is where you'll end up.
"I'm conscious of that play," he says. "That's what I really like, the thing loving people one second, and hating them the next, the moodiest of the play onstage. That's basically what I do. It's slap, slap, slap, hug, slap. That's fun. I don't know where it comes from."
Something about the way he says the last line makes me think he's lying here, that he is well and truly aware of what makes him tick. But I know we're not going through that door. And he knows that I know it.
So Mikey Robins was right. Those journals probably do have a lot to say about Paul McDermott. But if you want to know exactly what, you'll have to go through his bag yourself.
*only five of these are true.
"My home town...love Adelaide, love the Hills, love the Crows," says McDermott, endeavoring to ingratiate himself to us in the lead up to his Channel 10 premiere.
"My cousin was captain for a number of years, Chris McDermott."
"Yeah right," said we, before putting in a call to Triple M, McDermott's radio station just in case. Shock, horror. Paul was actually telling the truth. Triple M informs us Paul McDermott is actually Chris's father's brother's son, making them first cousins. And what's more, it's believed Paul, is the son of a taxman (no wonder he's been so coy about his past).
"He owned up did he?" says Chris, of the cousin connection. "His family were here until Paul might have been 10 or 12 before he went to Canberra. His father went over with work. So Christmases and all those sort of family things, we used to spend quite a bit of time together, we were about the same age. My memories of him were of a relatively quiet, good fun, skinny kid.
Then when he popped up on TV as this lunatic, I thought 'God'. I think he's got a real sense of humour," Chris adds. "I don't know (whether the move to ten) puts a restriction on his warped sense of humour or it's good for it."
More importantly, could Paul, a former Doug Anthony All Star play footy? "He wasn't without talent, although I'm sure he's far better in his chosen field. He's Become this superstar," says Chris. But surely not as big as the mighty Crows? "Probably bigger, in his own right."
TV WEEK: Have you got any nicknames?
PAUL: Yes - Mr Stinky, Uncle Pooh-Pooh, The Generator. Mr Grumpy is another one.
TVW: Wendy Harmer once shared a house with you. She said, "There is definitely a Paul smell".
PAUL: There's a Wendy smell as well. With the Allstars (the comedy trio the Doug Anthony Allstars), we had this sense-o-round idea - see them, hear them, smell them. It certainly worked in small venues. We never washed our costumes. My costume took on a life of its own. But those days are gone. I haven't been accused of having a bad odor for years.
TVW: Do you still tell lies to journalists?
PAUL: It's a bit harder when you're doing the solo thing. In the Allstars, we'd cover for each other. We have deceived TV Week in the past, and I feel bad about that. You once had two pages of absolute crap about us being in Ab Fab.
TVW: Then there was the Batman movie (the Allstars said they were drinking buddies of Jack Nicholson and were going to appear in the second Batman movie).
PAUL: That was a gem. It was like lightening striking twice. My other favorite was telling the UK press that Doug Anthony was the assassinated Prime Minister of Australia, our Nelson Mandela, killed in office on November 11, 1975. That got printed in The Times, The Guardian and The Independent. There were so many of 'em (lies), and we were caught out only a few times.
TVW: The Good News Week album features your monologues from the show as well as you singing a version of Hunters & Collectors' Throw Your Arms Around Me.
PAUL: We used to do that song overseas with the Allstars and pretend it was our song, because no one knew who the Hunnas were.
TVW: Your Good News Week buddy Mikey Robins says you're "so nasty when he talks and so beautiful when he sings", and Tom Jones said you had a great voice. Will you ever do your own serious album?
PAUL: I'd like to have time to explore those avenues. I like singing, but I haven't had the time to put together something substantial that I'd want to put out.
TVW: After the Allstars, Tim Ferguson joined the Nine Network. Are you open to commercial offers?
PAUL: I would say if you got your own way with a commercial station, it would almost be worthwhile, but not to go over as a gelding. Approaches have been made, but I wouldn't compromised what I have at the ABC, which is a fantastic forum for free speech and ideas.
TVW: What are the chances of an Allstars re-formation (the third member, Richard Fidler, hosts Race Around The World on the ABC and Mouthing Off on Foxtel's thecomedychannel)?
PAUL: None whatsoever. It's not like a band, which can get back together after 10 years and play songs people made love to. Very few people make love to comedy albums, so there's not that same nostalgic value.
TVW: On the album you joke about Princess Di and Stuart Diver. Is there any subject you won't touch?
PAUL: Not really. I think you should be able to talk about anything.
TVW: Do you like being the bad boy?
PAUL: I don't think I am. I'd like to be the happy boy!
TVW: You once said "I always fell agitated, permanently agitated".
PAUL: I'm in a happy state now. No, I still feel agitated, cynical and annoyed, but I'm not sure at what. I suspect I'll feel like this my whole life.
TVW: What was the last CD you bought?
PAUL: The Boogie Nights soundtrack.
TVW: Do you like being recognised?
PAUL: It doesn't happen and I don't know why, It's always been that way. In the Allstars, we'd be sitting three abreast on a plane and people would lean over me to get Tim and Rich's signatures and then say, "Where's Paul?"
TVW: What does your twin sister, Sharon, do?
PAUL: She's a primary school teacher and she recently became a storyteller.
TVW: Have you got any tattoos?
PAUL: No. I think the whole tattooing thing is a bit funny.
TVW: What next?
PAUL: With the Good News Week team, we're going to do a Saturday night program mid-year. Instead of looking at the weeks events, it will be a bit of a pop culture overview. It could be interesting.