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In an episode of the Doug Anthony Allstars' anarchic televised comedy show, D.A.A.S Kapital, Tim Ferguson asked Doug-Mate Paul McDermott to describe his life. "My life" wailed McDermott, "Is a cumulus cloud that rains misery over the flooded fields of my tragic memory. My life is like a young virgin girl, unsoiled, trying to find a youth hostel in Marakech but accidentally stumbling into a Turkish bordello, bathhouse and opium den. I hate my life! I hate my life!" The audience thought he was joking. "I never feel really too stable," confesses McDermott, 33, comedian, singer, painter, writer, and razor sharp compere of Good News Week ABCTV's newest satire, in which two competing teams of celebrities attempt to wittily deconstruct the week's news. "I always feel agitated, permanently agitated."
It's a state that has worked for him, both during his eight-year stint with the Allstars and since they disbanded at the end of 1994. In the past six months he has written and starred in Mosh, a frenetic mix of dance, song and acerbic McDermott monologues set against a rave party and based, he says, on "My drug-addled observations when I've been abusing substances". Mosh has just finished its run at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and may tour nationally later in the year. Critiques of the show have ranged from "Often Hilarious" to "an Ugly, grubby, cheap piece of undergraduate cabaret".
McDermott is also painting a series of small landscapes in oils for an exhibition and working on a film script and an album of his own compositions. "I always feel I've got to rid myself of something," He says "I don't know what it is but I hate having it stored inside me. I hate having ideas or thoughts crusting up my skull."
McDermott is sitting uncharacteristically still on the end of a futon bed in the loft of his Melbourne warehouse home. Amid the clutter on a desk at one end of the room is a box of assorted glass eyes he brought in India, a cross-sectioned plastic medical torso and a container of paintbrushes. A display of antique wooden skulls, also from India, sits on a chest. Though McDermott spends most of his time in Sydney these days where Good News Week is taped, this room is him: artistic, macabre, witty and, on good days, bathed in sunlight.
Good Days? "I'm getting to be a grumpy old man," he smirks "I can't do anything lately without complaining about it. I'm not sure if that’s mellowing or just a different outlet for the bitterness."
The second eldest - Paul is one minute younger than his twin Sharon - of John, a retired senior public servant, and housewife Betty's six children, he traces his angst back to stifling school days at Canberra's Marist College. The School's Priority, he says, was "to make a good football team so that you could impress other Catholic schools in the area with your brute strength and machismo". His interest in art, he says, "might as well have been witchcraft". Every year at school "felt like a step deeper and deeper into a limbo or abyss".
After completing Year 12 and spending two years abroad, McDermott enrolled in a Canberra art school and hit his stride. "That was the first time in my life I actually felt like I was alive." He says. In '85, while performing street theatre with a group of art students called Gigantic Fly, McDermott met Tim Ferguson (The first Doug to turn TV frontman now hosting the Nine Network game show Don't Forget Your Toothbrush) and Richard Fidler who, with Robert Piper, were doing comedy routines around Canberra as the Doug Anthony Allstars, allegedly named after the former Country Party leader. Piper left to live overseas, the Allstars asked McDermott to Join and one of Australia's most successful comedy exports - Eight international festivals including hit seasons at the Edinburgh Festival - was born. "The primary reason for joining the Allstars was monetary," says McDermott "I'd been stealing canvas from the bins around the art school."
"In the early stages we used to rely more on song parodies," recalls Richard Fidler, 31, who became the willing fall guy for much of the group's subsequent cruel humour. What did McDermott bring to the group? "The Voice of an angel" says Fidler, "and a personal hygiene problem." For Fidler, who now lives in Sydney and produces entertainment CD-ROMs, a highlight of MOSH "was to see that Paul has finally got himself a costume without sleeves in it"
"There definitely is a 'Paul Smell' but you come to love it when you know him pretty well," laughs comedian Wendy Harmer, 40, who shared a house with McDermott in Melbourne (with few fights over the shower, it seems.) in the mid-'80's. Harmer describes McDermott, whose MOSH monologue includes references to bestiality, masturbation, social diseases, cancer and drugs, as "incredibly sweet natured. He always makes beautiful home-made birthday cards with his drawings on them and writes you poetry and sends lovely letter when he's away."
Ted Robinson, who as the former head of ABC-TV comedy invited the Allstars to appear on 1989's The Big Gig, has smelled the smell and seen the complexity. "He's paranoid, he's a fascist, but he's also capable of being warm and generous." Adds Robinson, "if he's not being suicidal. There's an intensity about everything he does. No wonder he pulls the birds."
"I'm in love every 25 seconds of every day." Says the currently single McDermott. Not that love takes away his edge. "There's a permanent part of myself that is reserved for being upset and depressed. I don't think I necessarily take that out on the people I'm with."
He's occasionally tried to block those shadows. "Drugs are good forms of escape but they have their own agitations," says the comic, "whether it's stomach cramps or a sudden concern that your respiratory system is failing or your kidneys have fallen out your back.
"Sleeping is good," he adds, "But even then I have bad dreams." Woody Allen-esque angst aside, "He was always the one who would say 'I love your hair' or 'that's a great frock'" says Harmer "What more do you want from a fella?"
"IT was always said that eventually we'll do this kind of show, and that we would showcase bands that normally didn't get a guernsey on more commercial oriented programs," recalls GNW host Paul McDermott of when the variety show first appeared. Case in point for this would be having The Gadflys and Karma County as the house bands at various times, artists very unlikely to appear on other, more commercial music shows.
"A LOT of the bands that were on last year, certainly the young Australian bonds, I think it's great to have a show like this on a commercial station which allows them an outlet. Normally the ABC was the only place that groups could be seen, like Killing Heidi or Jebediah. It's great to be able to have that quality and strength on the show," McDermott adds.
THE resulting CD features McDermott a number of times, both solo and singing with guests such as Rebecca Barnard (Rebecca's Empire) and Caroline Kennedy (Deadstar).There's also songs from guests like The Gadflys and Karma County, plus Ben Lee, Yothu Yindi and more. There's the serious side such as McDermott's stirring rendition of Shivers, coupled with the fun side of The Sandman, and numbers like Marcia Hines, Mark Trevorrow and McDermott singing I Got The Music in Me.
"SOME people you can't stop from singing, but a lot of performers have different strings to their bows and that's good when you can take them out of the context you're normally seeing them in and give them something else to do, recalls McDermott of the guests they've had perform on the show.
I SUPPOSE one of those guests you can't stop from singing is Bob Downes alter ego Mark Trevorrow.
"YEAH, you can't shut him up [laughs]. You have to gafter tape him and put him in the back room. Though I still don't think that would be enough. Doing something like having him and Marcia sing together is pretty extraordinary, a lot of cultural diversity and weirdness happening there."
"IT'S just fun to have someone like Marcia and Mark and far the interested and willing to do things that they normally wouldn't do. Take them out of their comfort area and create something in less than two days befam it goes on air. That's the thing with most of the tracks, certainly all the ones that are produced in house, they're done in like a couple of days. It puts a lot of strain on everything, but it also makes for an interesting and eclectic mix."
OCCASIONALLY McDermott presents his original material on the show, but it's definitely not an ego thing. The explanation is much simpler in that if a band drops out or doesn't show up he has to step in. "It's not the best situation to be in, to try and host the show and then at the end of it go out there and have a yodel because it's quite draining over the course of the day," McDermott says of his performances on his show. "The original material I came up with Paul Mac or Mick Moriarty (of The Gadflys). I've got so much stuff. I've always written songs. If there was a need for another song in the show, I'd get a tap and go in there and put it together."
THIS year the show is reverting back to one night a week due to the incredible strain of producing two shows a week. The game show elements will be more on the news side of things, but the live music will still be there. "We'll still pursue as much independent and different music as we can, because I think there are more than enough shows catering for mainstream stuff at the moment," McDermott says. "Certainly the diversity of bands we had last year was fantastic. Anyone interested in music in Australia would have liked the program just for that."
Paul Mc Dermott, former Doug Anthony All Star, current host of the television program Good News Week, man of splendid voice and well-renowned quick wit, is a natural performer. But unlike many performers, he doesn't crave the stage, he has never caught 'the bug'.
"It's an odd thing, the bug, a lot of people say they feel the, have to perform, they have to be in front of an audience. I don't really have that feeling, I enjoy it when I'm doing it.. I have to write things down, that's the thing I have to do. That doesn't mean I have to show anyone," he laughs.
"I needed to feed myself,' admits McDermott, taking us back to those post-DAAS days. "The money I'd made from the All Stars ran out pretty quickly, and I'd lived off it basically for a year, fairly easily, but it got to a point where I thought I'd better start doing something, otherwise I'd have to go and live in Nimbin, which wouldn't have been a bad option... get a little herb garden goin'..."
The new year not only welcomes Good News Week back to the airwaves, but also greets the release of the second Good News Week CD, the follow up to the original spoken word album being a collection of songs performed live on the show by a collection of Australian artists, including Mark Trevorrow, Mandawuy Yunupingu of Yothu Yindi, Josh Abrahams and Amiel Daeemion, Ben Lee, The Gadflys, Paul Kelly and McDermott himself.
"Sometimes I write them to order, depending on what we've been talking about," says McDermott of the five songs he wrote and performed on the album "For instance, The Drugs song happened around the time of the scandals involving the safe shooting rooms, and that was about the same time they were having the big conference and so on and the show that we were doing, for some reason, had taken on the aspect of a drug aware show, and so to our closing item. Whether people picked up on that at the time or not, it didn't really matter, it was something for us and we weren't trying to push a point or anything, but that's why that was included on that show. The other ones, Happiness was something I had from years ago that I did in a show, Bottle comes from the time with the All Stars. And a lot of the other tracks there are just things that I've written recently.
"I always write, I can't stop writing, I wish I could sometimes, but I always scribble and make notes."
Is the show your only outlet for this writing?
"It s my only public outlet." McDermott begins to laugh... "I'm just looking at my mess of thought at the moment, which is three dimensional and clustered all over my floor... I have a lot of other crap that I do for myself, but I don't have to show anyone or feel I have to get it out there. I'll probably show people one day, when I get a bit more confidence."
Confidence was not something Good News Week's musical guests always had their proficiency being pushed to the limits with last minute, barely rehearsed musical surprises the order of the day But most were willing to throw caution to the wind.
"Its quite worderful to have that creative expression. You get caught into a mentality of selling product, and you wanna sell x amount of product, so it s gotta be exactly the same as it was on the record, but then you have people miming their songs on shows, and we thought, we re not gonna do that, we want people to do it live, and if they wanna do it a different way if they wanna do it as an acoustic number, if they wanna put more bizarre backing tracks in there, or have our musicians play on it, then, more fun."
"There's a lot of great Australian bands coming out at the moment. There seems to be a stronger lyric base, better melodies, just better thought in regards to it. Someone like Powderfinger, I just think they're glorious. And Killing Heidi, they're amazing, and it s great to see that their fortunes have changed over the last few months of the year, and the album's gone number one, and the single's been up there for weeks now, so I just think that's fantastic. It's great to be put in that position where we actually have a show in a prime time slot that can get some of these bands on, from both here and overseas.