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Richard, the shy, quiet third of the once-were Doug Anthony All Stars, is host of Mouthing Off, the anything but shy and quiet new show on the Comedy Channel.
"Basically, I sit in the middle of four ultra-opinionated people and start a fight," Richard said. "How do I keep control? I don't. I just get the ball rolling and let them go for each other. Adversarial TV is great stuff. I'd like to have Normie Rowe and Ron Casey on, as long as they appeared together. We'd probably have to get them to mud wrestle, naked."
Mouthing Off, although it's a lot of fun, does tackle serious issues. The producers choose topics for their relevance, and panellists for the variety of their ideas and their willingness to express them.
So the first four shows feature issues like Intolerance; Can you have too much money?; Will the Sydney Olympics be a success or a flop? Panellists include writer/film-maker Bob Ellis, radio broadcaster and comedian James O' Loghlin, film producer Margaret Fink, political journalist Debbie Spillane, Olympic diver Craig Robinson, country musician James Scanlon, and standup comedian and cartoonist Peter Berner.
"We taped those four shows in a day, and the panellists from the early shows hung around all day, still arguing," said Richard. There are 15 shows planned for the first series.
The Doug Anthony All Stars, once the top comedy/music group in Australia, made their final tour in December 1994. Richard, now 31, wasn't too upset that the 10 year association was over. "Touring takes it out of you, and there were other thins I wanted to do, like multi-media," he said. "I'm now working on CD-ROM based interactive movies and games. One, called Radiant City, will be out soon.
"Besides, on tour Paul (McDermott) and Tim (Ferguson) made me sit down the back of the Tarago, with the luggage. They had hotel suites, I slept in the car."
In fact, the trio still remain firm friends, and keep in touch. (Paul even got Richard a guest spot on his ABC show Good News Week). But they all have other careers now, and DAAS is kaput (although you can catch D.A.A.S Kapital on the Comedy Channel). Whereas Mouthing Off is alive, and kicking!
Paul: Before I met Richard, I'd seen the Allstars busking on the streets of Canberra. Hated them. I hated them vehemently. I didn't like their stuff at all.
Then we were both performing at the same cabaret club and Richard and I got talking afterwards. We discussed working together. A few weeks later the third member of the group, Robert, was ill and Richard asked me to fill in. I ended up staying.
We always had disagreements about the best way to handle things, the right music. Richard and I always had difficulties. I argue sensibly, with God and right on my side. Richard argues in a belligerent way and is closed off to suggestions. I'm very forgiving and he seems to hold on to pain.
Actually, I'm considered a monster.
While we were in the group, we lost track of friendship. You think: if the friendship is affected we'll give up because friendship is more important. But then you think, no, money - money is more important.
Any attempt to share our feelings or be honest was an invitation to be mercilessly attacked by the other two. The comedy was always black. Richard probably suffered more because he was more honest. Nobody could afford to slip up - it was survival of the fittest. It was always a battle of wills. He would accuse me of being domineering and controlling. But you've got to come up with the material and the last thing you want is a committee. These things work better as a dictatorship.
But I didn't always get my way. It took us a year to do Commies For Christ - one of our most successful songs - because Richard didn't like rap. Is he obstinate' I didn't say that. Let's say he has strong will power.
He's an incredibly tenacious person - incredible will to achieve, which I admire. When the group broke up, he wasn't going to do performance stuff because it wasn't so much his forte as ours. He saw himself as having a serious job. Well, now he's developed this whole CD-ROM thing and is holding down jobs in television.
Quite a severe shock. I was probably cramping his style all those years.
I think he was pretty unhappy in the middle years of the group. I was part of the problem. I think I let him down. I was probably nasty, even vindictive and cruel, but we came through it - the fact that we've still retained the friendship is so valuable.
A cathartic thing happened in Barcelona. We'd been there for the post-Olympics entertainment and we were at the airport along with half a million other people desperately trying to get home. I was so incredibly tired and angry. What triggered it was Richard going off to buy a paper while I struggled up the escalator with everyone's luggage. I lost my temper. I said I couldn't stand it any more, we were at loggerheads all the time. I was very , very aggressive. Richard was noble and listened to me. We sat, surrounded by all this hullabaloo and people and luggage, and talked for an hour at least. There might even have been a bit of crying.
Will I know him for the rest of my life? I have no idea.
Richard: We met at Cafe Boom Boom, a cabaret venue in Canberra. Paul was in a group called Gigantic Fly, parodying ?30s films, very clever. My first impression was that he had a beautiful singing voice. He was also spiky which was good. He had really abrasive moments in his performance.
We were very young. Tim was a bit of an explosive hippie in those days. Robert and I would stand there and smile a lot. When Paul joined, he changed the dynamic. He would come out with the worst possible thing that was in the back of everybody's mind. A really nasty, poisonous thought. I really enjoyed that. Once his mother was in the audience and Paul was doing a song called Mummy Dearest about crawling back inside your mother's womb. It was spectacularly visceral and offensive.
At first, I was happy to sing along and play guitar and play the straight man. Then the group moved to Melbourne and the audiences just weren't responding - we had to do something to provoke them. We started being a lot more vicious. I realised I wasn't as good at abuse as Tim and Paul - it made more sense for me to be the victim. I became Mr Stupid who was just naturally happy.
Paul being Mr Grumpy is pretty much for real. I've never known anybody to have such prolonged periods of grumpiness. He has a whole series of laws in his head and he can get very angry if you break one - and it's so easy. Not leaving enough milk for his tea would be one.
He is a bully, yes. He accuses people of his own worst sins. He could be bullying because he needed to show leadership in a situation where we were letting things slide. Other times it would be just his need to maintain authority and, often, to insist on his artistic prerogative. In retrospect, that was reasonable because he was the main artistic engine in the group. Not that I had been a picnic to work with either. My faults were, well, laziness and thoughtlessness, I suppose.
Paul is a very complex man. He's incredibly loyal - even though he might behave dreadfully to you to your face, then you hear stories of him coming to your defence. But he's also very unforgiving if he suspects you of disloyalty.
Once, I remember, we were painting backdrops in this theatre - he was doing the bulk of the work and I was going along in my own slow, plodding way - and we were talking, for hours. I felt really happy at the end, when we'd finished. It was like we'd reminded ourselves of why we'd liked each other in the first place.
Somebody said we were like an old married couple who know each other very well and always bicker. Well, that's true in a way.
When we were touring, we'd spend months on end sharing a Tarago stinking of Big Macs and beer and personal body odour. We were living like a triple-headed hydra confined in our roles both on and off stage. Here were so many rows and periods when we couldn't talk to each other. Paul's changed a lot since the group broke up. Mr Nasty could take a rest and this sweet guy emerged. Anyway, the animosity got less and less, gradually the toxicity leached out of the system. It has been a very pleasant time, resuming a friendship.
Paul has two modes of being. Very gregarious or painfully shy. He's happiest when he's been painting successfully (if the painting's bad then he's terrible) and when he's in party mode. He is truly sensational then. He's a very, very good dancer and if he's poured a few drinks down his ridiculous neck and lost his head, he can actually be quite pleasant.
Will I know him for the rest of my life? Absolutely. For sure.
ABC's head of television, Penny Chapman, banned the mini-doco and Safran lost a potential 50 points because his back of film was not ready to air. In the offending film, Safran entered the Brazilian confessionals and told the priests he had kissed a boy. He then multiplied the number of Hail Marys by Our Fathers and awarded points to the unsuspecting priest. "Penny (Chapman) made an agonizing choice," series producer of Race Around the World Paige Livingston says.
The man who brought Race Around the World to Australia, Mike Rubbo, is less equivocal. "Documentary making is all about access, and when you obtain access by trickery you better have a very good reason for doing it," Rubbo says. "There may be cases where it is justified but this was just plain mean-spirited. "He also misrepresented himself as a Catholic so if we put it on we would be sending the wrong message about how we should be working as film-makers."
In tonight's final one-hour episode of Race Around the World, Safran's film-set in Disneyland-once again pushes the boundaries of taste. it's also hysterically funny. "John is always borderline," Rubbo says. "He challenges the show because most of the stories are about getting access to people's lives in a very sympathetic way and John uses the whole world as a stage on which to play his jokes!"
The most trying part of Race for Livingston, who became emotionally involved with all the youngsters, was the constant worry of safety. "I had all these terrible nightmares about Channel 10 new chasing me with the snot running down my nose after someone had been killed in a trouble spot, you can't help thinking about it... For the racers, I think the fear was the hardest thing; fear of failure, fear of being judged. Can you imagine what it would have been like going through all that, new country, new language, new food, new smells, where am I going to stay, where do I get a translator and then your whole experience is compressed into a four minute story? Right now they are all tender, they have post-traumatic stress syndrome."
Rubbo agrees. He says it was hard for them to be catapulted to prominence in a few short months. "They have become almost stars overnight, and their work has been displayed to the whole country each week." But don't feel too sorry for them. Safran is already a household name any they are all talking to executives at the ABC about jobs. "We would love to employ them all and if we weren't so strapped for cash we would," Rubbo says.
Although race has been a critical and ratings success for the ABC, Rubbo has planned some fine-tuning for the 1998 series. He hopes to convince management to extend the weekly 30 minutes to 40 minutes and is keen to appoint a more ethically diverse group next time. Rubbo says the greatest conflict arouse over deadlines and the pressure of producing a story within 10 days.
When it came to lateness, the girls were really conscientious and the boys were consistently late and rebellious, he says. Daniel Marsden, the tall Queenslander, cruelled any chance he had of winning by being late, as did Bently Dean from Victoria. "I do sympathize with the tremendously stressful situation they were in," Rubbo says. "I am thinking about giving them another day or two on their stories before they send them."
Despite complaints from some racers that the judging was too harsh, Rubbo says it will stay, be beefed up even. "If you're going to have judging you have to have judging that's pretty hard, not some sort of mutual admiration society," he says. "Judging gives it an edge and encourages the audience to make their own judgments, to be participatory and it arouses tremendous passions."
Rubbo says the secret to good documentaries is access and points to the celebrated film Rats in the Ranks as proof. "Rats is all about incredible access, which you get through inspiring incredible confidence," he says. One of the more successful racers, Olivia Rousset from Perth, gains access to people's lives through what Rubbo calls "intelligent understanding."
"Olivia is the born super-journalist but she has a heart too," Rubbo says. Rubbo and Livingston say each racer developed his or her own style and each has a peculiar talent. Marsden and Ben Davies, 25, from Sydney, for example, use playfulness, Rubbo says. At just 23 Marsden has so impressed ABC executives he is being considered as a host for a new show still in development. "Daniel was the darling of the training period at the film school," Rubbo says. "Everyone adored him, but then he bitterly disappointed us with his first few stories. He claims he was unlucky but he was very slack. But after a while he just went from strength to strength.
"Daniel could have won this if he hadn't been so late, he would have been right up there running." At half the price of a conventional documentary and one quarter of price of drama, Race is a cheap program to make and has the added benefit of bringing a younger audience to the ABC.
Rubbo says Race has proved the observational film using digital cameras is the future of documentary. "Whole eras of society the Whitlam era, the Keating years all went by without anyone behind the scenes making films like Rats in the Ranks. We are reinventing the doco and it's now just a question of having enough money and enough outlets to play all this wonderful stuff we're going to have."