There is nothing Good News Week host Paul McDermott regards as ‘sacred’. Not that he will necessarily make fun of everything.
"I think there is always a way of approaching a topic, that might not present itself immediately, but I think it is good to talk about things, it is not to make fun of them but to discuss them in a humorous way," he says.
"You just have to look around and fossick through the dirt and there is usually something there that’ll catch your attention."
Diana, Princess of Wales’ death is an example. The blame shifted from the paparazzi, for taking the pictures; to the press, for printing the pictures; to the people, for buying the magazines. Thredbo is another example.
"It was a difficult story for us to approach until Harry M. Miller came out of the wood work. Well, it’s like, ‘Whoa, there’s the joke’. You’d be like a parasite to make money out of this story, and he managed to sell it three times before the end of the week."
McDermott, who went to art school in Canberra, isn’t worried he may eventually offend everyone. He says everyone has a "little button" when they will go "Oh, no. That is going too far", but when people push that button is a personal decision.
"The idea isn’t to offend people, it is just to express an opinion. If we were thinking about how people thought or how they judged us, we wouldn’t do anything," he says.
With the 1998 season just started, fans will have noticed not much has changed; there are some new games - such as 'Where In The World' - but that is all.
"We were going to change the set and make it a bit more dramatic and make it a bit more ‘1998’, but unfortunately there isn’t enough money in the budget. We were also going to get me a new suit, but there is not enough money in the budget to cover that either," McDermott says.
Mid year, when Roy and HG’s Club Buggery takes a break, the GNW team will take over that slot, too. McDermott says the team members didn’t want to "do anything too ambitious and fall flat on our faces", so it will be similar to GNW, only it will look at Australian pop culture.
But that won’t take over from the traditional show. According to McDermott, GNW will be around for a while yet. While he, Mikey Robins and Julie McCrossin would love to stay around, he says the show would go on without them.
"It is a bit like the Phantom, I’ll pass the old skull ring on to my son and it will keep going because it is a good idea. It looks at the events of the week, so the jokes are constantly changing and the way you view things is constantly changing and the things you talk about are constantly changing, so it is not like it can grow tired," he says.
With the GNW book selling well, a new CD - Paul McDermott Unplugged: The Good News Weeks Tapes vol: 1 - was released this week. It even has McDermott singing - something he has had a mixed reaction to in the past.
"People always want me to sing, but they get upset when they hear the songs I sing. They think I have a lovely voice, why do I sing songs about f---ing dogs," he says.
McDermott says the CD wasn’t planned to be a "product". It was meant to be a gift for the people who were behind GNW - the family, friends, cast and crew.
He says ABC Records got wind of it and wanted to mass produce it, and then EMI Virgin got involved.
McDermott regards the CD as an alternate version of what happened in 1997, he says it has everything from the Wik debate to the wharfie’s strike. "Instead of looking at Time magazine and staring at some pictures of what occurred, you can sit down with this and remember a fantastically funny year," he says.
And that is the good news.