Teaming up with a computer has changed the life of a former Doug Anthony Allstar. Kerrie Murphy talks to Richard Fidler.
In the early 1990s the Doug Anthony Allstars were one of Australia's biggest comedy acts. Since the group's split in 1994, the guitarist Richard Fidler disappeared from public eye, reappearing recently as host of the ABC's 'Race Around The World'. In the time between the two gigs, Fidler has decided to focus on emerging multimedia technology instead of more traditional fields of entertainment.
This was totally different from his pre-fame days as a university student, when the ideal of working with computers never crossed his mind. That changed in 1991 when he met his wife, Khym for the first time. "She had a computer, a 386, which was pretty damn good for the time and my reaction to it was rather stupid - it was, 'What do you want one of them for? They're so nerdy.' She said 'Don't be an idiot'," recalls Fidler.
"I was in the Doug Anthony Allstars and shortly afterwards we all awarded ourselves a Macintosh to write scripts and do graphics... I got to grips with it very quickly and had to know everything about it. It was a Mac LC - it was great, I've still got it."
The group relocated to the UK for a while prior to their split, where Fidler further indulged his interest in computers. "I became involved with a multimedia production company over there called New Vision Media. One of my friends was creative director of the company and he encouraged me to become involved with it," he says. "This was about 1993, before the Internet went apes--- and when everyone was going, 'CD-ROM, maybe CD-ROM will save us!' They were making interactive adaptations of Japanese manga [comic books] and I became more obsessed and got a more powerful Macintosh, one that was capable of low-level multimedia, and because our group was about to split up, I gave myself an intense crash course while in London. I pretty much taught myself to use basic multimedia applications."
Despite the sudden change of career, Fidler says there are similarities: "Until then, the whole ethos of the Doug Anthony Allstars was to be a multimedia group in the old-fashioned sense of the word. We worked in comedy, we also put out books, comic books, music albums, bulls--- art exhibitions, and this struck me as an excellent way of being able to do it all on your desktop, integrate it and make it interactive, which is even more interesting."
However, just as there were similarities between the two careers, his previous work also proved an unexpected hindrance to working in the UK. "I was supposed to stay in London after our group broke up to work with New Vision Media, but the British Government wouldn't let me stay because I'd going over as an entertainer and if you're an entertainer you can't be a new media worker in their eyes," he says. It was a lucky move as it turned out, since New Vision Media has since folded.
"I moved back to Australia to Sydney and started doing some work in new media, meanwhile developing my own projects. I got involved with writing Real Wild Child [an award wining CD-ROM on Australian rock music] and also the production of my own title called Radiant City. I received an Australian Film Commission investment in that, on the strength of a script, some graphics and a little "QuickTime movie I put together".
Radiant City is a ghost story set in a Bauhaus-style city, which Fidler suggests will be "quite a violent game".
"About the time that I got yanked back into television was when the same people who'd been saying that CD-ROM's the next big thing started saying 'CD-ROM's dead, it's gone' and everyone was going, 'It's the Internet, the Internet!', and that left me high and dry a bit, and funding for CD-ROM's in the private sector dried up."
As well as hosting Race Around the World, Fidler works for the Comedy Channel. Radiant City is still in development and Fidler said he may look at pitching the product to the developer later in the year. "As far as new media goes, my activities have been curtailed somewhat, the reason being we're at an impasse waiting for a new technological breakthrough. That's my feeling. I'm not interested in new media unless it's entertainment-based. I like the Web, it's fantastic as a consumer product,for software updates, news, chats and stuff. It's fine as a communication tool, but as an entertainment tool, I've yet to see it used properly and effectively."
Besides this the limitation to 3D games are not so much technical but in their conventions, says Fidler. "The problem I have with Doom is that it's so ugly. Same goes with Quake and Duke Nukem. There's no aesthetic there except that really crap, watered-down, LA techno-noir look form the early 80s...the whole process of applying a strong aesthetic to the thing stuck me as interesting."
And multimedia is an area he is definitely keen to continue working in. "The only medium that can accommodate the work I would like to do in new media is CD-ROM, and there seems to be a reluctance to go forward with that. "At the moment there's not enough bandwidth on the Web to pump entertainment through, and there's no one to distribute CD-ROMs, so maybe DVD-ROM is the answer - or more Internet bandwidth," he says.
"I love new media, I think it's fantastic. Some of the most compelling media that I've mucked around with has been new media. It's lots of fun to create with as well. The whole process of reduction of graphics, sounds, interactivity into zeros and ones is facinating."