Host busters
May 6, 2007
www.theage.com.au/news/tv--radio/host-busters/2007/05/03/1177788307117.htmlIt's a tough gig, hosting TV's night of nights. You can disgrace yourself, you can be too stiff, you can even be too polished. Melinda Houston charts the Logies curse.
Your mission (if you choose to accept it) is to get up on stage in a ballroom filled with 1100 people, most of them quite sober, in front of TV cameras beaming you almost-live to people across the nation, knowing that those people include your boss, your boss's boss, a number of potential bosses, a large cohort of cynical, keen-eyed journalists, an even larger cohort of self-involved starlets of minimal IQ, some of the most accomplished comedians in the country, and several million individuals, across all demographics, aged about six to 96.
Now, be funny.
Hosting the Logies has to be the toughest gig in television. It's so easy to get it wrong. Which makes it deliciously easy to mock.
And mock we have - enthusiastically and relentlessly - from the early '80s right up until Andrew Denton (and the inclusion of peer-judged awards) reinvigorated the beast in 1999.
Of course, Denton had been mocker-in-chief right up 'til he slipped on his tux and took the mike to the floor of the Crown Casino ballroom to accost Jamie Packer and anyone else he figured it might be career-ending to offend. It was precisely that 15 years of lip-curling that made it - according to the man himself - one of the most intimidating gigs he'd ever undertaken.
In fact, the wonder is not that so many previous hosts have crashed and burned, but that more haven't done so.
In 2001, Shaun Micallef picked up the baton. People who already loved Micallef loved Micallef hosting the Logies. The rest of Australia wasn't so sure. (He is deeply weird.)
By the following year - Harmer-gate - we were back to the Logies we knew and despised. Yes, Wendy Harmer was awful, but it had been an awful year for television. The crowd was awful (and, for most of the night, awfully absent.) And poor Harmer's cup of ignominy ranneth over when - no doubt urgently wanting a drink - she was denied access to the after-party. (For the wrong wristband, apparently, not for the quality of her gags.)
It had become painfully obvious that the witty, irreverent, risk-taking yet inoffensive and utterly engaging Logies host was a species fairly thin on the ground in Australia. So, after a couple of years of Eddie to calm things down, Logies organisers have come up with a formula they reckon is worth persisting with.
Let's call it safety in numbers. We've had the TV triumvirate of Rove, Eddie, and Andrew O'Keefe. Perhaps working on the "more is better" principle, we then got five (count 'em!) co-hosts: Bert, Ray, Daryl, Lisa McCune and Georgie Parker. And, this year, we're back to a tidy three: Adam "Twinkly" Hills, Dave "Aaarrrrgh" Hughes, and Fifi "Heeheeheeheeheee" Box.
On paper, it's so crazy it just might work. Easy on the risk-taking, heavy on the loveability, and ideally with something for just about everyone. Hills has done a sterling job backstage for the past couple of years. (This year, Hamish and Andy are taking over in the Green Room and they're at their most entertaining when they're adlibbing.) Hills can be genuinely funny but as his aptly-named Comedy Festival act, Joymonger, suggests, he can also be counted on to bring the niceness.
Hughesy . . . It depends what mood he's in and how well-prepared he is. Like Messrs Blake and Lee, the more Hughes polishes his gags, the worse they are. If he's really going to bring the funny, he's going to have to cut loose.
As for Fifi, for many of us, hers is an elusive allure. Indeed, why she's employed in any of her various roles remains a deep mystery. Fifi will bring the blonde.
Of course, any Logies devotee will tell you (and especially those who love to mock) what we want is not a stellar performance by three of Australia's leading comics. What we want is something just bad enough to make us hoot, but not so bad we have to leave the room in embarrassment.
We want a Bec-Lleyton-Mia moment. We absolutely want another Joan Rivers moment, although, sadly, none of this year's international imports seem likely to deliver. Maybe Rachel Griffiths will come through for us. (Remember her nude protest at the opening of Crown? Has she got over it? Or will we see a repeat?)
Some of us even crave a return to those musical extravaganzas, such as the Neighbours all-star ensemble of 2002, or the Dannii-Bec-Sophie shemozzle of 2003.
(This year's marquee entertainers - Avril Lavigne, James Morrison and Damien Leith - are all disappointingly high-quality.)Even though she's not nominated for anything, we want Kerry Armstrong to win a prize so that someone will make an embarrassingly long and inappropriate speech. In her absence, we're counting on Terri Irwin, who'll be there to accept husband Steve's posthumous Hall of Fame induction. At the very least, we can expect her to ignore the fact that Australian television roundly ignored the excitable one until spectacular death brought him to its attention.
What we want is probably precisely what the Logies organisers don't want. We don't really want safety in numbers. We don't want inoffensive. We want to be on the phone/email/text the next day saying, "Did you see . . . ?".
We want the Logies to deliver what it has delivered most reliably over its varied 48 years.
And the chances are good. As uber-host McGuire says, "That's the great thing about live television and adlibbing: invariably, something will go wrong."
We can only hope.
The 49th Annual TV Week Logie Awards screen on Channel Nine from 8pm tonight, preceded by the Awards Arrivals from 7.30pm.
CLASSIC LOGIES CRINGES
Ancient past: Bert Newton refers to Muhammad Ali as "boy". Funny now, mortifying then.
1998: Daryl Somers. Matt LeBlanc. What were either of them doing there?
2001: Michael Crawford and Shaun Micallef scattering Ray Martin's ashes. We still don't get it.
2002: Destiny's Child asking, "Whassup, 44th Annual TV Week Logie Awards?" Did we dig it? We did not.
2003: Eddie McGuire, following an appalling musical number by Dannii Minogue, Bec Cartwright and Sophie Monk: "The chicks rule, don't they?" No Eddie, they did not.
2005: Rove McManus on accepting his third Gold Logie: "F---ing awesome!" Rove! Was your mum watching?
And Evan will be very happy too with the result too. 
I wanted Rove to win, but I don't think it bothered him either way.