Goodbye To The Silly Season
The Sun Herald
Sunday January 16, 1994
Brindabella, New Year 1994: Took five trout - three browns, two rainbows -from the crystal waters of the Goodradigbee, startled lyre bird in the shimmering scrub, saw red-bellied black snake lazing in the sun ... which reminds me I have to write a television column.
One of the smallest, least noticed but nicest consequences of the demise of the Derryn Hinch evening current affairs show is that I got my first Christmas and New Year off for six years.
Having been Derryn's stuntman, sitting in his hot seat for 150 or so shows round this time of year, I hardly know what to do with myself. So, in between counting trout and stalking the platypus below our mountain eyrie I've been pondering just what's happened to current affairs during the last decade - not to mention the quarter of a century I've been involved with it.
One obvious thing is that bush fires - or indeed people like Saddam Hussein who started his own - are no respecters of television silly seasons.
I remember opening one summer series with the line that "not even Saddam Hussein would put on World War III while Derryn was on holidays" but, alas, I was wrong.
Eventually we got so close to the brink of destruction that Derryn hurried back, mid-novel, from his own holiday eyrie to claim back his seat. No self respecting TV host could say he missed the apocalypse because he was drinking Mai Tais. "Where were you in the war, Daddy? - I was writing a pot boiler in Hawaii." And I can't blame him.
When I first started in television in the plasticine age all those eons ago the current affairs programs went into limbo from early November to mid-way through February because that was the non-ratings period. It evolved from the American tradition that still explains why we have series with the peculiar number of 13 or 26 episodes.
WHATEVER, it was a farce that we kept quiet about because we enjoyed the good long holidays. As I mentioned recently one of the first to break the nexus was Mike Willesee when he pirated the TDT concept, flogged it to the Packers and started early in the year.
Let's face it, many of Australia's major stories have broken during this period - from the hanging of Ned Kelly, through Federation, right up to the Harold Holt drowning, Cyclone Tracy and the sacking of Gough.
EVEN during my stints as compere of the summer series on Seven and Ten I've presided over such stories as the Gulf Crisis, the Newcastle earthquake, the tourist bush crashes, Roumania and the crumbling of Communism and the ascension of Paul Keating over Bob Hawke - and, of course, bush fires.
So what's the point of all this, you might be asking? Is he going somewhere here or just waiting for the next trout to rise?
No, there is a moral to this tale and that is it seems that the silly season will well and truly end this year. I hear on the grapevine that from now on A Current Affair, at least, will try to make it totally seamless -people will have breaks but staggered through the year and there will be no recognisable "summer series" feeling around Christmas-New Year.
Alas, it's been a traditional hiatus that has given me plenty of interesting times in the hot seat but if it's all for the public good, then you know me - good sport, always willing to make the sacrifice. Hang on, I think I can see a 4lb Rainbow just under that rock over there.
© 1994 The Sun Herald
