Cantankerist

Nostalgia is a mug’s game: you reminisce about something, but you’re really reminiscing about yourself. You taste a perfect piece of chocolate in 1976. It sends you into raptures. Someone grabs a piece, jumps in a time-machine and brings it straight to you in 2009. You taste it and say “yeahhh… it was kinda like that… but…”. But what? It’s the same chocolate. It’s just not 1976 any more.

I expect that’d be my response if someone unearthed a cache of “Hey Hey It’s Saturday” in its original morning-show format. As a kid, I found it hilarious; it was freewheeling and highspirited and always just teetering on the brink of collapse. It was one of the most quickwitted shows on television (Ernie Carroll’s early work as Oswald Q. Ostrich was particularly devastating in this respect) and the cartoons and video pieces that the show originally framed were just delays until you caught up with the team again. It was undoubtedly remarkably sexist and racist in its attitudes, but since it was the 1970s, everything else on television was too – and you forgave it its blemishes because it was just as happy to self-destruct as poke fun at others. One errant remark from the cast to a crew member on set would result in a snap crew strike; the show would descend into darkness until the appropriate remorse was expressed. Indeed, it was one of the first shows I remember on television to comprehensively, deliberately blur the lines between cast and crew.

This was liberating: the tools of the medium were left unsupervised on a Saturday morning in the hands of those who were more interested in making something happen in the room, celebrating a shared humanity, than they were with preserving the boundaries and conventions on which so much of Australian network programming seemed to rely. Time? Pah! They had three hours to fill, and nobody “important” was watching anyway – so they would, for instance, highlight the remarkable stunt career of the fearless Fred Fly, the only fly ever to swim a full length of an Olympic-sized swimming pool underwater – or did he perish in the attempt? It was hard to tell; you couldn’t see Fred, of course. He was too small to be picked up by the camera, but he had big dreams, and energy to burn.

When “Hey Hey” moved to the 9.30pm timeslot in 1984 – the network presumably discovering that their adult audience for the show had grown too large to ignore – it looked for a while as if the magic formula would be preserved. (The first Saturday night show is currently on Youtube, I see, with an endearingly awkward Somers blinking and thinking quickly in his new surroundings. Ozzie rarely blinked; he just charged on in.) The show revelled and bloomed in its late-night position, happily drawing on the cult that had grown around it. Melbourne celebrities would be belittled or challenged live-to-air, in full knowledge that there was plenty of time for the said celebrity to jump in a car, drive to Bendigo Street, Richmond, and defend themselves or answer the call in the last hour of the show. The last half-hour was often a loosely-planned jam, where musicians of note might drift in and take a solo or sing something they’d always wanted to try. Most of it was planned, of course, but it gave the impression that it had been more sketched than inscribed, and that a firm breeze from another direction could change tonight’s agenda entirely. The show was undeniably connected to the pulse of the evening.

But, notwithstanding the ramshackle feel, two-and-a-half hours of live television is an expensive enterprise, and it was probably inevitable that “Hey Hey” would be asked to pay its way before long.  In June 1985, the show debuted in the 6.30pm prime-time timeslot; it would hold that position until its cancellation in 1999. The new “Hey Hey” was trim, clean, family-friendly, and scheduled and programmed to within an inch of its life. There was no longer any time to relax – there was a commercial break coming up, dammit, and three segments and live crosses to get through before then! Sadly, the one thing the show should always have done – introduced an on-air showrunner who could be the resident killjoy when required, to keep the show moving – was never attempted; Somers assumed that mantle himself, and it showed. Boy, did it show.

It’s hard to explain to those who have only ever known the prime-time “Hey Hey” how delightful and endearing Somers was as a genuine mischief-maker. He was rarely the ringleader, but his appreciation of a quick line or a funny joke was in itself a thing of beauty – all the more so because it genuinely felt like Somers and Carroll had landed in this position by mistake, like any moment someone would chain them up in the brig, replacing them with a stentorian admiral who would return television to its usual levels of predictability, conformity and boredom. Daryl was the young recruit who found himself at the helm of the ship, and was unable to contain his wonder and delight at just getting away with it, weekend after weekend.

In the rise of prime-time “Hey Hey”, Somers increasingly became the admiral, and the air in the studio slowly vanished. Normality had been restored – now it was a Saturday night variety show like everyone else’s, no room for wild digression, no time for crew strikes. The gags once presented with a straight face became hammy, winking debacles – everything had to be explained and understood by the Great Mass Market – and, while the show still ran overtime, it was only because segments ran too long, or commercial obligations had slowed everything down. The spirit that infused the original show was replaced with a grotesque plastic sheen; it was the simulacrum of rebellion, supervised and approved. The only true remnant of the show’s golden years was the beloved pink ostrich, and when Carroll retired in 1994 you thought surely - surely - they know the jig is up now.

But it still ran for five more years after that. English band Reef got it down accurately: asked to play on the show, they swapped their scheduled song for the coruscating “Yer Old”. Admiral Daryl was visibly furious and dismissive, saying that the band would “never play in this town again”, or words to that effect. The metamorphosis was complete: in the old days, the show would have celebrated the energy and spirit that motivated the selection. In the old days, the band would never have had to make it.

So don’t talk to me about “Hey Hey The Reunion Special” as if the exuberant program from my childhood had sprung back to life. This is simply the unwelcome, unwanted, insulting return of the vampire that killed it. I suggest doing what the Nine executives should do if they were to end up putting another set of youngsters on air: show some respect, and look the other way.

Over the last couple of days I’ve been taking a look at the first few episodes of “Nurse Jackie”, the Edie Falco vehicle that completed its first season in the States last month and is already popping up on Australian television (Sunday evenings at 10.30 or thereabouts on Channel 10). It’s a pleasant enough show. Falco always makes a favourable impression as an actor – as Officer Diane Wittlesey on “Oz”, as mobster wife incarnate Carmela Soprano – and she is still as adept at deadpan comedy and dramatic engagement as ever. The supporting cast are lively, if not always wholly believable, and the scripts are occasionally witty and mordant and move the week’s action along briskly. And yet… and yet…

Well, there’s a twist, of course, you’ll never guess, kids: Nurse Jackie’s secret is that she’s a drug addict. She pretends that she’s not married at work so that the horny pharmacist will give her access to the Vicodin, Seconal etc. etc. that she needs to function in the demanding hospital environment. She’ll commit dastardly acts to ensure that her habit and interests are protected, yet in other respects she strives to be the best nurse she can be – not just competent but a Florence-Nightingale-shimmering-vision of all that is holy and pure in medicine. And when these two worlds collide? Oh, brother! That’s when the craziness really kicks in!

It got me thinking about how the lead-character-with-an-illegal-secret device has been given a thorough walloping over the last few years. Dexter is a pretty nice guy, but wait! He’s a serial killer! Ray Drecker is just trying to fix his house and provide for his kids, and boom! He’s a male gigolo! Nancy Botwin, respectable mother, dope dealer. Walter White, suffering father, meth maker. Even Don Draper, though that’s less significant to the narrative arc. The flawed-hero formula allows certain networks to trumpet their shows as being “about real characters”, but take off the coloured glasses and the characters are often less real than anything you might see on “CSI: Yarrawonga”. They’re not three-dimensional characterisations; they’re that awful fake 3D, flat images with lines of blue and red slapped onto the side, destined to give you a headache after half an hour. But when their regular life meets up with their secret-identity life? Oh, brother! That’s when the craziness really kicks in! Watch out! Duck! Whoo!

Some of the setup for these shows has required a massive suspension of disbelief – Drecker, Botwin, I’m looking at you especially – and sometimes it’s a prerequisite for continued enjoyment of the show; they say yes, we know, there are probably a raft of icky issues with being a male gigolo, but they’d harsh our vibe! We know that this character held the exact opposite viewpoint last week, but who cares about details like that? Don’t take us seriously, dude! We’re just having some pop fun! Wacky hijinks and whatnot!

Well, sure, yeah, whatever. That’s exactly what “Two And A Half Men” do, but, y’know, knock yourselves out. Just don’t spend awards season complaining that quality work isn’t being recognised. There’s a reason why “True Blood” doesn’t sweep all before it, for instance – it’s one of the most inconsistently-plotted (and occasionally woefully-acted) shows out of HBO in a long time, especially considering the amount of moolah the network must shell out for a typical episode. It’s also the only show where you cross your fingers and hope that the lead romantic couple don’t have any scenes together this week. That can’t be a good sign.

“Friday Night Lights” came a bit of a cropper in its second season with a couple of ill-advised plotlines, but apart from that, it’s much closer to the kind of show these networks say they’re aiming for – melodrama acted as if it were drama, with room for improvisation and lots of space for ridiculous happy endings and sudden sourings and whatnot. It appears to have been given short shrift by audiences, possibly because the perceived focus on high-school football has driven away the audience the show is most clearly made for, but it has invested in character to its benefit – you care about the folks of Dillon, Texas. There’s precious little comparable affection for Bon Temps in me; Bill Compton could be staked in the opening sequence of True Blood S3 and I wouldn’t bat an eyelid. Again, that can’t be good.

And “Nurse Jackie”? Meh. Many of the secondary characters are at this stage (I’m six episodes in) stubbornly refusing to develop into something more than punchlines, and some of them have been mapped out with such broad brushstrokes that it’s hard to see how they’ll ever do so. There’s an English doctor in the show, and apparently she’s rich and obsessed with haute couture; we know this because every episode so far features a scene where she talks about her $1200 scarf or her $160 socks, and oh, how they get ruined in the hospital environment, and how she just throws them away rather than dry-cleaning them. Is this character meant to be real? Well, yes and no – according to the direction of this week’s plot. Maybe she’s hanging around this week to be thrust into a late scene as a sight-gag. Maybe she’ll be participating in a heart-to-heart talk with Nurse Jackie about the central dilemma of the show. It doesn’t seem to matter to the writers – they reach into the club bag without looking and grab the nearest character to effect whatever plot device they’ve thought of this week. It’s the kind of show where a twin is brought into the hospital and his twin is in the waiting room, worried, and suddenly we discover that the gay friend and confidant of Nurse Jackie was also a twin and his brother died when they were one year old. And you know that after this week we won’t hear about his twin-ness again. In short, it’s hokum. It’s “Grey’s Anatomy” with a slightly more sarcastic mindset, and yet because it’s Falco, and because it’s Showtime, it apparently goes into the “quality” or “arthouse” basket. Well, no more. HBO used to say “It’s not television, it’s HBO”; nowadays, even HBO is decidedly television. AMC are the only ones keeping their noses clean, and that’s because they present such a small target – Matt Weiner’s “Mad Men” and Vince Gilligan’s “Breaking Bad” are the only two shows they have out there, and they’re both high-quality enterprises. They wouldn’t have a secondary character taser themselves for a pratfall, then try to build it into a moment of revelation, then forget about it next week – which is the kind of thing “True Blood” and “Nurse Jackie” do with depressing regularity.

You’ll notice that I haven’t mentioned “The Sopranos” or “The Wire” in this post. Watch this space!