THE
MOST IRREVERANT PAUL McDERMOTT
source
and author unknown
Some Friday nights, you can
hear the country breathing. First there's the sharp intake of
oxygen as Paul McDermott sets up another gag right on the brink
of acceptable taste. Then comes the nervous pause and, almost
invariably, a mutual exhalation which is half relief and half
belly-laugh.
"To me that's what it's
all about. It's about rushing up to that invisible wall and
pushing it over," says the bloke with the cheeky squint in
the sharp suit, ex-DAAS, ex-JJJ breakfast terrorist and current
anchor of ABC TV's Good News Week.
"It doesn't matter
whether it's about cancer or politics or something precious
people are holding in their hearts, a death or tragedy or
something less meaningful. There's always a line that you can
walk up to, play around with and then gleefully cross.
"It's a relief to
people, I think, to realise these things aren't taboo. We're not
all going to burn in Hell if we talk about Satan, and it doesn't
make one less of a human being to laugh about tragedy."
McDermott's current affairs
game show is in its thrid season on ABC TV, where he first
surfaced on The Big Gig nine years ago as the caustic third of
DAAS.
He was hardly gagged and
bound by DAAS's famous brand of anarchic musical comedy, but as a
free-ranging, mad-dog social commentator, his ingrained
irreverence has blossomed with his weekly monologues on politics,
media culture and their key players.
Born and raised in Canberra
he says that his insights have come from hard work, rather than
proximity to federal power.
"I've always loathed
politics, largely because of the Canberra experience. I've never
wanted to become involved with it. With the Allstars it was
always very broad strokes. We'd talk about the family and
fanaticism, take the piss out of communism, have a go at
everyone. We never got specific about the government or
personalities involved.
"With GNW it's essential
that we do that, so it's meant a bit of a rethink for me about
the way I view the world, what I take in, what I read and what I
look at."
Neither music and comedy nor
political commentary were foremost in McDermott's mind when DAAS
started pulling crowds of Saturday morning shoppers with their
hyperactive busking routine in 1985. An indication of both his
aspiration and talent, he topped his class at Canberra Art
School, the same year.
"When I started with
DAAS, I was just trying to get enough money together to finish
art school. That was my dream. I spent three years working in a
little burrow with pen and ink on tiny bits of watercolour paper.
For my final year I wanted to do a big installation, which meant
I had to buy canvas."
He had met Richard Fidler and
Tim Ferguson at ANU. For the struggling visual artist, DAAS was a
means to completing a final year installation, which he still
recalls with enormous pride.
McDermott broke into a sealed
off clock tower on campus and started painting the four walls:
one comprised fire and machinery, one images of hell, one death
and the other heaven, complete with angels, tortured saints and
Virgin Mary. Hundreds of pieces of canvas with figurative
Renaissance motifs hung around sculptural pieces based on his
grandfather's service in WW1.
For the opening a choir
ascended a ladder to sing in the tower. "It was all very
ethereal. It was mean to be a kind of war memorial, and when
people arrived they unknowingly started whispering. That gave it
a reverential quality. Unfortunately the whole thing got torn
down when I went away to the Adelaide festival with the Allstars.
"It was the thing in my
life I was most proud of," the professional cynic recalls
with surprising sensitivity. "Nothing comes close to it as a
personal feeling of self-worth."
"But painting is a long,
lonely road. You put it in front of people and they just insult
it and you think okay that's a year's work and I still don't feel
good. With the Allstars there was this immediate gratification.
Even if you do crap, people still come up and say it's good. At
the time I wanted that, because I didn't talk to people. I hadn't
had much communication with other living human beings at that
point."
With the Allstars that
changed big time. In a phenomenal seven year reign, the trio
attracted a near hysterical following around Australia and
Britain. They undertook 10 national tours, seven seasons at
London's West End, played dozens of international festivals,
released four albums, three books, two comics, one documentary
and wrote and produced several tv series at home and in England.
"The thing I always
loved was the vision of the Allstars, which was darker and more
vicious than anything I'd encoutered anywhere else,"
McDermott says, "It was a great vehicle for me. I could
write stuff, put songs together and do the graphics."
The group reluctantly folded,
after a final tour in 1994, mainly due to Ferguson's family
commitments. Ironically, it was the tall Star who took the
fastest plunge back into showbiz with the ill-fated Don't Forget
Your Toothbrush and sundry other appearences. McDermott took it
more slowly, for his own reasons.
"No one wanted me for a
start. And I'd had eight years of writing and performing and
working very hard. When the Allstars stopped, I wasn't sure I
wanted to go back into performance anyway. I felt for a while I
might go to join a friend of mine in WA, and start painting again
for a couple of years. But it was a bit too easy to go back and
perform."
McDermott began infiltrating
JJJ in 1995, culminating in an inspired partnership with Mickey
Robbins on the breakfast show in 1997. He gave it up last
December because he's "not a morning person."
Meanwhile, GNW was mustering
a cult audience, with a refinement of DAAS's acerbic wit, but
dressed in more topical clothes. For the host, comedy without
kick is a waste of prime time.
"I can't see the point
in observational comedy: talking about how weird your cat is and
how curious it is to walk into a 711 after you've had some dope
and gee, aren't goldfish funny? They only have about 15 seconds
of memory.
"That surface-of-life
stuff is great, and good luck to people that do it, but it's good
to get under the surface. I like to talk about the dirty, nasty,
evil things living in the carpet, rather than just the
carpet."
This looks, at times, like
plenty of work for the ABC's legal department. Some Friday nights
the viewer wonders about McDermott's grasp of the fine line
between harmless fun and expensive prosecution.
"Personally, over the
years I've had freaks and loonies harassing me over the phone,
but never anything that's comes close to Salman Rushdie's
problems. It's the business. You can't whinge about it when it
happens."
Especially when your brand of
comedy has a slightly higher purpose than laughing at goldfish.
Like the best DAAS satire, GNW is a necessary counter balance to
the flood of limp infotainment gaining momentum on Australian
airwaves.
But McDermott prefers not to
contemplate his role as a sculptor of public opinion.
"You can see it that
way, but I prefer not to because then you give it responsibility.
You imbue it with the idea that it has to achieve something.
"It's good to stand at
the sidelines and fire a few comments, but once you say that
you're influencing perceptions, it makes you responsible. I
prefer to be irresponsible."
Thanks to
Warren for this Article
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