The normal attire for my sisters at movement class was a tutu, so at five years old, the normal attire for me at movement class was also a tutu. I was like a Billy Elliot with no interest in boxing and without a homophobic father who would eventually learn to accept my flair for dance. If anything, my parents were so accepting of me from such a young age I think part of them will always be disappointed I’m not gay, just because it’s a missed opportunity for them to tell me they love me no matter what.
My first day of school arrived and I was elated. I’d been held back a year at kindergarten and, frankly, I was sick of my peers’ immaturity and was ready for some intelligent discussion, to graduate from finger painting to my pen licence and eventually to get a mortgage and family of my own.
On Monday morning, my sisters and I were stuffing our faces with the variety of gluten-free cardboard substitutes my parents had dubbed breakfast, and it’s here most parents would have looked at my sisters in their green and white school uniforms, then at me, and asked, ‘Lewis, why are you wearing your tutu?’
But my parents didn’t ask that. Because my parents believed I should be able to wear whatever I wanted, and that no heteronormative system would tell me that wearing a tutu to your first day of school was probably going to raise a few eyebrows. If they had asked me, I would have told them the truth: ‘Tilly and Eliza told me you don’t wear a uniform on your first day, you wear your tutu.’
In retrospect, I don’t blame them. Like low-ranked Nazis, they were just following orders handed down to them by the natural instincts of sibling dynamics.
My first day of school comes back to me in flashes. Walking through the gates to see no other tutus. My best friend Lliam, who I’d known since I was six months old, refusing to sit next to me in the introductory circle of Mrs Scott’s class. A group of boys, led by an older kid named Tristan, pointing and laughing when I pulled my pink tights all the way down to my ankles to use the tiny, prep- height urinals.
In those flashes it’s four, five, or maybe twenty boys in that bathroom pointing and laughing at me – in reality it was probably just Tristan. But that was enough.
I cried. I cried heaps. I cried in class, I cried as I left class, I cried in the playground, I cried in the bathroom. And I did all of that crying in a tutu.
At lunchtime the principal, Mrs Beaumont, approached me wearing her trademark pink. Mrs Beaumont was pink all over – her clothes were a gentle explosion of cerise, coral, peach and rose. Even Mrs Beaumont’s house was painted completely pink. I thought maybe she was coming over to congratulate me on my bold colour choice, but she sat next to me, the two of us resplendent in our matching hues, and asked if I was OK.
My parents had always told me to be honest about my feelings, but as of that day I’d decided my parents were liars and fools, so I told her I was fine as my tiny tears dripped through the tiny holes in my lace skirt.
She took my hand and led me to her office, where she gave me one of the spare pairs of tracksuit pants reserved for children with bladder control issues, of which I was one, but not today. I stuffed my tutu into the bag hanging on my bag rack, and ran out into the playground to join in a game of whatever wholesome activity kids did back then, before the future came and turned all children into prostitutes and drug dealers.
Ten years later, standing in General Pants, I bought those goddamn skinny jeans. My parents were shocked, but accepted me for whomever I decided to be, and were delighted to see the jeans were made in Australia. And when, predictably, one of the boarders at my country school complimented my new look with the traditional, ‘Nice jeans, faggot, do they make them for men?’ I turned to him and said, ‘Yeah, they do make them for men. And women. They’re unisex.’
JONATHAN HOLMES
Jonathan was a television journalist for forty-five years. Born and educated in Britain, he worked as a producer for the BBC’s TV Current Affairs group between 1969 and 1982, when he was invited to Australia to become Executive Producer of the ABC’s flagship current affairs program Four Corners. He worked for the ABC, on and off, until 2013: among other jobs, as Head of TV Documentaries, Executive Producer of Foreign Correspondent and The 7.30 Report, a reporter with Four Corners and Foreign Correspondent, and one of the ABC’s Washington correspondents. From 2008 to 2013 Jonathan presented the popular ABC TV program Media Watch.
‘The Midweek New Year’s Eve’ copyright © Jonathan Holmes 2018
The Midweek New Year’s Eve
by JONATHAN HOLMES
This story was originally performed at the event Out of Control
For forty-four years – from 1969 to 2013 – I worked in television, in Britain, in Australia, and in the United States. I loved it. Yet when I was at university in the late 1960s, my ambition was to become a newspaper reporter. I had taken very little interest in film or television. I was a wordsmith.
Then, in 1968, a bunch of us on the staff of the Cambridge student newspaper Varsity had a bright idea: we would ask the BBC if we could spend a day in the offices and studios of its daily current affairs show, 24 Hours. ‘12 Hours out of 24’ was to be the pithy headline. Remarkably, the BBC said ‘yes’.
I remember quite a lot about those twelve hours – most vividly, the studio control room. The dim, blue light; the banks of monitors glowing through the haze of a dozen cigarettes (everybody smoked everywhere in those days); the calm voice of the studio director: ‘Camera four, give me a close shot please . . . camera four, coming to you now. Take four. Stand by telecine two. Run telecine!’ and the woman beside him – most directors were men, their assistants were invariably women – calling out the countdown as numbers flashed through on one of the monitors – ‘Five, four, three, two, one, take TK two.’
It was like some occult ritual, secret and powerful. ‘The new priesthood’, a trendy 1960s look called television producers. I was hooked. Mesmerised. This was what I wanted to do.
Less than two years later, I was doing it. And by 1973 I was a studio director myself, on a program very like 24 Hours – although that had been phased out. The new show aired late on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights; it was called, with that plodding literal-mindedness so typical of TV current affairs, Midweek.
My job was to put the program to air, live. Part of the essential preparation was to draw up a reel order for the film and videotape clips.
Videotape in 1973 was still in its infancy. It was used in the main to record events that occurred within a TV studio. The vast magnetic videotapes were two inches – about five centimetres – wide, and the machines that played them took a full ten seconds to roll up to speed. So you would count thirty words back in the presenter’s introduction to the clip – assuming he or she read, as most do, at three words per second – and mark up the script with ‘RUN VT’.
As the presenter reaches that point in the script, you say softly, confidently, ‘RUN VT nine’; in the bowels of the BBC’s Lime Grove Studios, a technician presses a button on his gargantuan machine, and it begins to lumber up to speed. On one screen in the bank of monitors in front of you, numbers start to flow through as your assistant counts down: ‘Ten, nine, eight . . .’ In the studio, the floor manager is silently using his fingers to count down, so the presenter knows precisely how many seconds he has left. As the PA gets to zero, the presenter reaches the end of his script, and the vision mixer punches in the new source. Neat. Seamless. What can possibly go wrong?
But most of the images from the outside world were captured on film cameras – truly portable video cameras were still a decade away. The film – and accompanying sound tape – would be hastily processed and physically edited with razor blade and sticky tape. The film reel would then be loaded into a telecine machine, which magically turned the celluloid image into an electronic signal suitable for broadcast. It wasn’t uncommon for the sticky tape to come unstuck as the film rolled, leaving a splurge and a white space on the screen. Calmly and confidently, the director would cut back to the presenter in studio. There w
ere no earpieces back then. You told the floor manager to signal to the presenter to ‘fill’, or proceed to the next item.
In an emergency you could pick up the phone in front of you. It connected to a phone on the presenter’s desk. It was very rarely used.
Unlike videotape players, telecine machines took eight seconds to run up to speed. Don’t ask me why, I never knew. So you count back twenty-four words from the end of the presenter’s intro and write ‘RUN TK’ in the margin. What could go wrong?
By 31 December 1973, I was just short of my twenty-sixth birthday: a ripe middle-age in the television world of the ’70s, which like the dot-com era of the late 1990s was peopled almost exclusively – behind the camera at least, where the real priesthood dwelt – by young men (and a few young women) in their twenties.
I reckoned I was pretty good at my job. That was the night that proved me wrong.
We had a special New Year’s Eve program planned – a look back at the events of the year, the dark and the light, the sad and the funny. You’ve seen that kind of show a hundred times, but in those days, on live TV, they posed a challenge for a director.
We had no fewer than thirteen clips on film and seven on video. I carefully drew up the reel orders. Each clip would be loaded onto one of three different reels, so that we could alternate between the two telecine machines and the one VT machine.
Soon we were counting down to go live on air. ‘Run titles.’ Fine. ‘Cue presenter.’ Fine. ‘Good evening – the last night of 1973, and a Midweek special . . .’ blah blah blah. Lead into first film clip – seamless. Back to presenter – a nice man of great professionalism called Nick Harman – to read an introduction about the IRA bombing campaign that had devastated Northern Ireland.
‘In March, the IRA managed to bring its war to the heart of London, when bombs exploded in Whitehall and the Old Bailey.’
To my surprise I saw that a telecine machine was already running. I hadn’t cued it; the PA wasn’t counting down. That was when I made my first, and worst, mistake. I said to the vision mixer – ‘TK’s running, take it on cue.’
As Harman intoned, ‘. . . from the devastation outside the Old Bailey, David Jessel reported for Midweek’, we cut neatly to the new clip.
Royal Navy destroyers ploughed through a storm-tossed sea, while the narration burbled on about the so-called ‘cod war’ with Iceland.
Oh shit. Wrong clip. So where was the right one?
An experienced director would calmly and quietly have said, ‘Right, hold on everyone while we work this out. Floor, tell Nick to fill for one minute. Cut to camera three.’
If I’d done that I might have realised that the machine I’d seen already rolling was the one I’d just used for the first clip. It was rolling down to its next mark, while the second telecine machine was all set to run the clip I wanted.
But I didn’t do any of those things, or realise what the hell had happened. I decided that if the clip I needed wasn’t where it should be, my reel orders had got messed up. I’d hope for the best and move on.
‘Tell Nick to go to the next item, Cod Wars.’
Nick dutifully, and with a graceful apology, launched into a new introduction: ‘Reporter Harry Percy took to the high seas to watch Iceland defying the might of the Royal Navy.’
‘Take telecine!’ David Jessel was standing in the smoking ruins outside the Old Bailey.
‘Stand by camera four, cut to camera four. Cue Nick.’
‘Hmm. No sign of a Happy New Year so far,’ said Nick Harman to the viewers. Taking a deep breath, he reminded us that back in February, Princess Anne had announced her engagement to Mark Phillips. That introduced a clip showing Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland in a nakedly passionate embrace, the famous sex scene from that year’s hit movie, Don’t Look Now.
We all looked then. In horror. Things were spiralling out of control.
My memory of the next thirty minutes is mercifully vague. I do know that not one single clip matched its introduction. A script about the new Value Added Tax led to a clip about eighteen miners dying in the Markham Colliery disaster. An intro about the OPEC nations’ oil embargo led straight into the music video of Pink Floyd’s triumphant album, The Dark Side of the Moon. That’s exactly where I’d like to be right now, I remember thinking.
Eventually, Nick Harman said calmly to the camera:
‘Well, viewers, I really haven’t a clue what’s going on up there. Let’s see if they do.’
He picked up the telephone on his desk.
He didn’t need to say anything. He waited.
I picked up the phone in front of me.
‘I’m sorry, Nick. I don’t really know what’s gone wrong.’
‘I thought as much,’ said Nick Harman as two million viewers watched, agog. ‘What would you like me to do next. Sing a song?’
I said the last thing a director should ever, ever say: ‘Um, I don’t really know.’
Harman put the phone down. He smiled sadly at the viewers. ‘No, they don’t know what’s going on up there. I think the best thing I can do is to apologise for the monumental shambles you’ve witnessed tonight, wish you a Happy New Year, and say good night.’
Without asking me, my assistant ran the credits, the vision mixer cut to them, and I watched, ashamed and mortified, as my credit rolled across the screen.
Studio Director, Jonathan Holmes.
Mercifully, Britain did not have then, and indeed doesn’t have now, a show called Media Watch. But the celebrated television playwright Dennis Potter, who was then at the height of his fame, was the TV critic for the weekly magazine The New Statesman.
‘The medium of television’, he wrote in that week’s column, ‘has been with us for more than twenty years. You would think that the BBC would have learned by now how to avoid serving up an agglomeration of blunders that grows more excruciating, minute by minute, for a full half hour.
‘But if that’s what you thought, you would be wrong, as Midweek so triumphantly demonstrated on New Year’s Eve.’
Or words, no doubt more pungent, to that effect.
The next day, my boss kindly suggested that perhaps studio direction was not my true metier. Perhaps I should try something easier: journalism, for example.
And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.
RHYS NICHOLSON
Comedian. Writer. Craft enthusiast. Razor sharp, daring and downright lascivious. After winning Best Newcomer at Sydney Comedy Festival in 2012, Rhys has performed all over the world, garnering audience and critical praise. They also quite liked his nice jackets. His solo show Seminal won the Best International Show Award at the 2018 New Zealand International Comedy Festival and Rhys was nominated for the Helpmann Awards’ Best Comedy Performer of 2018. In 2017, Rhys picked up an ARIA nomination for Best Comedy Release. Rhys has plastered his jagged face all over Australian TV – including chatting candidly to the Prime Minister about red heads (and other things) on The Project. Rhys was co-host with Joel Creasey on ABC TV’s documentary Gaycrashers.
‘The Night Was Warm’ copyright © Rhys Nicholson 2018
The Night Was Warm
by RHYS NICHOLSON
This story was originally performed at the event It’s All a Game
I always worry with these types of nights that I’m not smart enough for them. I’m not a writer: I’m a stand-up comedian. We don’t deal in apt metaphors or clever motifs. We’re more into over-complicated similes, because, like using an AK-47 to shoot dead fish in the world’s smallest barrel, it’s easier. For the most part, we stand-ups reference something you’ve thought of before, you as an audience go, ‘Aw, yeah, I’ve heard of that before,’ and then we say a lot of things very quickly and rhythmically, you clap and we are given money. Simple.
But I wanted to be smart tonight. To that end, I have decided to tell the story of the time I blew a guy on a public tennis court. You have to write what you know.
So let me take you back, ladies and gentlemen
, to early 2009. Rebecca Gibney had just won the Gold Logie, McLeod’s Daughters was still a thing and we were yet to feel the shame slap from Harry Connick Jr following the Hey Hey It’s Saturday Jackson Jive Blackface fiasco. They were simpler times.
I was almost nineteen, living in my hometown of Newcastle, my heart full of big-city dreams and my lungs full of industrial smog left over after the collapse of the local steel works. I had also recently lost a lot of weight due to a burgeoning eating disorder, more on that later, and had in turn discovered sex. Even though I’d lost my virginity almost two years earlier (well, I’m still technically still a virgin in the Lord’s eyes) there really hadn’t been any movement at the station for those couple of years. I’d been chubby and had a lot of acne. As my high-school bully, Tom Holloway, put it, ‘No one wants to fuck a pizza.’
But now things were different. I was different. My skin had cleared, my weight had been shed and no longer was I that Weirdo One That Dyes His Hair Red. Suddenly, I was the funny gay one. I was everyone’s friend. I was a commodity. People seemed to want me around and I became addicted to the attention. Everything I did was for a reaction from others. I was meaner. I did and said things I knew people would find shocking. I settled into this life very quickly. I wanted a reputation as a mess. I was wandering the earth like some sort of Ancient Demonic Succubus who grew stronger from pingers and giving wristies to strangers.
One night I finished my shift at Grill’d, changed, bought a six-pack of Smirnoff Double Blacks and headed to a party. It was one of those parties that was had because the parents were away. The kind of party you quietly left after you had broken something.
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