The earth cooled, we wrote the sitcom Outland, the dinosaurs died, we made Outland, Melissa Tkautz had a hit with “Read My Lips” and finally Outland is ready to premiere! It starts on Wednesday 8th of February at 9.30pm on ABC1 (you’ll come for the gay science fiction fans, you’ll stay for David and Margaret).
You may have seen there’s a lovely promo going around – it looks like this:
In preparation and promotion I’ve been shouting at anyone who’ll listen – here’s a list of places you can find me in the next few weeks:
LIVE!
Melbourne Science Fiction Club
Friday January 27th
St. David‘s Uniting Church Hall
74 Melville Road, West Brunswick
Hall opens at 8pm
I’ll be talking Outland, its development and probably showing a clip or two.
Queer Nerd
Thursday February 2nd
Bar Nancy
61 High St, Northcote
7.30pm
This is a spoken word event for the Midsumma Festival and I’ll be one of several people doing some speaking – sort of like stand-up comedy but not necessarily funny. But maybe it will! Find out!
Back on Boxcutters – the tippest toppest Australian TV podcast – we talk to Toby Truslove about acting, Outland and AACTA Awards.
And I’ll be coming up on Guy-Fi, Sci-Fi & Squeam, Diffrent Strokes,The Age Green Guide, I’ll probably be going door-to-door at some point (“Hello. Have you considered letting a gay-and-lesbian-science-fiction-fan-club-comedy into your lives?”).
You can keep up with Outland news and events at the official facebook page, and check out the brilliant insanity of the Where’s Outland? tumblr (and why not join in? I know I have. But I’m not saying which one is mine).
And watch Outland on February 8th on ABC1, or else on iView. Or both. Whatever. I’m not your mother.
A couple of quick plugs for the weekend ahead for all you Melbourne-based arty-types – I’ll be hosting an event for Australian Poetry at The Wheeler Centre on Saturday the 14th May. It’s called one.seven.six and will feature readings from Terry Jaensch as well as Susan Hawthorne, Elizabeth Beaton, Trevor Ball and m d west. You can find out more by going clickety-click right here.
Then on Sunday night it’s the official Boxcutters Eurovision Party at Seraphim (formerly Vibe on Smith), 123 Smith Street, Fitzroy. Look at the classy poster!
So if you want to stalk me, you know where I’ll be…
As you probably know, The Outland Institute is not my only podcast. Oh no. I pod around. And this week the Boxcutters podcast celebrated it’s 200th show – to put that in perspective, in dog years we’d be dead by now. Our guest was Myf Warhurst, meaning I’ve now interviewed two-thirds of the Spicks & Specks team (and Adam Hills did once hold a door open for me, which is much the same thing). You can hear Boxcutters by going here, and remember you can download The Outland Institute podcasts here. Curiously, the TV Tonight website ran an article about Boxcutters‘ achievement calling us “a guilty pleasure”, which surprised me. I think of guilty pleasures as “eating a whole packet of Deb instant potato” or “jerking off in a supermarket carpark“. I would have considered Boxcutters to be simply “a pleasure“. Or even “a delight“.
Anyway, reaching this milestone made me think – what are these podcast things, anyway? So I decided to find out what the crazy kids were doing by actually listening to some of them. They’re surprisingly good – I had no idea. Here are some I’ve been enjoying lately (click on the titles to go to their websites)…
Acclaimed author Doug MacLeod talks about writing for Young People, Steve from Glitter & Tonic visits the Forever Barbie Exhibition (so you don’t have have to), Narrelle M Harris discusses the CSI Effect, Glenn Dunks looks at what happens when stage musicals go to the cinema, Josh Kinal goes rant-tastic over Masterchef, Almost Fabulous visits the 19th Century, and Adam C’sCrime Against Pop was Filter Section’s singular cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit.
Please do not reveal the secret ending to your friends. All this and our musical challenge too!
The inaugural voyage of the Outland Institute radio show set sail today – Josh Kinal assures me that the “one show anniversary” is traditionally lined notepad paper, freshly torn. And who am I to say he’s wrong?
On today’s show:
Josh Kinal talks about All Saints and televised eating contests, Narrelle Harris and Mary Borsellino discuss Robin The Boy Wonder‘s place in culture, Our Almost Fabulous feature looks at Neighbours’ Andrew “Macca” Mackenzie, Glenn Dunks picks some hits from this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival, Toby Sullivan tells us the right way to approach football, and our Crime Against Pop is Buckner & Garcia’s Pac-Man Fever:
I know it might seem lately that I’ve neglected you. I don’t write as often as I once did, and perhaps you think my love for you has waned.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Actually, that may not true – there’s probably some things that are further from the truth, like “space octopi open convenience store in Geelong”, but you get the drift of my gist. While updates to this site have been – let’s say “sluggish”, shall we? – behind the scenes it’s been all systems go. Or go-ish.
On Friday July the 10th the exciting new radio version of The Outland Institute will be unleashed, and your ears will never be the same. Every Friday from midday to 2pm (Melbourne time) we’ll be exploring pop-culture in audio form on Joy 94.9. There’ll be plenty of exciting guests, plus some boring ones to make up the numbers. And we have a glamorous selection of resident experts, including Josh Kinal from Boxcutters, Glenn Dunks from Stale Popcorn and Anne-Marie Peard from Aussie Theatre. There’s even a theme tune by David Ashton from Destination Moon – take that, ABC 2′s News Breakfast! Not so big now!
So please join us on the 10th of July – you can listen on the wireless at 94.9FM in the Melbourne metro area, or hear it streamed wherever you are throughhttp://www.joy.org.au/listenlive, or download the podcast version from the Joy website (I’ll provide more podcast details in due course). And keep listening after the show for Flip The Tape, Joy’s fantastic indie/eclectic music show hosted by Adam C. It’s grouse.
The website will also continue to function, with both complimentary and new material, plus you’ll be able to comment on the radio show and basically make life just that bit more bearable.
To finish with, let’s look at some Canadian bilingual kite-flying, set to The Free Design‘s 1967 classic Kites Are Fun.
Ever wondered who writes the theme tunes for the news? No? Oh… Anyway, this week on top TV podcast Boxcutters we talked to David Ashton and Damaris Baker about writing the music for ABC2′s News Breakfast. You can hear the whole interview by going here (and why not consider subscribing to the show through iTunes? Perhaps on multiple computers?).
You can hear the News Breakfast theme at whatsonthetube (scroll down for the second video clip), and here are some highlights from the interview:
Note that for the sake of simplicity I have combined all hosts into one question-asking entity I call “Boxutron“.
Boxutron: How do you approach writing a theme tune for the news?
David: The thing about writing music for TV is that you’re told what to do, basically. It’s not like writing your own song where you just sit down with a blank page and think “what do I want to write a song about?”. They say “we want something like this” and that’s what you try to do.
When they say “something like this” do they mean “dark and moody” or “like the thing NBC is using but change enough notes so we don’t get sued for it”.
David:(pause) Somewhere in between… (laughter)
In the case of Breakfast News they had a piece of music they’d been using when they were throwing ideas around. They checked out how much it would cost to get that cleared and it turned out it would be cheaper to buy us. They didn’t tell us to copy it, they said “this is what we like about it”.
It came down to ominous, serious strings with a little bit or percussion under them – and that would be what they’d read the headlines over - then it burst into these big dancey drums and a bit more melody in the strings and that would be where the opening titles with the spinning graphics would go.
The theme is surprisingly funky…
Damaris: There was a bit of an issue as to whether it should have a tune or whether it was something that was meant to be dancey and funky but definitely not sing-able, whether it should just be hummable, or…
David: There was a phrase, you had to be able to “nod to it, but not hum it”, or something…
This week on Boxcutters our special guest was Jane Badler, who is probably best remembered as Diana in the 1980s science-fiction franchise V. Actors in science-fiction often complain they get typecast and find it hard to work – I wondered if Jane ever worried she’d be stuck with hamster-eating roles for the rest of her career.
There’s a temptation to turn an actor like Jane Badler into a pop-culture punchline – look, it’s the evil lizard-lady from V! But that would not just be insulting, but also unfair – Jane Badler is no Limahl. She has an extensive body of work, ranging from guest appearances on Fantasy Island and Murder She Wrote to regular roles on Falcon Crest and the second Mission: Impossible series. Sure, it’s not Ibsen – but who is?
So while I was looking forward to having Jane on the show, I wasn’t a crazy fan-boy – I mean, it’s not like it was Louise Jameson! (Louise, why don’t you answer my letters?) I had enjoyed the original mini-series of V, but I thought the ongoing series was pretty dire and I hadn’t watched any of it since it first aired. So I was surprised that an odd thing happened when she arrived – Josh and I were both a little star-struck by her (I can’t speak for Brett, as he is inscrutable).
But the new version of Survivors covers so many of the Institute’s obsessions – illnesses on screen, retro television, great theme tunes, cheap science fiction, Paterson Joseph – that it would be churlish not to talk about it. Beware, minor spoilers lie in wait.
For those who came in late, Survivors was a British television series that ran for three seasons from 1975. It’s premise? A man-made virus wipes out the majority of the world’s population, the few left behind trying to start anew in an unfamiliar world (so it’s a bit like Ugly Betty). It was created by Terry Nation, who also created the Daleks and Blake’s 7. Not a bad resume. Certainly better than working at Lidl.
Apologies for the lack of new material on The Outland Institute this week. We’ve been having the asbestos in the east wing of the Institute replaced – it was getting a bit worn out. Do you know how hard it is to find asbestos these days? Meanwhile – in between interviewing puppet squirrels – I’ve also had other work commitments, including my new regular gig on the tv-themed-podcast Boxcutters and I’ve been doing some Fringe reviewing for AussieTheatre.com.
Speaking of reviewing, Syms Covington has been having some fun at the expense of The Tender Hook recently – it’s an Australian film, so you won’t have heard of it. It was released on the 9th of October and set new box-office records, taking $4.55 and half-a-biscuit in its first week, before it was mercifully taken out the back of the cinema and shot repeatedly in the head. Which reminds me, it stars Rose Byrne. (Actually, to be fair, I’ve discovered I only hate Rose Byrne in Australian films, I think she’s pretty good in non-Australian films, and she is genuinely lovely in real-life).
Syms’ less-than-flattering comments about The Tender Hook led to this comment, from a person named “Anonymous”:
“Syms, I feel very sorry for you. It seems that you find enjoyment in belittling films you would never have the skill or imagination to make. Maybe if The Tender Hook was about a bitter, cynical nerd with a blog, you’d have liked it. Maybe if it spelt out every detail ad-naueseum you may have liked it. When was the last time you got laid Syms? I’m guessing its been a while. Seriously though, it’s your loss that you weren’t able to enjoy The Tender Hook.
It’s people like YOU that are the problem with Australian film industry… Get a life you miserable tiny little man.”
So people like Syms are the problem with the Australian film industry? And there I was, thinking it was the films…
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