Some people witnessed the “Staaaaage of Mystery” at Melbourne Public tonight, with Triple M Melbourne’s Ultimate Footy Panel on call for Kickin’ It For The Kids.
Eddie McGuire, Mick Molloy and Luke Darcy appeared and spoke to the crowd, along with special guests musican Mark Seymour and various AFL players. Proceeds go to Learning For Life Autism Centre.
With Mick on stage, he was joined by special guests Santo Cilauro and Tom Gleisner, re-enacting Santo The Magnificent.. rise up in the air oh Mick…
Tony Martin. (The Soap Actor, Cyclist, Crooner, and Escape Artist not pictured)
Hey, you know that Tony Martin guy who looks like the bloke from the ‘Where’s Wally?’ books?
And you know how he’s written 3 books (2 physical, 1 virtual)?
Well he’s bringing one of the chapters to the stage for the Melbourne Fringe Festival at The Butterfly Club in September / October.
Tony Martin: The Yeti is a chapter lifted out from his first book Lolly Scramble, telling the story of his upbringing in his native New Zealand.. you know.. you should have the book, so dust it off and read it again.
Wow, talk about a blast from the past. Does anyone remember this 1993 video clip of John Farnham’s Seemed Like A Good Idea (At The Time), featuring the Late Show cast & nonno Cilauro? (Thanks for the link, Zoë!)
2) Judith is pairing up with ABC Radio National personality Jason Di Rosso to fill in for Margaret Pomeranz and David Stratton on At The Movies for three weeks from July 16.
They will be doing reviews and interviews in their own special way, with Jason having a pop culture background for his radio show The List and Judith being a major film buff.
3) Coming off the success of her series Judith Lucy’s Spiritual Journeyon ABC1 in 2011, ABC have picked up a new show from Judith’s noggin – Judith Lucy Is All Woman.
A six-part series will show if there’s any difference of lifestyle change for women from 50 years ago until the present day.
It will be produced by Bearded Lady Productions, funded by Film Victoria – coming soon.
Okay, we might be stretching it a bit, but who’s complaining?!
Even though July 17 last year we celebrated 20 years since the first episode of The Late Show was broadcasted, Saturday June 5 1993 was the first day that the first episode of Season 2 went to air. By then, the show had developed a cult following.
And what a way to start the season with the now infamous “We’re Still Number Four!”, a direct parody of commercial TV idents which promote the channel’s talent. Just like Channel 9’s “Still The One“.
The Late Show got a few extra coins in their budget, allowing The D-Generation to change the set a little, going from the emerald green to a tinge of orange, red and horizontal venetian blinds. Once the money dried up, a whip-around with the hat added up to employ an extra staff member – Judith Lucy – for season ’93.
The News Desk returned with an extra bit of spit and polish, and the team get off to a flying start – a ‘brief 2 minute” synopsis of Paradise Beach. (Note: Paradise Beach was a soap on Channel 9 that aired only a few days before the return of The Late Show, and was universally panned by critics and the general public. Though somehow it lasted until 1994.)
“Hey, Warner Brothers Movie World!” becomes a staple quote every time you visit the Gold Coast theme park.
we’re also introduced to everyone’s favourite superdog – Charlie The Wonderdog featuring The Pissweak Kids and Charles (Bud) Tingwell. Read the interview with the Anderson Brothers about their experience as a Pissweak Kid.
Meanwhile, to ‘impress’ Judith’s first day on the show, Tony, Mick and Jason try and convince her about their time away in .. New York.
After a few padded sketches, the story of cult leader Cliff Thompson was shown. This was topical as only a few months beforehand the infamous Waco seige with David Korseh was still fresh in the headlines.
Toilet Break returned, but instead of the marvellous song and dance routines of The Natural Seven, Tony dives into the archives to show the best-of-the-best of talent show – Pot Luck. First off the rank, David Thai – with the amusing critique of the late Bernard King with host Ernie Sigley playing the straight man host.
and naturally, our ol’ spurring partners, Graham and The Colonel return, to follow the script, only to throw it all out the window.
Last and least, Season 1 ended with a montage under the closing credits. Season 2 upped the entertainment value with Tony requesting Mick to have a well known band or musical performer to close the show with a well-known song of theirs. Mick, always heard the names wrong, which resulted in someone else totally inappropriate to perform (full list here). First off the rank was meant to be US band Van Halen performing Jump and Panama. Mick heard it as Syd Heylen – aka Cookie from A Country Practice.
Hilarity ensues… turns out later on Syd had no idea what he was meant to do either.
From the scrivener’s ink of Ed Kavalee comes the sizzle that has been making traction and cut-through for years.
First, we copped a dosage of delicious filler from Scumbus… now here’s Kavalee’s second film:
The trailer has just been released, with appearances by Peter Helliar, Ryan Shelton, Dave Hughes, Ash Williams, Andy Lee, Ryan Fitzgerald, Lachy Hulme, Josh Lawson and some guy named Tony Martin.
Ed Kavalee and Tony Martin. (Not to be confused with KD Lang and Andrew Denton.)
View the 2 minute 53 second trailer here. No word yet on release time, but if you follow Ed on Twitter, I’m sure he’ll update us all in due time, and we’ll update the details on here. To find out more on the cast, hit up IMDB.
Yay, we have finally shifted ten years’ worth of posts to a shiny new-look forum! It needs a facelift and a few tweaks here and there, but the content has been retained, including all your old posts, private messages and login details. Find it at www.champagnecomedy.com/newforumwww.champagnecomedy.com/forum(we’ll eventually change it back to /forum).
Regular visitors to the Champagne Comedy forum are probably noticing the database errors that show up when you try to access it. This is because our host recently upgraded the database software on our shared server (PHP), and our forum (which has not been upgraded in a while) is incompatible with it.
During the “donation drive” a few months ago, we raised enough money to pay for the year’s hosting although not quite enough to pay for an upgrade to our current forum software, hence the delay. The fact our forum is down now means we urgently need to upgrade it no matter what – we are considering trying out free forum options in the short term and seeing how they go. Our host has kindly offered to migrate us to a server that has not yet upgraded the version of PHP, so the forum would keep running, but it is not a long-term fix. We know that it will need to be done eventually. In the meantime thanks for your patience and understanding – we are not coding experts so it’s a bit tricky – and huge apologies about the inconvenience.
Justin Hamilton, Santo & Steele – Letters To Green Guide
If you’re a Melbournite, you’d be aware of the Green Guide lift-out in The Age newspaper, which is usually full of amusing letters written in to critique the state of the Australian television landscape – positive and negative.
Comedian Steele Saunders has taken one step further for his love of these letters – turning it into a highly popular podcast. With various comedians who come visit and share anecdotes. Tony Martin and Santo Cilauro have been previous guests.
Check out the most recent episode with Santo as a guest, telling the origin story of Jane Kennedy joining the D-Generation, as well as a bit of fiasco with Tony’s beloved Warren Perso sketch, and even the classic Wheel Of Fortune sketch from back in the D-Generation days.
I Love Green Guide Letters is heading to the Melbourne International Comedy Festival stage from March 30 to April 20, 2013. Check out I Love Green Guide Letters for more details, tickets and previous podcasts now.
1) Judith Lucy is currently midway through her stand-up tour with other funny woman Denise Scott for The Spiral show.
2) Judith is pairing up with ABC Radio National personality Jason Di Rosso to fill in for Margaret Pomeranz and David Stratton on At The Movies for three weeks from July 16.
3) Coming off the success of her series 
