Ahoy hoy, I thought I’d do a bit of real journalism for a change and copy and paste straight from an unsolicited press release:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
‘Good Afternoon Adelaide’ is coming to Channel 44 Adelaide and Channel 31 Melbourne & Geelong, Monday 5 March at 9PM.
[Tuesday, 27 February 2018 – ] ‘Good Afternoon Adelaide’ was a South Australian television institution. The one-hour chat show aired live across SA and into the silver city of Broken Hill weekdays at 2PM from 1989 to 1992 during an era when Adelaide truly was the place to be (before Victoria stole the slogan for their number plates, along with the Formula One Grand Prix).
Hosted by journalist Jeremy Dome and business identity Norman Vine, the show featured news, celebrity interviews, live music, talkback callers, lifestyle segments, paid advertorials and a who’s who of Adelaide royalty.
Like a lot of local Adelaide telly, the show became a victim of increased networkisation from the eastern states and GAA was cancelled in 1992. As a final insult, the station’s master tapes were later sold and used for episodes of “Wheel of Fortune”. Hence very few recordings of the show still exist today.
However, when Hallett Cove amateur video archivist Ben Felixstove passed away last year, several Betamax tapes were uncovered by his family, featuring home video footage of Ben introducing some of his favourite ‘Good Afternoon Adelaide’ clips recorded off TV.
Ben’s tapes have been eagerly snapped up by C44 Adelaide and C31 Melbourne and six half-hour ‘best-of ‘episodes of ‘Good Afternoon Adelaide’ will be broadcast for the first time in more than a quarter of a century beginning Monday 5 March at 9PM.
Well that’s another year. A year of two blog posts. Here’s what I was doing when I wasn’t writing stuff on here:
In January for the first time I worked at the Australian Open as an audio operator at Rod Laver Arena. It was similar to the panelling I’ve done for radio, but the audio (music, umpire’s microphone, packages on the big screen, etc.) wasn’t for broadcast, but played to the crowd in the stadium. I got to see most of the big night games. It was pretty great.
Used a different kind of panel too. This one had VU meters on each individual channel, which was quite nifty.
And living in South Yarra was great. Walked home most nights.
I was also conveniently positioned to walk to work at my other panelling job at Crocmedia. For the first few months of the year, I walked a couple of k’s east. And then they moved to their new studios in Southbank, so I walked a couple of k’s west.
I panelled the rebranded “AFL Nation” this year (formerly “AFL Live”), as well as some A-League and the Australian Open (golf). Panelling the golf was my introduction to “Zetta”, which is quickly becoming the new industry standard broadcast software. I do love the old NexGen, but Zetta’s built for the social media age.
The new studios and offices are state-of-the-art. Big fan of the landscaping.
Mid-year, I was back writing for the 7th season of Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell, which was also one of the last shows made at the ABC’s historic Ripponlea Studios.
Once again I popped up standing in the background of a few sketches. But this time I also had my first ever speaking role on ABC TV in a sketch about the Bananas in Pajamas turning 25.
And once again I can’t believe I’m actually doing this with these great people. Show’s back early next year and I get to be part of it all again, this time in the new Melbourne ABC TV studios in Southbank. Can’t wait.
I continued writing questions for the quiz show I started on last year, and I was a “talent stand-in” for another quiz show on a different network. I don’t think I’m supposed to talk about those because one of them hasn’t aired and the other wants to protect the identity of the question-writers, so… not sure why I even mentioned it, other than to demonstrate to any producers from those shows who periodically check up on me that I can at least partially keep a secret.
Here are some places I traveled to this year:
Finally did the Great Ocean Road. London Arch was my favourite.
Ditto Puffing Billy.
Celebrated my 30th birthday in Sweden with Annika.
Had an amazing week on Lord Howe Island with family for my Mum’s 60th birthday.
Road trip down the Limestone Coast of South Australia to Mount Gambier.
And made several trips back to Adelaide. Here’s me and my brother Luke. He had a Bond-themed birthday. I’m Max Zorin.
Speaking of Adelaide, I finally made good on that Adelaide-based web project I mentioned last year (and the year before that… turned out to be more complicated than I thought). Anyway, check out “Good Afternoon Adelaide”. It’s a multi-cam TV chat show from the early 90s.
Or if you’d prefer a less convenient way of watching, we’re currently in the process of editing x6 half hour episodes, which will air on Channel 44 in Adelaide and C31 Melbourne & Geelong sometime in the first half of 2018.
I spent October and November writing a new screenplay. This will be my second. Both comedies. Always comedy. The first one is going back in the drawer for a while. Anyway, I’ve found screenplay #2 a lot easier to write – actually planning it first helps, and I guess just practice and all that.
I was about 85% of the way through the first draft when Annika and I found out our landlord wanted to sell the house we were living in, so we had to move at short notice. That basically consumed our entire lives until we found somewhere and moved everything in. I don’t mind the packing and moving part, but the searching and the applying and competing with other people and the not knowing – that’s the stressful part. It was the sixth time I’ve moved house in eight years. Renting in Australia kinda sucks. Hopefully the next place we move to is one we own.
But we got it done. We found a unit in Malvern that’s about the same size and a tad cheaper, but it has an air conditioner AND a dishwasher. It’s already changed our lives. So we moved in and handed back the keys to the old place and literally the next day, I was driving to Adelaide for the Christmas break.
Every time I’ve come back to Adelaide, Katie the family dog has been there to greet me. We’ve had her since 2005. This time, I was shocked at how thin she was. It was like she was a puppy again. She hadn’t been well for a couple of weeks. Turned out it was cancer. She couldn’t eat and it was clear she was in pain. We made the difficult decision to put her down on December 18. I’m glad I could be there with Mum when the vet came to the house, but it was very sad.
I’ve never felt so attached to a dog. Katie was my favourite. She had so much character. Not too many cardigan corgis around here so she always turned heads where ever she went. She had some problems with her hips when she was a puppy, so she had this funny wriggling way of walking. She was always the top dog. Even when she went to doggy daycare with 30 other dogs, some of which were quadruple her size, she was the boss of all of them.
She loved food, attention, lying under a curtain or up against a wall and would go nuts if you bounced a tennis ball. She never truly grasped the concept of fetch. Or possibly she did, but it was beneath her. Thanks Mum for getting her 12 years ago. She’s been a great part of our lives and I will miss her.
But on a lighter note on the final day of 2017, pleased to announce that Annika and I are now engaged. Surprise!
A bigly year indeed. Hope yours was too and all the best for an even biglier 2018. It will be the bigliest.
This week June 1 to 5, community television in Australia is having a week of action to call attention to the fact they’re still facing the axe at the end of the year when the Federal Government turns off their TV transmission.
I wrote an article about all this for The Age last year. Aside from my middle initial mysteriously disappearing from The Age website, nothing much has changed since then – not least my firm belief that community television is an important part of the Australian media landscape and deserves to exist.
Sign the petition. Like the Facebook page. Send a Tweet. Write to your local MP and/or Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Tell someone you think community TV and the thousands of hours of content created every year by thousands of volunteers is important and they should have more time to make the transition to an online distribution business model.
Very sad this week to hear veteran ABC director Joe Murray passed away Wednesday morning.
Joe directed some of Australia’s most memorable TV comedies, including The Late Show and DAAS Kapital. He was vision mixer on Countdown and The Gillies Report. Backberner, Recovery, The D Generation – the list goes on.
I had the pleasure of working with Joe last year when he came out of retirement to direct the third season of 31 Questions. He was very generous with his time and taught us all so much about how to make television. He was always cool, calm and collected. When there was chaos in the studio, I’d hear Joe speak with that softly-spoken voice of his and I knew it was all under control. And I loved hearing his stories about the old days at the ABC.
He shared his wealth of knowledge and experience with a new generation of television-makers. It was a rare opportunity and an honour to work with a legend. We will always cherish the brief time we had with Joe, and he will be sorely missed among the cast and crew.
My thoughts are with Joe’s family and close friends at this difficult time. RIP.
And so another curtain turns by the milestone where a chapter passes around a corner that’s closed to cap off the page’s end of yet another ticked over year.
Hi, I’m David M. Green and here’s the gist of what I did in 2014.
It’s coming up on 5 years since I left Adelaide for dead and moved to Melbourne to pursue a life of comedy, radio, television and shopping after 9PM. And man, I did a big steaming pile of all those things this year…
January through April was full on. I started at my childhood dream job of writing for a Shaun Micallef-based ABC TV comedy show: Series 3 of Mad As Hell (as seen above with Alasdair Tremblay-Birchall and Simon Taylor in our official ABC-supplied writing uniforms). There’s no other way to put it. It was bloody fantastic. An amazingly talented team of people and so, so much fun. I returned in September to write for Series 4 and I’m thrilled to say I’ll be back in the writers’ room again on Series 5, which starts in February.
If you want tickets to come join the studio audience – which I can highly recommend – hit me upside the head. I know a guy 😉
Here’s my favourite Mad As Hell sketch from this year: “Watching the Watcher”
Returning to the start of the year, the ole RMITV gang got back together one last time to record the third and final season of 31 Questions: The TV game show where YOU get to be the viewer. We put everything into this one and it almost killed me.
I reckon the best episodes this year were 1, 6 and 8.
I’m amazed we got so far with that show. But 4 years and (fittingly) 31 episodes seems like enough for now. It cost a lot of money, time, sleep, dignity, and even a couple of friendships. But we did it because we loved it and everyone involved learned an incredible amount. And that’s community TV.
And that’s why I’m so concerned about the future of community TV, which is currently under threat after Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull decided to kick all 5 metro stations off the air at the end of 2015.
Make sure you sign the petition over at Commit to Community TV if you think community television in this country is worth having.
After that burst of TV-making in the first half of the year, I took my first trip to Tasmania with my friend and mentor Van Badham. It was pretty good, aside from the food poisoning on the second day. I think it was a combination of some bad fish and a slightly disturbing experience seeing MONA‘s infamous “shitting machine”.
I thought surely I took a picture of that machine? But looking back through the photos, evidently I did not. Probably for the best.
3 days in Hobart was great, though I spent one of those days in bed watching QI, which arguably I could do at home. So I’d love to go back and explore the rest of the state properly. There’s some pretty breath-taking scenery.
Here I am taking a breath:
Back in Melbourne, I met a girl from Sweden. Her name’s Annika. She wants to stay in Australia, so to get a second year on her visa, she went and worked at a dairy farm in Lockington near the Victorian/New South Wales border. For 3 months. For no money. In a profession in which she has zero interest.
Understandably, she didn’t like it much. I’m kinda ashamed we make foreign visitors do that in Australia. We are a selfish, small-minded country – as comprehensively encapsulated by our current federal government and their systematic policies of unfairness… But on the other hand, at least I got something out of this situation (not selfish).
I got to visit a part of the country I’ve never had a reason to go to. So I twice drove up to see Annika, temporarily save her from the life of a milk maid, and spend a few days in Echuca. I introduced her to Red Dwarf and we stayed in a B&B that had a fireplace. (A FIREPLACE, people.)
Both trips were great, though the guy at the B&B was a bit of a dick the second time. Got a stern lecture when we went to check out at 10.07AM. Hey, I was there at 9.55 and the counter was unattended!
Anyway, we’re totally going out now. Here she is riding a cannon (hoho):
Throughout the year I’ve also been back behind the radio panel at Crocmedia, where I continued my self-imposed tradition of panelling the Grand Final for “AFL Live” in a suit:
Even panelled a few shows with cricket legend Merv Hughes. Turns out we have similar tastes in shirts:
There were fewer sound effects this year, but that wasn’t enough to prevent another batch of bizarre audio highlights. Get a load of these:
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As always, a thrill and a pleasure to work with the whole team, on-air and behind the scenes (and not just because they get my name right, but that does go a long way).
So that’s the gist of it. I’m seeing the year out in Adelaide. Gonna see the old gang. Gonna play some golf. Gonna have my bowl. Gonna eat cereal. Gonna eat at my favourite spots: The Blue Bird Bakery and Charminar Indian restaurant in Brighton, that Yiros House place on Rundle Street, and maybe even Gilbert Place’s The Pancake Kitchen – just like Melbourne’s The Pancake Parlour, but everything’s 30 per cent cheaper. Just the way I like it.
I still love Adelaide. And I love coming back to visit. It’s slowly turning into a proper city. I reckon every time I’m here, I see more solar panels and speed cameras. And little bits of Melbourne slowly being absorbed into the local scene. That’s progress, my friend.
So that’s the gist of it. Thank you for reading, enjoy your holidays and I’ll see you in 2015. We should do lunch.
