NAKED CITY: IN SYDNEY TONIGHT!
It could be argued that every great city deserves its own TV Tonight show in the style of the five night a week chat shows we most associate with American personalities such as Steve Allen, Johnny Carson and of course David Letterman. The show is there to reflect the vibrancy of the city and provide a snapshot of its culture, current affairs and dare we say, celebrities.
Australian television does of course have a history of successful tonight shows with Graeme Kennedy’s IMT (In Melbourne Tonight) perhaps the best known. There were also the imported American hosts Delo & Daly and Don Lane and for many years the nightly chat show was the flagship of any local TV network.
Whilst in the past Melbourne has led the way, Sydney has lagged well behind when it comes to establishing a successful nightly format in the style of David Letterman or Conan O’Brien. Ironically both the Letterman and Conan shows screen locally but there is currently no home grown equivalent. Sure there have been half hearted and short lived attempts to create a Sydney based tonight show but most of the networks appear to regard the concept as either outdated or just too expensive to produce.
Whilst there is a plethora of morning chat shows, bulging at the seams with infomercials for wonder bras and magic mops, there is nothing at night to connect the viewer with the true heart and soul of this city. Some would argue that we need a Sydney Tonight Show like we need another hour of Psychic TV but surely the time has come to reinvent the genre.
Perhaps we could even extend the cultural cringe that existed in the 70s and 80s and import a US celebrity to host In Sydney Tonight. For example Pee Wee Herman would probably work cheap these days and would quickly acquaint himself with the Australian vernacular. We’d like to see the show broadcast nightly from a well known Sydney landmark, like the Pylon Lookout or Gilligans Island at Taylor Square with a vast cityscape in the background.
There would be the obligatory house band (maybe Geoff Harvey might come out of retirement) and the usual overblown set with a massive desk carved from a single block of perspex. Studio audiences would be bussed in from local nursing homes and yes there would be a nightly prize wheel. There would be no shortage of nightly guests and has-been celebrities looking for tedious self-promotion themselves but we would break new ground by charging them to appear (say $100 a minute with a taxi style meter) thus providing a unique form of funding for the concept. No tacky adverts for Wonder Bras here!
Incidentally the pic above has very little to do with this week’s subject but the still from the Freddie Freihofer Show, which ran for seventeen years between 1949 and 1966 on US TV, proves that Junior Masterchef was alive many years before Channel Ten came up with the idea. There is nothing new on TV!
The Hit List: Bridie King has a brand new album Blue Ivories which features some very funky tunes from Young Holt Unlimited, Professor Longhair and Henry Butler as well as her own very soulful compositions. The launch is on this Friday 2 March at Notes in Newtown and will feature a host of special guests including Pat Powell and the Foreday Riders. www.bridieking.com On Saturday 3 March at Venue 505 in Surry Hills there’s a rare opportunity to catch the superb jazz singer Chris McNulty, an Australian expat who has been based in New York since 1988 and is regarded as one of the finest contemporary jazz vocalists in the world today. www.chrismnulty.com
