Naked City: Whatever Happed to the Late, Late Show?
Perhaps it’s just the collateral damage of a changing lifestyle dominated by the new technologies. Then again it could also be a huge conspiracy to lock us all into a rigid nine to five workplace in an effort to boost productivity. It seems we are losing the late night hours especially the once vigorous post midnight nocturnal playground of culture and old school socialising.
Socialising like sitting around in Kings Cross’s Piccolo Bar until 5.00am in the morning, charged with expresso and listening to John Coltrane on the juke box. Culture like jazz musicians jamming at the Paradise Club in Darlinghurst Rd right through until dawn or the remarkable Deadly Ernests (yes there five of them) and their late night TV shows which introduced thousands of young Australians to the joys of schlock horror.
We might just be wallowing in a nostalgia but it does seem that the once fruitful wee small hours have become a wasteland for those insomniacs, shift workers or bohemian ravers who are not safely tucked into bed by 11pm. Television is a great reflection of our society but is now almost unwatchable after midnight unless you have developed an insatiable lust for info-mercials and the endless home shopping pitch. Who would have guessed that the new celebrities of Australian TV are the Nutribullet and the Shark vacuum cleaner. Maybe they deserve their own special category at the Logies!
The once loved late night movies that plundered a treasure chest of B grade, cult and classic film noir have long given way to these wretched info-mercials. It seems only the gullible are tuned in after midnight and the rest of us need to grab a good book or add some quirky photos to our Facebook page. That might be a suitable diversion for some night owls but there are many who crave a much deeper intellectual stimulation. You can download just about anything these days but there’s something special about turning the TV on at 2.00am and discovering a rare screening of The Tingler or The Blob.
The 1.30am lockout may have curtailed the boozy weekend madness in Kings Cross but there was a time when late night clubs flourished all over Sydney, free of any real controversy involving alcohol or violence. Clover Moore has often talked about Sydney becoming a twenty four city with late night restaurants, cafes, bars and various cultural attractions. That paradigm worked briefly during the Sydney Olympics in 2000 with thousands of international visitors in town but has long since dissipated.
We are now so locked into a rigid framework of opening and closing hours that any departure from that regime is considered almost revolutionary. The Sydney Festival has tried it with post midnight shows in the Spiegletent, all of which have been highly successful and Melbourne recently ran its White Night festival which ran from dusk right through until dawn.
Maybe we need to set aside a precinct of this city purely for the nocturnal, far from the madding crowd of Kings Cross and heavily subsidized and promoted by our good City Council. You would find restaurants, a cinema, cafes and bars with live music, as well as selected specialist shops trading exclusively from midnight to dawn. At first it would operate only on weekends but once Sydneysiders cottoned on it would expand to seven days a week. The area would become a haven for anybody looking for late night nourishment or intellectual inspiration from insomniacs and travellers through to those who simply eschew the daylight hours. Eventually hotels and apartments would spring up in the area and a whole new apres midnight culture would emerge with not a Nutribullet to be seen.
By Coffin Ed, Jay Katz and Miss Death
