From Theincblot.blogspot
Catherine Deveny’s latest book Free to a Good Home has just been released. The book collects the best of her television and opinion columns from the Age in 2009.
Hey Hey It’s Saturday. The Director’s Cut.
THIS COLUMN WAS PUBLISHED AUGUST 2009
Are you fucking serious? They’re bringing back Hey Hey it’s Saturday? If that’s not a blatant attempt by Channel Nine to attract my attention I don’t know what is.
Where do I start? Bump off Leunig and give me a whole page for this one.
What are they thinking? When I say they, I mean my friends at Channel Nine. And when I say friends I mean blokes who would gladly kill and rape me as half time entertainment at the Grand Final. Or any occasion, event or gathering. For a laugh. And similcast it with Eddie Maguire in the studio and Steve Jacobs on the ground. “Yeah Eddie, the crowd down here is electric. Traditionally what happens on the footy trip stays on the footy trip but this year Nine has a World First Premiere. Who needs Carols By Candlelight when we’ve got Deveny on a spit after a night with the State Of Origin All Codes dream pack sex team, After the break, Livinia with the weather….”
But seriously, it’s about time someone exhumed and resuscitated the festering corpse of Hey Hey. Something had to be done about the staggering deficit of blokey, cobbled up, camp concert style content on television and the shortage of middle aged, white men with relevance deprivation on our screens.
Hey Hey ran for 27 years. Haven’t we suffered enough? Apparently a Facebook page calling for the show’s return has 197,000 followers. Which may sound impressive until you realize they’re all Daryl Somers, Hey Hey’s host. Host as in organism that is invaded by a virus on which parasites thrive. The show was axed in 1999 despite the noisy protest of Daryl’s mum.
Hey Hey was fine for what it was. An alternative to having a conversation with your family. But it was even dated back in 1999 when it was axed. Anything could happen and generally didn’t. The words “improvised”, “unscripted” and “flying by the seat of their pants” were used as code for “sloppy”, “cheap” and “Why prepare, research, rehearse and plan when you can just throw starving egos into a studio and let their delusion of talent do the work being fuelled by the promise of a Logie, being called a legend over a Crownie after the show or a hand job from one of the make-up girls.”
Dead Eyed Daryl will be joined by Red being a sarcastic prick, Wilbur being a smartarse, Molly sucking up to anything with a whiff of next big thing, Shane Bourne doing jokes beginning with the line “A couple of sheilas walked into a bar” and John Blackman making us think what happened in the 70s should stay in the 70. Mrs. McGillicuddy anybody?
Well at least the mediocrity of the performers made the Red Faces contestants look good. So too segments with like What Cheeses Me Off and personalities like Plucka Duck. Plucka? Get it? Sounds a bit like…which reminds me, I wonder if Jacky McDonald is still alive? Hey Hey It’s The Token Woman! Livinia Nixon! Denise Drysdale! Jo Beth Taylor! The occasional presence of any women on Hey Hey was amplified by their unashamed absence. What does it say when Dickie Knee – a hat and wig on a stick got more air time than any performer with a vagina on Australia’s longest running light entertainment show.
Light entertainment is what you call comedy when the jokes don’t work. Variety is what you call a programme when you’re not sure what it is and family entertainment the genre it’s labelled if you want to sell station wagons, nappies and lawn mowers. How do I know? I wrote for IMT with Frankie J Holden, All Star Squares and The Wedge. I’m not proud of it, I had to pay the car rego.
If these ‘reunion shows’ (Look who’s just popped in! It’s Peter Russell Clarke, Colette Mann and the blokes from The Curiosity Show! You thought they were dead didn’t you? Well after 30 seconds you’ll wish they were!) rate Hey, Hey will be back on our screens permanently. You have been warned. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s creative paralysis and corporate cannibalism.
Love Her Or Loathe Her
From The Age
By Michael Lallo
December 11, 2008
Few columnists elicit such starkly contrasting responses as Catherine Deveny, and that’s just the way she likes it. Michael Lallo reports.
CATHERINE Deveny is sitting on a couch out the front of her house, her bare feet up on a stool. It’s hot and windy, and her red cotton dress is billowing around her ears. After her fourth inadvertent Marilyn Monroe impersonation, she yanks it down and tucks it between her legs. Then she likens herself to a prostitute as she sets about biting the hand that feeds her.
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Catherine Deveny Melbourne Icon
From Readings.com.au
By Jo Case
Catherine Deveny, like her Age colleague Michael Leunig, is a Melbourne icon, loved (and sometimes loathed) for consistently calling it as she sees it in her columns on television and on the opinion pages. Jo Case talked to her about her new collection of her best writing over the past year or so, Say When.
At this time of year, we edit out the dysfunction in our lives. On Richard Billingham
IF YOU’RE reading this, it means that you’ve survived Christmas Day and not been stabbed by one of your relatives, nor are you in custody for finally losing it and going the thump on Uncle Ron. From all of us here at Dysfunctional Family Central, congratulations for not going a member of your family with the good pair of scissors yesterday; God knows you wanted to.
People are going to write in accusing me of making light of domestic violence and informing me that this time of year is particularly stressful. I’m deadly serious. I know this time of year is a hot spot. Again, it’s a case of not being surprised that it happens, but being stunned that it doesn’t happen more often. Anyway, well done. Pat yourself on the back and pour yourself another glass of restraint.
It’s Boxing Day, one of the weirdest yet most comforting days of the year. Pav for breakfast, a ham as big as a nine-month-old baby in a pillowcase in the fridge and for some, the cricket. But not for me. If I want to be bored out of my brains for hours on end and sit on uncomfortable seats, I’ll go to church. Or spend the day in the casualty waiting room of a public hospital.
Much of my Boxing Day will be spent flattening boxes, chucking out plastic packaging and finding places for the carload of merchandise acquired over the previous 24 hours. I’m also the mother of three boys, so for a fair whack of today I’ll be head down finding batteries, small plastic men and pieces of Lego the size of Tony Abbott’s heart. At some point, I’m certain to find myself trawling through the rubbish to find that “really important bit” only for the entire dragon/mother ship/flashing gadget with annoying music to be crushed underfoot moments later. As I tip the broken dream into the bin, I will be overtaken by a deep sense of calm.
I’m feeling a little emotionally raw. Not a fan of this time of year. I like routine and effort. Not the drum roll and fanfare stuff. Which is one of the millions of reasons that I’m not married. The panic of getting everything right and the stress of orchestrating happiness makes no sense to me. The grand gesture days are never the ones I remember. The moments I capture in my head to keep me warm when I’m old are always unexpected.
I spent Saturday afternoon at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art checking out Richard Billingham’s exhibition People, Places, Animals. Billingham is a photographer best known for images taken of his dysfunctional family “drinking, fighting, smoking, passing out, and pet-throwing in their cramped West Midlands council flat”. His father, Ray, is a toothless alcoholic often snapped struggling to get out of a chair or passed out next to the toilet. His morbidly obese mother, arms covered in tattoos, spends her days doing jigsaws and playing a game console. His brother Jason wanders around the flat with his shirt off, killing flies and smearing their guts into the smoke-stained wallpaper.
The exhibition is stunning. Most of the images are of his family or of animals in zoos. As a boy, Billingham’s only escape from his dysfunctional family was the zoo. The images of the animals butting their heads against the doors of their enclosures, aimlessly pacing up and down, sniffing the same spot over and over all while being watched by curious humans are heartbreaking. And even more poignant juxtaposed with images of his caged family.His work is described as “a cathartic outpouring of his claustrophobic past”. It really hit a nerve with me. Confronted by the images, I had tears pouring down my face. I could smell that cramped council flat, the sweaty upholstery, the unwashed clothes, the cigarette smoke, the stale bottles and the rubbish from the take-away. I was overwhelmed by the airlessness, the hopelessness, the desperateness.There was none of the usual romanticisation of the underclass to make it palatable. This exhibition is not what you’d call a feel-good experience, but it is certainly a feel-something experience. Which is rare in this era of being bombarded by images. Leaps in technology have led to a sharp shift from quality to quantity in photography. It’s ages since I’ve been kicked in the guts by a photo.Billigham’s work made me think about the images of our life, our families and ourselves that we choose to display in frames and photo albums and carry around in our wallets, and the images and truths that we edit out. Billingham’s decision to take the skeletons out of his closet, blow then up and put them in a frame I found liberating. The unhappy snaps, not the happy snaps. Most family dysfunction can’t be photographed. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. I’m with Diane Arbus: “I think all families are creepy in a way.”
Stories From Peter Mac
Stories From Peter Mac
Director of the Peter MacCallum Wellbeing Centre Geraldine McDonald and comedian, writer and author Catherine Deveny combine forces to collate this 
beautiful book of anecdotes, real-life stories, reflections, tales and truths to come out of the Wellbeing Centre’s writing workshops. These stories come from staff, patients, volunteers and carers.
Keen to grab a copy of Stories From Peter Mac the beautiful book of tales and truths that came out of the writing masterclasses held at the Wellbeing Centre?
You can
1. Buy from Readings Carlton for $25
2. Pop into our pop up store in the foyer of Peter Mac
· Monday 16 Dec 2020 12.30pm – 2.30pm
3. Drop into the Wellbeing Centre any time or email them here and they’ll pop one in the post
4. Buy the eBook version here for only $15
$25! All killer no filler!