Mister Brisbane: Celebrity roast
Podcasts, we've got 'em. Also: the airfryer gets a workout, and some thoughts from another time in another place
Due to the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak his newsletter seems to have strayed from its original intentions. However, my stats tell me that people are still reading it, so I’m happy to keep writing it. This week I’m cooking a chook and posting the very latest from Hollywood (if you think it’s January, 2007, when I visited the Playboy mansion).
THE POD SQUAD
In my column for InQueensland last week, I wrote about podcasts and gave five other people the opportunity to recommend their favourites. What I neglected to do was mention some of my own favourites. So here are just a few of them:
The News Quiz. This BBC Radio 4 show features a rotating roster of some of the funniest and most perceptive minds in comedy and current-affairs commentary (pictured above). It shares the Friday Night Comedy podcast with The Now Show, Dead Ringers and other offerings of varying quality. I also occasionally enjoy the NPR news quiz, Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me.
Tony Martin’sSizzletown. This was my favourite thing to listen to last year, even though it kind of fizzled out towards the end after Tony’s production guru Matt Dower got a real radio job. The whole season is available here.
In Our Time is the Melvyn Bragg-hosted BBC series that calls in three expert each week to discuss topics from history, science, philosophy and literature. The program’s extensive archive will keep you going through the longest lockdown. Also worth checking out from the BBC is Desert Island Discs, which has a vast collection of interviews with famous and intriguing people.
Meanwhile, if you are feeling nostalgic, you may want to check out the Grace Gibson website, which is where some radio stations go to buy broadcasting rights to a bunch of old radio serials. There’s also a retail page where you can purchase such classics as Yes, What? (a.k.a. Greenbottle), Night Beat, Life With Dexter, Starlight Theatre, The Passing Parade and, from more recent times, How Green Was My Cactus.
FRYER’S TUCKER
My $69 K-mart airfryer is the best-value appliance I’ve ever bought. In the few months since me purchase, I’ve used it at least four times a week, cooking everything from a full roast to meat pies and steak and chips (above). I even baked some scones in it. There are thriving communities on Facebook for people who do the most amazing things with these cookers. On Thursday night, I put in a whole chicken, cooked it on 200 degrees for 30 minutes, then added into the basket some potato and pumpkin that had been peeled, lightly covered in olive oil and zapped in the microwave for 5 minutes. Less than an hour later, after separately cooking some veggies and making gravy with flour and the contents of the removable tray on the fryer, I had a lovely roast dinner. There was chicken enough for lunch the next day and snacks beyond that.
HOORAY FOR HOLLYWOOD
In January, 2007, I went to Hollywood on assignment for The Sunday Mail and courtesy of E! Entertainment. The trip included a visit to the Playboy Mansion, where I met Hugh Hefner and his three girlfriends, an audience with Ryan Seacrest, a taping of The Soup with Joel McHale (there’s a picture, above, of us) and a Golden Globes afterparty, where guests included Pink, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Sacha Baron Cohen and Al Gore’s son, and a live performance of Suddenly I See by KT Tunstall.
Here’s some notes I made online at the time:
It’s just gone 10am here in Hollywood and I’m getting ready for a big day out on the town, courtesy of E! Entertainment. I can’t say too much about my plans, but I’m going to be kept on the go and - I hope - have a good time. Meanwhile, here’s something that happened on the plane: I was chatting to two of the very friendly Qantas air crew as we were landing in LA (I was sitting opposite them), and one of them said he thought he recognised me. Had I flown this route before, he asked. Yes, I said, but it was a long time ago. Then he said: “Are you on television?” I am a journalist, I replied, I do some radio and I have been on TV once or twice but I didn’t have a regular gig. He then told me that Channel9’s Richard Wilkins was also on the plane, up in business class. “Oh well,” I replied, “that’s the difference between him and me.”
I arrived on the ground in Los Angeles ready to hit the bed for a huge night of catch-up sleep. Before I could check-in to my room, however, I had to kill some time - so I wandered down Sunset Blvd from West Hollywood and took a left-hand turn to get to the parallel Hollywood Blvd to wander along the Walk of Fame, drop in to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and have a look at the other tourist sites. It’s much the same as I remember it from my last trip in the early 90s. I’m disappointed that the old Jay Ward Studios on Sunset is now a doggy daycare centre* (but the statue of Rocky and Bullwinkle is still there). Still the area around Grauman’s Chinese Theatre has had a welcome tidy up since my last trip, and there’s a nice viewing platform near the relatively-new Kodak Theatre to look at the Hollywood sign.
Guess who, don’t sue: I was chatting to a French journalist last night about my admiration for a well French actor. “Oh yes,” she said, “but these days he is always drunk. It is such a pity…”
I visited Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion today. Now, whatever you think of Hef’s lifestyle - specifically the bit about him living with three women young enough to be his granddaughters - he’s certainly a unique, urbane and intelligent individual. His three girlfriends, Holly Madison, Bridget Marquardt and Kendra Wilkinson (that’s me with them, above), seem to be quite intelligent too. They’re certainly all strong personalities who are well aware of the situation they are in and the way others view it**. The mansion itself is something else …
Everywhere you go, there’s somebody flogging you a product, a seminar or some other thing that promises to make you wealthy, make you look better (via plastic surgery) or, at the very least, score you some marijuana (for medicinal purposes only, you understand). One thing that did amuse me in a town that strives on success is the notice of eviction posted in the window of one of the many psychics’ storefronts. I know it’s an old joke, but surely they must have seen it coming.
The break-up of Cameron Diaz and Justin Timberlake, made official in a statement from the couple, is the big topic of conversation around Hollywood today. The interesting thing for me was watching as the news spread from a person who knew to a person who hadn’t heard it. The reaction was almost as if they’d lost a friend.
*I think it’s now a bar.
*A few years later Holly - who had given me a guided tour of the mansion’s famous pool grotto and zoo, and was very candid about her sex life with her much-older lover - wrote a book that was quite scathing about Hefner.
WHAT’S ON
In Brisbane, Camerata, the Queensland Symphony Ochestra, The Little Red Company, and dozens of groups and individual performers are doing their thing online during this crisis. The Queensland Performing Arts Centre has put together this page full of links to online arts events from around the world.