Oysters at La Tratt, a cheeky game of cards: Secrets of Adelaide’s showbiz gang
Every so often, a group of local celebrities whose bond has lasted decades catches up in Adelaide for a big night out. There’s Willsy, of course, famous faces from the stage and media ... even a former PM!
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Mark Trevorrow will get off the plane at Adelaide Airport, minus the wigs, polyester suits and golden sequined pants of his much loved alter ego Bob Downe.
He will be met at the airport by Anne “Willsy” Wills, who needs no introduction in these parts.
They will greet each other warmly, as they have many, many times before, then head to La Trattoria in the city, “Willsy” having rung the night before to ensure a steady supply of their favourite dish – oysters.
They may, or may not, be joined by their “gang”, which includes, but is by no means exclusive to, Matt “Hans” Gilbertson, Peter Goers and, if she is in town, former prime minister Julia Gillard.
Wills says that, these days, it often feels like a family affair.
“If Julia is here we will all try and get together,” she says.
“And it will be family and partners and everyone else. Sometimes there’s a few of us, sometimes a lot more.”
It will often end with a game of cards, usually canasta somewhere.
“We are teaching the kids to play it now,” Wills says.
The truth is, they are all tight and go back a long, long way, and in a business that can be notoriously fickle, have remained steadfast in their support of each other..
“Peter (Goers) and I when we used to do our show in say about 2014 we started saying ‘And here is our son’ and out would come Matt (Gilbertson)’,” Wills says.
“Matt would play the piano and I’d sing with him. We’d do these little shows around, like at the Feast Festival.
“But it got the the point where we were just up in Kadina, just Peter and I, were doing a show and the audience was shouting, ‘Where’s your son?’
“It’s just lovely that they go along with the gag.
“And I always say to Matt’s mum, Jo, look I’m sorry you had to do the hard work getting him out, but I’ve taken the kudos for him since then.”
But even if it’s just Willsy and Mark the two of them, it won’t matter much.
Theirs is a bond lasting decades (and one set to again take centre stage).
With or without their ‘gang’, there will be much to talk about, even more to laugh about, and another chapter of one of showbiz’s most enduring friendships to be written.
Accounts differ a little as to when they first met.
Wills says it was during an interview in 1988.
Trevorrow thinks it was the early ’90s, when he was performing at the Adelaide Fringe and appeared on the first week of Wills’ A.M. Adelaide, the TV magazine show which dominated the daytime TV timeslot during that decade.
What they don’t disagree on is how quickly they hit it off.
“It was straight away,” Trevorrow says.
Wills adds with a laugh: “Yes, we immediately clicked. He’s an Aquarian and I’m a Libra, and we’re very compatible.”
As the years went by, they stayed in regular contact. Wills would often make guest appearances in Trevorrow’s act, something she says saved her career after the TV circus had moved on somewhat and her on-screen partner, and younger sister Sue, had children.
“I actually owe my resurgence to Mark,” she says. “It would have been 25 years ago. He said, ‘Look, I’m gonna be doing the Fringe. I’m coming down. What say you? Can I just use you as a secret? You can be a surprise guest and we’ll sing a song.’
“And that’s how it started.
“So up until that stage, I’d been out in the doldrums, you know, and not singing because Susan and I had stopped singing together at that stage because she was raising kids and all that stuff.”
It became a recurring event, with Wills joining Trevorrow on stage pretty much every time he came to town.
“And then it just became a theme that whenever he came to Adelaide, when it was possible, he would just include me in the show,” Wills says.
“You know, I owe him such a lot. It’s that he’s such a generous person and a lot of the people in this industry don’t like sharing.
“Mark will not only share, but he’ll suggest, `Why don’t you and Susan do this and do that?’”
From Trevorrow’s perspective, the decision to include Wills just made sense personally and professionally; he regards her as one of the best and most natural live performers he has worked with. “She’s just an incredible talent, a natural comic, a great singer and a great, great personality,” he says.
“I just love her and her incredible generosity, and spontaneity and joy of life.
“She will be 80 next year (Wills turns 79 in October) and she’s just outrageous. She’s an inspiration.”
Wills says the friendship has extended well beyond the stage and they will text each other three to four times a week.
She is close to Trevorrow’s husband, Stefan, and extended family.
“He’s the closest thing to family for Susan and me that I can think of,” she says simply.
But it’s on the stage where they will again make their mark when they team up for next week’s Adelaide Cabaret Festival (which runs June 9-24), recreating the much loved Adelaide Tonight TV show of the ’60s and ’70s, which was made famous by the pairing of Wills with the late, great Ernie Sigley.
They promise a conga line of guests, a healthy dose of cabaret … and bucketloads of nostalgia.
Trevorrow loves Adelaide. He’s got his close circle of friends here and Stefan’s father lives in Mt Barker.
“If I could get a regular job there, I could live there,” Trevorrow says from Perth, an hour or so after getting off a cruise where he’s spent the past few days performing.
“But I’m not sure Stef would go back, it'd be too much back to the future.
“But it’s changed so much over the years, it’s incredible.”
Still, the Adelaide Cabaret Festival remains Trevorrow’s favourite and he’s buoyed at the prospect of taking to the stage, albeit with something of a twist this time around.
While the wigs, loud suits, and caked on makeup will accompany his character of Bob Downe on the aforementioned nights with Willsy, Trevorrow has decided to shed the Prince of Polyester for his own show, Singing Straight. It’s not the first time he has done so by any means, but he admits he approaches the idea with a mixture of excitement and trepidation.
“It started about 20 years ago when the wonderful Ted Robinson, who used to be the head of comedy at ABC, created Good News Week,” he says.
“And they asked me to be on the show and I wanted to do it as Bob but they said, ‘No, no, no, no, the people that appear on the panel appear as themselves.’
“And I was really nervous and scared about performing as myself.
“And so the only way I was going to do it, as they weren’t going to put me on as Bob, I either did it as Mark or I didn’t do it.
“I was terrified and I just did it.
“And so Paul (McDermott) and I would do these duets, and they were just an instant success which was incredible, really.
“So it helped me find my feet performing as myself because it’s so easy to hide behind the character.”
Shedding the character still takes time and effort and a completely different approach to performing.
“Bob is really me as a kid fooling around and putting on numbers for the family. Really me as a show-off kid,” Trevorrow says.
And it was that childhood, in his music mad family home in Murrumbeena, a leafy suburb southeast of Melbourne, which informs much of Singing Straight, from his take on Beatles classics to the soothing tones of Bacharach and Sondheim.
He grew up listening to music on a wind up gramophone. Everything from pop, to rock, to blues and early R&B, to Louis Armstrong, to Ella Fitzgerald, to ABBA.
Nothing, however, could top the Fab Four.
“One of my earliest memories would have been watching the Beatles on the balcony at the Southern Cross (Hotel in 1964),” he says.
“Channel 7 broadcast their arrival live and they followed them from Essendon Airport to town.
“And there were 100,000 kids on Exhibition St, swaying and screaming and it was all live on TV, and I was just glued to it.
“And then there was the world’s very first international satellite TV show called Our World in 1967 and the London contribution was the Beatles recording
All You Need Is Love live.
“Well, watching all that was just so electrifying.”
Little surprise then that a medley of Lennon-McCartney favourites forms a centrepiece of his show.
As we’ve already stated, Bob Downe is not being lost from the festival altogether.
Far from it.
And that’s a good thing for one of our most recognisable and much-loved characters, and one who turns 40 next year.
Trevorrow created him in the ’80s, while working with Cathy Armstrong in Glebe, Sydney. Bob was one of a bunch of characters in a cabaret show they performed, but the biggest hit with the audience.
The character grew and would become a local, then national, then international phenomenon, appearing in 18 Edinburgh Fringe festivals, selling out five Sydney Opera House seasons, winning a Lifetime Achievement in Cabaret, hosting his own TV shows (a few times) and performing at the Royal Variety Performance in 1995.
The formative years weren’t always easy, though. Trevorrow recalls an early appearance on Hey, Hey It’s Saturday that was a little unsettling.
“It was kind of that footy show type of vibe, you know, not very friendly to anybody, and not to women or gay people,” he says.
Times, he says thankfully, have changed, to the point that being gay is now not only accepted, but celebrated.
He points to hits like Priscilla Queen of the Desert, the juggernaut that is the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade (which Bob, incidentally, has hosted nine times), the LGBTIQ+ community’s campaign for equality, and just a general shift in societal attitudes.
“I feel like everyone just marched in lock-step,” he says.
“I used to joke that I was the only gay in the village. It’s a career move now.”
He’s only half joking. His latest gig is playing a gay koala dad called Russell on ABC Kids’ Kangaroo Beach.
The enduring appeal of Bob “The Prince of Polyester” Downe, however, transcends labels and comes down simply to the connections the character has formed with the audience.
“I’ve always enjoyed doing it and also I’ve just developed a relationship with the audience,” he says.
“I just did a show at the Regal (Perth) and not being here for about eight years now, the response was unbelievable.
“I think the only reason why I keep doing it is because people keep wanting me to do it.
“And I love it.”
It was Adelaide’s golden age of television and, while it may not be politically correct to use the term in 2023, Anne Wills was the golden girl.
From the mid ’60s, for more than 35 years, she was a fixture of our screens, delivering the weather report, working with Sigley on Adelaide Tonight, helming the weekly Movie Scene and hosting A.M. Adelaide.
The story of how she became Willsy has been told many times before but bears repeating.
It was 1967 and her first show with Sigley as his “Barrel Girl”.
“I came on to the set and Ernie said, ‘Here’s Willsy’, and then he said, ‘How’re things, Willsy?’ and I said, ‘Mine are great: how are yours?’,” she says.
“And off we went. We discovered we worked very well together, and I have been Willsy ever since.”
What followed was a career that saw her win 19 Most Popular State Personality Logies, a record which stands to this day.
In 2018 she was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia for Services to broadcasting.
Now she’s putting the finishing touches on Adelaide Tonight, which was programmed by Adelaide Cabaret Festival co-artistic director Alan Cumming, who describes it as an “intergenerational variety feast”.
From here, she and Trevorrow will rehearse the musical numbers, but the rest will be largely ad libbed, something that Wills says defined the great TV shows of the ’70s and ’80s.
It’s clear she loves reliving that era and is not alone: Adelaide has a healthy appetite for nostalgia. “I think it’s remarkable that in the last 10 years, people have been able to come back 20 years after they supposedly retired,” she says.
“All the singers, the bands are all coming back, because we all like to remember when that was just a hit. What was I doing? I was getting married for the first time or I was building a house.
“At the moment it’s a bit doom and gloom, with prices rising and everything.
“I think if we can make people laugh, and they remember the stuff that we did, it makes them remember that they were part of it as well and then we all belong to the same group.”
Now two old, dear mates will hit our stage to recreate that era, to take us back to simpler times, to make us laugh, to make us sing and to help us remember.
In between, they may even take a breath and realise that, without a friendship formed almost 40 years ago, none of this would be happening.
But not before another round of those oysters and, if the gang is around, just maybe a game of cards. ■
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