90s showbiz royalty Steven Vizard spills on new Aussie comedy project and kids’ book
Steven Vizard has been a major player in Australian media and comedy for decades. He spills on his prolific career and what comes next.
Fiona Byrne
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Steve Vizard has always seen the funny side of life. Vizard has been one of Melbourne’s great story tellers for almost 40 years starting with a late night comedy show on Channel 7 and rising to the top of the ratings with the legendary sketch show Fast Forward and his nightly variety show, Tonight Live for which he won the Gold Logie in 1991.
While he pulled the plug on his TV hosting career at the end of 1993, he has never stopped being a part of the entertainment scene as a radio host, playwright, author, and supporter of talent, while also making the occasional guest appearance on shows.
Now, as a professor of Communications and Media Studies at Monash University and an adjunct professor at the Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at Adelaide University, Vizard, 68, is heading up a research project into Australian comedy.
He has also written his first children’s book, Here Comes Grandpa, which will keep the next generation laughing.
I caught up with Vizard to talk about Fast Forward, Hunch, Tonight Live, Kerry Packer, the mayhem of live TV, whether a tonight show could once again exist on Australian screens and becoming a kid’s book author.
FB: Hello Steve, for someone who has spent decades in entertainment, show business was not your first career choice.
SV: I studied law/arts with philosophy honours at Melbourne University. This was in the mid 70s. I had written some sketches with a mate of mine and did a couple of Archi (architect) Revues. As it happened there were some bloke who owned a place called The Flying Trapeze Theatre Restaurant, Melbourne at that time was full of these little performance places and theatre restaurants – The Last Laugh, Comedy Cafe, The Flying Trapeze, Foibles – and he asked if we would come and do a show. I could not believe we would get paid for doing this because I was working in my dad’s shops and doing all these sh*t jobs to support myself through uni. That was my first taste of showbiz and I just loved it.
FB: There was plenty of emerging talent coming out of the student scene around that time.
SV: At that time at Melbourne Uni and in that scene there were people like Glenn Robbins, Ian McFadyen, Mary-Anne Fahey. A couple of years later came Rob Sitch, Jane Kennedy, Tom Gleinser, Santo Cilauro, Jane Turner and Magda Szubanski. Twenty years before us Barry Humphries had gone through exactly the same way. None of those people were doing any courses that were supposed to be anywhere near acting.
FB: Your law career took off, but then TV came calling.
SV: I became a partner in a law firm and ended up doing the legals for a whole lot of film financing. (He even wrote a film, The Bit Part, starring Nicole Kidman in 1987) I was writing sketches in my spare time and got offered to do a pilot for Channel 7 by (executive) Gary Fenton, literally on a shoestring, with a group of people he had seen from the theatre restaurant scene. So a group including me, Ian McFadyen, Mary-Anne Faye, Mark Mitchell, Glenn Robbins, Peter Moon and Alan Pentland did a show called The Eleventh Hour (in 1985). We did that for 13 episodes. In that show we invented characters that we took to future shows. There was a prototype of Kylie Mole, there was Con the Fruiterer, there was Uncle Arthur, there was my Hunch character.
FB: How did the legendary sketch comedy show Fast Forward emerge?
SV: I went back to being a lawyer after The Eleventh Hour. I was now an international lawyer flying around the world, working mainly in Germany and Switzerland. I was sitting in Zurich with my colleague working on a very big deal with a German steel manufacturer and Gary Fenton rang said ‘we want a sketch show, could you come and do it – but you would have to be in it too.’ That was 1988. I started 1989 with the promise of making 13 episodes of a sketch comedy show, so I rang up a whole lot of people who I had known from uni, or who I had performed with or who I had seen or listened to – Marg Downey, Peter Moon, Magda Szubanski, Alan Pentland, Ernie Dingo, Jane Turner, Gina Riley and others – and that became the cast of Fast Forward. I also contacted Peter Nicholson who had been doing these puppets called Rubbery Figures for the ABC. Andrew Knight and Ted Emery and I set up (production company) Artist Services.
FB: Fast Forward took off.
SV: My main idea was ‘let’s do a week in the life of television’, a condensed, humorous look at the week that was via TV. The device would be changing channels and it gave the show real pace. By the end of 1989 it had gone from being never on air to being Seven’s top rating show. Seven then did a four year deal for Fast Forward and asked if I wanted to do a tonight show. I said ‘not really’. The head of production came down to Melbourne, I think we went out to lunch and I got drunk and was talked into it.
FB: Tonight Live launched in 1990, was a ratings smash and in 1991 you won the Gold Logie.
SV: We basically modelled it (Tonight Live) on Letterman, because the network wanted it on Letterman, Graham Kennedy and The Don Lane Show and in addition we put a whole lot of sketch components in it, as well as mayhem. It was the capacity to go anywhere and have fun with the show that resonated.
FB: Tonight Live had a rocky first night.
SV: The day I started my tonight show in 1990, was the day Channel 7 went into liquidation. There were receivers coming around the station, everything was getting locked up and they were putting bolts and locks on things. I was in Studio 7, which is where we did my show for some years, and that became a lot in the Quintex receivers catalogue, all the cameras and everything. It was a miracle we got a show out that night, but we did.
FB: Part of the allure of Tonight Live was that it was wildly unpredictable.
SV: We broadcast a live dinner party one night, we did a show where we had a split screen and one side was R-rated and the other was for general consumption. I did one show from the back of a motorbike while Mick Doohan was driving me around. We did a show from a bowling alley, from the McDonald’s drive through, from viewer’s lounge rooms. We did a nude show. We did terrible things to Derryn Hinch. We stole his set one night and another night he was away and we bricked up the entrance to his dressing room and plastered over it. He had been in my sights for a while because of the Hunch character on Fast Forward which was a parody of him, a bloke who was permanently outraged. All the big stars came on: Tom Jones, Michael Douglas, Billy Joel, Bob Hope, Quincy Jones, Gregory Peck, Debbie Reynolds, Burt Reynolds, Patrick Swayze, Robin Williams, Stevie Wonder, Peter Weir and Oliver Reed who was on the show five times including the time he stripped and showed us a tattoo on his old fellow live on TV.
FB: And then there was the ferry show.
SV: Seven wanted us to do something in Sydney so it was decided we would do the show live on a ferry on the harbour. Everyone boarded around 7pm, there were hundreds of Sydney’s hoity-toity on this boat. By the time the show got to air at 10.30pm a lot of champagne had been consumed and people were p*ssed. There were people stripping, there were other boats trying to board us like pirates, people were falling off. Wherever you turned the camera there were people vomiting, there were a couple of exotic dancers who got on the boat who were pole dancing on poles people hang on to, and I was personally seasick while I was hosting. It was the worst show ever broadcast anywhere in the world.
FB: With your success at Seven did Nine try to poach you?
SV: Halfway through 1990 I got a call from Kerry Packer saying come up to Sydney.
He flew me up, a car met me at the airport and took me to Bellevue Hill (Packer’s home). I was thinking it would be a business meeting and when I walked in there was Kerry in a pair of shorts and he said ‘do you want to come and watch TV?’. We go into his den and he put his feet up on the coffee table, told the butler to bring in some sandwiches and we sat there drinking orange juice, watching and talking about tele. After about three hours, what became apparent was that he wanted me to come over to Channel 9. It got to about 5pm and I am thinking ‘how am I going to get out of this? I don’t know where I am in Bellevue Hill, I don’t even know where the front door is’. I was literally there for eight hours before I made my escape. I found him (Kerry) incredibly amiable and very persuasive. He was incredibly charming and forceful too.
FB: Why did you quit Tonight Live at the end of 1993?
SV: The reason I stopped was because when I started Fast Forward I had just got married to Sarah and we had no children. By the time I finished four of my five children were born and I was hosting a nightly tonight show and was involved in a big production business. Family is my life. You get one chance with that stuff. I was prepared to do the show three nights a week, but the network wanted four so we just stopped.
FB: Do you think a night time variety show could work now in Australia?
SV: Nothing is impossible, anything is possible and, in fact, America and the UK and other countries around the world still have these exact type of shows. Another way to look at it is we are kind of unique in that we don’t have these type of shows. We have hybrid shows like The Project and The Cheap Seats which cover news as well as entertainment and then there are the morning shows which are half entertainment. I find it quite fascinating that the morning shows particularly, which I like, are suddenly bearing the weight of doing what tonight shows used to do when most talent don’t want to get up and do something at 7am. Also people aren’t in the mood for that stuff at that time. The reason that you saw those things on a tonight show is the reason why people go to the theatre or the movies at night, it is because they have time and they are in the frame of mind to absorb it.
FB: I hear you have been busy planting grapes.
SV: We are putting a vineyard down at our farm (on the Mornington Peninsula). It is something I vowed I would never do, but we are putting in pinot and chardonnay. I am now an expert on ploughing paddocks and putting in stakes. In about who knows how many years we will have a bottle of wine and it will be the most expensive bottle of wine ever produced.
FB: Your children were the reason you stepped away from Tonight Live and now it is your grandchildren who have inspired your latest project, your first children’s book called Here Comes Grandpa.
SV: I have got two grandchildren and there is nothing like grandkids to tire you out, wear you out and make you realise how knackered you are. Sarah and I can’t spend enough time with Poppy, 3, and Teddy, 1. They are the most beautiful little kids and they love us and we love them. They bring so much joy. I was walking at our farm not that long ago with Poppy and we talk to the nature, ‘hello sky, hello butterfly, hello birds’, and she stopped and said ‘Babar, why do you make strange noises when you walk?’ I did not realise simply being old you grunt, and puff and groan and creak; everything you do makes a noise. I started to explain to her that grandpa makes strange sounds when he walks because his back goes click, click, click, and suddenly I was doing a poem. I thought I may as well write some of this down and before I knew it I had a book. It has been beautifully illustrated by Nathaniel Eckstrom. It is basically all the sounds that a grandpa makes as he lives his life. It is a kid’s book for grandpas. There are plenty of books for other people, but I think the relationship between grandparents and their grandkids is special.
Here Comes Grandpa, written by Steve Vizard with illustrations by Nathaniel Eckstrom, published by Brio Books is available in store now or at www.briobooks.store
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