Glass half full

NINE'S Logies night is one of the best reality television comedy shows on the local media schedule.

NINE'S Logies night is one of the best reality television comedy shows on the local media schedule, reliably offering uncomfortable laughter, embarrassment, humiliation, an occasional unintended moment of ribaldry if we're lucky and a few tears.

From the beginning, when they were televised in 1961 from Melbourne's then glamorous Southern Cross Hotel, there has always been something makeshift, garish and gimcrack about the Logies; something warmly lowbrow and trivial.

"Logies?" Dame Edna Everage inquired of one-time seemingly perennial host Bert Newton. "Sounds like something you'd find in a Chinese handkerchief." More recently, clever Andrew Denton, a brilliant compere, said: "Welcome to the 42nd Logies . . . God, if only they were that long."

Bob Phillips, long-term producer of live shows such as Graham Kennedy's In Melbourne Tonight, The Don Lane Show and Hey! Hey! It's Saturday in its early days, still remembers the nights in the cramped Southern Cross ballroom, everyone smoking and boozing, the air vaporised nicotine.

Newton was the host, peering urgently at his notes during the breaks, one wet-tipped finger in the air to determine the mood, and trying desperately to keep things under control as drunk after drunk came up to accept awards.

"We were always paralytic, so much drinking; you got pissed as a galah and then made a fool of yourself on national TV, though you never realised until the next morning," Phillips says. "There to celebrate the best of local TV, the night always brought out the worst: punch-ups, marriage break-ups and dreadful personal calamities."

He remembers two leading presenters slugging it out at one of the after-parties that were orchestrated lavishly by the networks throughout the hotel. The parties became legendary. It seemed all of the misfits and crackpots, dreamers and schemers managed to get into those rooms, crowded in with the stars, producers and network executives and their wives. Everyone made enemies and friends with abandon, embracing both as badges of honour and drinking until fluid came out of their ears.

I was one of them; a star then in the racy serial The Box in the early 1970s. It was a satirical show following the day-to-day boardroom and bedroom exploits of the staff of the fictional TV station UCV-12. The series, with all its flashing buttocks and breasts and lesbian kisses, wasn't a patch on those Logies parties. For the next few decades, publicly at least, the Logies were a ritual of comfortable national togetherness, a celebration of the way TV created unity out of fragmentation. We were all connected in TV land by the night's playfulness and spontaneity, its self-reflexive jokes and the sheer silliness of congratulating shows that would have made us sigh with irritation if we had watched them.

The Logies have always represented a point of connection between those who make TV and those who love watching it, and have always seemed to belong to that earlier robust time.

It's impossible not to think about them and imagine their earlier incarnation. Now the event seems a little beside the point, as so many viewers dream of ways of avoiding commercial TV altogether in a burgeoning digital media landscape that even Marshall McLuhan could not have envisaged.

Newton hosts again this year, his 19th Logies as front man. He is the only survivor of TV's beginnings in this country, when it was joyfully makeshift, impromptu and live. Dear old Bert must think he's living in a parallel universe; no wonder he always seems so peculiarly delighted to still be standing in front of a camera.

This year's awards ceremony will include, of course, the usual imported variety acts, though the catastrophe-in-the-making from Britain's Got Talent, Susan Boyle, was a last-minute cancellation.

Insiders suggested the long flight might have been one too many for the fragile chanteuse. But pop stars Gabriella Cilmi and Rogue Traders will perform, providing what Kennedy used to call the obligatory "piss breaks" in live TV shows.

Packed to the Rafters' Rebecca Gibney, Talkin' 'bout Your Generation's Shaun Micallef and Home and Away's Ray Meagher will battle it out for the Gold Logie.

My bet is on the mercurial Micallef, so brilliant at the moment: he's commercial TV's brightest star. And watch MasterChef's Matt Preston pick up some gongs, too.

But Newton is up against it as host, for all his robust past experiences. The productions have been funereal affairs in recent years. There have been few good jokes and little self-deprecation, except when Rove McManus appeared with some genuine spontaneous wit. A couple of years ago he cleverly ad-libbed a sketch about the endless thank-yous from winning soap stars that were slowing a quiet Logies night even further.

McManus had just won the award for most popular presenter, beating off Sunrise's anodyne Melissa Doyle and David Koch and proving his detractors to be out of touch with the public. "I'd like to thank those people who did nothing for me," he said.

It's already exhausting just thinking about all this year's winners -- ingenues, journeymen and women and industry stalwarts -- hurrying to the stage before the music runs out, as it often does, to receive lukewarm applause.

Phillips says he'd be wary of producing the show now.

"Watching it over the years, you think just what could you do with it; they've tried everything," he says.

"These days it's all about pacing; you don't have the luxury of casually going about in a spirit of goodwill."

Martin Coombs, veteran director of Ten's Good News Week and that network's many live comedy specials, agrees.

"One big problem with awards shows is a cynical room of well-lubricated TV people who are too cool to laugh and clap. It must be the toughest audience you could face," he suggests. "We're conditioned to expect hot audience responses to TV comedy, and if they're not laughing it's often excruciatingly embarrassing."

Doing the Logies, as Gretel Killeen discovered last year, is like parading an electronic CV. It's the toughest on-air job interview. I admired her at the time for the way she had the guts to push the format to the edge.

The regretful smile on her face as she felt herself dying remains a singular Logies memory: she was a disappointed head mistress faced with a bunch of students who had failed to grasp a single concept.

It's a tough gig.

Presenters must display witty verbal play, sexual suggestion and comic abuse before 2000 people who are willing them to fail, although many leave the room early and never return from the corridor, where the real show happens in an atmosphere of exhaled smoke and alcohol fumes.

When you're there and wander outside during the commercial breaks, you can't help but notice an unusual amount of traffic in and out of the toilets, people returning glassy-eyed with strange smiles and touches of white powder around their upper lip.

But despite all this, the Logies -- and yes, there are too many categories -- are still a wacky part of our cultural heritage.

We watch with a jaundiced, cynical eye these days, phone in hand, ready to jump on Twitter, still hoping for some quixotic, serendipitous happening.

Logies night has always been a show to watch half-pissed at home, pickled in the rosy claret of TV's past, like most of those attending and sometimes performing.

UNFORTUNATELY it's unlikely we'll see anyone from I Rock -- the ABC's new eight-part, half-hour drama-comedy -- gallivanting about at next year's Logies, waiting in that hard-love room to have their names called out. It's a strangely lacklustre, naturalistic look at an indie rock band trying to make it big on the Australian music scene, written by and starring Josh Mapleston, in association with producers David Fedirchuk and Rob Macdonald.

Mapleston has so far has passed me by, although the comedian has appeared, it seems, in McLeod's Daughters and written for Home and Away. In I Rock he's Nash Taylor, leader of the post-punk band known as Boy Crazy Stacey. The series documents in a rather haphazard way his attempts to crack rock's big time while remaining part of inner-Sydney's community of cool.

The idea is a good one and must have appealed to the ABC when it turned up: a satirical look at indie music's culture and the contradictions of the way it sees itself as parallel to the mainstream. Indie hipsters, such as the swaggering but relentlessly insecure Taylor, see themselves as embracing a noble set of values, such as authenticity, experimentation, anti-commercialism and appreciation of the world beyond American pop culture. But as their detractors like to point out, indie kids really are only cultural elitists wearing ironic T-shirts.

The show gets some of this perceptively but doesn't know how to satirise it. Its clumsy low-budget casualness lacks point and definition. Its makers obviously understand the milieu -- the filthy share-houses, the self-admiring band names and the "Look Mum, I'm in a band" banalities of the lifestyle -- but have little idea of the timing required to make comedy.

The series begins with the band performing a support gig at the blood-bath Annandale Hotel to the usual jeers and drunken yells. Taylor sees the pre-Raphaelite Comet (Ashley Fitzgerald), all flowing auburn locks and simpering eyes, and wants her in his outfit. (She is bass player for the other support band, The Little Ponies.) This means he has to jettison his own bass player, little brother Jasper (Mark Pound). Then Jane (Alison Bell), Taylor's ex, writes a less-than-flattering review of the Annandale gig on her music blog, premenstrualasanything.com, and starts sleeping with his lead guitarist. You get the gist?

Bell and Pound deliver the best performances. They are focused and convincing but the others all suffer from the perennial sin of young TV actors: sighing.

It's as if, under-rehearsed, they have little idea of what comes next and fill the gaps with big breaths to give them time to remember the lines. It gives the dialogue a dying fall; there's not enough energy in the exchanges to snap it forward. And some of the performers look too smugly pleased just to be in the show. I'm sorry, but I watched Mapleston doing his daggy best as Nash Taylor -- cutting his first EP, ditching his girlfriend, finally deciding on a hairstyle -- and couldn't help but think, what would Chris Lilley do with this stuff?

The Logies, Sunday, Nine, 7.30pm, Nine.
I Rock, Monday, 9pm, ABC2.