Strewth: Studly Deputy PM to investigate water options

Doff your cap to the paper that put the headline ‘Stud to investigate water options’ over a photo of Michael McCormack.

Stud. Photo: AAP

Magic Mike?

It’s not often enough we salute newspaper sub-editors and layout magicians. But today we will break this reprehensible drought and doff our cap to the crew at the Bundaberg NewsMail. In an act bordering on art they’ve parked the headline “Stud to investigate water options” over a photograph of Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack. When Strewth pressed McCormack on this, he mustered more gravity than most could under the circumstances and replied: “Yes, I will investigate water options.” As an added bonus, the subheading on the story is “Down on the farm.” Bravo to everybody.

Roseville, ’twixt thorns

News the Roseville branch of the Liberal Party is keen to push Malcolm Turnbull into the airlock and blast him into the void of non-membership is a reminder that Roseville is the little branch that can. Behold this from a Strewth item in 2013: “Still feeling the warm glow of Bob Ellis’s only occasionally self-promoting defence of Malcolm Turnbull in The Spectator Australia the other day, in which he claimed (him) for the ALP, we wondered where the Labor warrior’s adventures would take him next. What we didn’t expect was that ‘next’ would be a Liberal Party fundraiser. Yes, Ellis will be on a Q&A panel next month, helping raising dough for the Roseville branch of Bradfield, the Sydney electorate that recently passed from the hands of Brendan Nelson to Paul Fletcher.” It took Strewth to alert Ellis to the fact it was a Liberal fundraiser and not, as he’d thought, just a Spectator event. Result: a rambling phone call from Ellis to Strewth that added up to a withdrawal, ending with the line: “My wife’s telling me to shut up now.” Given subsequent allegations about Ellis, this was a good outcome for the Libs.

Shelf company

A Dymocks store in Brisbane has parked its copies of Kevin Rudd’s latest memoir slab in its fiction section. On the shelf below, Peter FitzSimons’s Mutiny on the Bounty and George RR Martin’s Fire and Blood. Sound placement.

Tunes and teams

During the Scott Morrison-Alan Jones encounter on 2GB yesterday, their distinctive personalities emerged in the form of duelling metaphors.

Jones: “Are you confident every one of your people are singing off the same sheet of music? … is everyone singing that song?”

PM: “Yeah they are, Alan. I mean there will be people outside of the parliament, there will be people that aren’t in the team that runs on to the field, they’ll have their views and that’s all right. But the people in the team …”

Bastards revisited

Yesterday we touched on the motorcade of visiting US president Lyndon B. Johnson, a bunch of protesters, and then NSW premier Robin Askin’s famous imperative, “Run the bastards over”. Enter David Salter.”Like so many of history’s most memorable quotes, it was never said,” he tells Strewth. “In July 1968, Askin recalled the incident during a lunch speech to the US Chamber of Commerce. When asked what he had told the police, Askin remarked that what he should have said to them was ‘ride over them’. This was then reported as ‘Run over the bastards’. Back then, I was a humble young researcher on the ABC’s new nightly TV current affairs program This Day Tonight. The show was beginning to experiment with ‘funnies’ … Coming from the tradition of university revue, I wrote some of these satirical segments in the form of parody songs. The Askin ‘quote’ was begging to be lampooned and John Brown’s Body seemed the ideal song. But ‘Run over the bastards’ doesn’t scan well, doesn’t rhyme and doesn’t fit the rhythm of John Brown’s Body. What if I changed it around to ‘Run the bastards over’? The chorus (‘Glory, glory Hallelujah’) would then become ‘Run, run, run the bastards over’. Perfect! The lyric was finished by late morning, we hired an actor to play the part of Askin, dragooned a few of the technical staff as a male chorus, decked out the studio in flags, got the piano player from Play School to provide an accompaniment and had the whole thing recorded by 5pm. The item was quite a success and has featured in just about every compilation of ABC history since. The chorus became so embedded in people’s minds that everyone now believes that Askin told the police to ‘Run the bastards over’.”

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