How Crocodile Dundee blew up my radical idea for talk show

It was to be a talk show, but with a difference: all guests would be as deceased as Python’s parrot, played by actors and repeating verbatim all the wild things said while they were alive.

Oppenheimer, starring Cillian Murphy (pictured), didn’t do it for me... but it did remind me of one very good idea I once had... Picture: Patrick T Fallon

While disinclined to join the genuflecting to Christopher Nolan for his Oppenheimer, I recommend another film on the first atomic weapon – Einstein and the Bomb. A more modest and revelatory doco-drama on Netflix. Blending archival footage with re-enactments of Einstein’s life, with all his dialogue taken from the physicist’s spoken words or writings.

The film focuses on his torments over writing a crucial letter to Roosevelt asking the President to back the Manhattan Project. Something the non-observant Jew and lifelong pacifist only did because he feared Hitler was well advanced on the same quest.

Much of the archival footage, including some of Hitler’s rantings – and a speech Einstein gave at London’s Albert Hall – was new to me. As were the details of Einstein’s life in the UK, including the period in 1933 that he spent hidden away in a little wooden hut on a country estate in Norfolk. I thought I knew the Einstein story but clearly did not.

Watching it, I recalled a TV series I was working on with Peter Faiman before he was distracted by a film about some crocodile-hunting bloke. It was to be a talk show, but with a difference: all the guests would be as deceased as Python’s parrot. Hence our working title: Dead People. Not contacted via a seance, but by having actors portray the good, the great and the ghastly. Not made-up or costumed to look like the originals, but simply sitting around the table. A bit like the minimalist approach used by the great John Clarke in his interviews for Clarke & Dawe.

Why Einstein and the Bomb intrigued me was the fact that everything the central character said was on the record, either spoken or written. That was the central conceit for what Peter and I were planning. My characters would be repeating themselves. No more, no less. And doing so in the chatty, conversational way people do on a normal talk show.

Peter had a fillum with Hoges coming up. I dimly recall that it was something of a hit.

Even Herr Hitler. No posturings, ravings or tub-thumpings like we see in archive footage. Just talking normally; repeating the malignant muck he wrote in Mein Kampf. In my mind’s ear I could hear him clearly, knowing that in a strange way his ideas would seem all the more monstrous and chilling. No Nuremberg propaganda directed by Leni Riefenstahl with crowds in their tens of thousands sieg-heiling. Just a simple, chatty articulation of impure evil.

The line-up of guests, in my mind’s eye? Hitler of course, with perhaps Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, even Ben Chifley. I looked forward, as program host, to hushing Hitler. “Be quiet Adolf, Abe is talking...” The author of the Gettysburg Address versus the Nuremberg Nazi.

But it was never to be. As I said, Peter had a fillum with Hoges coming up. I dimly recall that it was something of a hit. And as I totter towards the exit myself, it’s too late now. But I did give it a dry run as little wireless program on the ABC – a Dead People edition of Late Night Live. Renamed Late Night Dead for the occasion. I can’t recall the actors or the chosen guests, but I think I managed to get in a “be quiet Adolf”.

The tape couldn’t be found in the LNL archives. Sad really.