Cassowary Crossing

THE NIGHT I WAS ROVE
(Warming up to a gonzo task)

(c) David Astle

Australia boasts less than ten warmup professionals and there’s a reason for that. The job is a rare calling. Warmup guys (and one gal we found) are those studio sprites who orchestrate an audience into perfect pitch, pre-setting the mood for the pilot, chatshow or quiz to follow. But that’s like describing Neil Armstrong’s job as sitting in a Pullman chair and unlocking the hatch once the module touches down. Wrangling a crowd, as some pros call it, entails every demagogic trick in the book. Charm and bluster. Touch and timbre. Should a warmup job ever reach the boards at Centrelink, the index card would say:

WANTED: AUDIENCE SUPERVISOR
Must be fearless, loquacious, funny and punctual.
Needs to improvise under pressure.
Good diction and manic energy an advantage.
Has to read strangers in a nanosecond, and break the ice as quickly.
Must understand: you are the person nobody has come to see.
Hours erratic.

No such card exists of course. Warmup gigs are pretty much a closed shop, much like the domain of hitmen or strip-a-grams, and no less agonising. For amateurs at least. As I would discover.

I park my car in the backblocks of Abbotsford, Melbourne and look for the lingerie warehouse. Kym the publicist at Channel 10 says the Rove Live headquarters is bang on top. Can’t miss it. I’m already running late – breaking Rule #1 of the Amalgamated Warmup Union. I climb the stairs, heart in mouth, and push the glass door.

My trouble? I come from a long ancestral line of impostors. The Astle family crest is subscribed by the motto: Quo Duro Posso Existere which roughly translates as How Hard Can It Be? I push the door open and walk into a universe of Little Mermaids and Pez dispensers – the Rove offices are glutted with knickknacks sent in by doting fans of the show. Cushions on the deco couch are stencilled with Kapow! and Bam!

Pottsy and Ralph Malph from Happy Days are there in person to greet me. At least their lookalikes – Kynan Barker and Gerard McCulloch – cowriters on the show, and the warmup commandoes in charge of getting the weekly vibe right. Both in their 20s, both with standup and Totally Full Frontal in their past, Kynan and Gerard will be my sensei masters over the next 36 hours, and I will be their grasshopper.

Kynan drags on his Diet Coke, and says, ‘You’ll be fine. It’s simple.’
Host Rove McManus grins from every photo on the meeting room’s wall.
Gerard is more cryptic. ‘The best times are when we find something new, and the crowd feeds back, and they feed off Rove’s energy, and Rove feeds off their energy. Comedy cannibalism.’

I do my best to laugh back. I write the word ‘cannibalism’ on my pad and then a little pot with steam climbing out.

‘Have you been to Nunawading before?’ asks Kynan. ‘It’s not a red-carpet kinda suburb. You won’t find any papparazzi in Nunawading. Its more the sort of place where a body might float to the surface.’
I realise I’m glimpsing his schtick.
He reverts to advice. ‘If you get there at 7.30 then we can do a walk-through while the band is rehearsing. Should be a great show too – we’ve got Ali G on sat-chat. Do you have a digital watch?’
‘No.’
‘I’d buy one if I were you,’ he says, before cackling. ‘But I’m not.’

Before I die a thousand deaths in public, let me acknowledge the Roving production house. Every job in a TV team has a psychic payload and the warmup guys are no exception. Only fools would tamper with a successful formula, and Rove Live – a popular nationwide hour of chat, stunt and music – is surely that. But Rove and his producers embraced this gonzo experiment at first blush.

Sure, why not, they said. Try it on. Secretly, I felt encouraged. Maybe I was a warmup guy trapped in a writer’s body. The gig’ll be fine, I told myself. The crowd will be warm and nobody will get hurt. I add a smile to the missionary standing in my cooking pot. But then again, Rove Live is the same show that regularly features air-guitarists, naked roller-coastering and idiots who think they can catch shooting arrows with their hands. I decide to get some independent advice.

##

‘In an audience of a hundred people, they come from a hundred different days,’ says Michael Pope, the pontiff of warmups. ‘Some have had funerals, some have had births and everything in between. But my objective is get them reacting in one voice.’

Pope is a lean, mischievous Dad of two with pewtered skin and a gat-toothed smirk designed to make you feel good. In a previous life, Pope was Kylie’s love interest on Neighbours, as well as Mr A Nus, a klutzy magician around the standup traps. Since then he’s warmed up the biggest (Logies night six times), the best (In Melbourne Tonight – ‘though I shouldn’t really say that’), the longest (five hours improvising – ‘fake it till you make it’) and the worst.

‘The worst was a footy-show version about horse racing. The audience was all invited friends of the racing fraternity. Someone was trying to be helpful, pointing out Joe Bloggs in the front row – it could have been Phar Lap for all I knew – and I went right, right…. I think he was the Melbourne Cup-winning jockey of that year. So I went ‘OK Joe, what have you got to do with the industry?’ And the audience went ‘This guy knows nothing’. A mono-audience is always harder.’

The Logie crowd, on the other hand, is far too groovy to obey any warmup routine, so Pope dupes them. ‘For the last two years we’ve tricked them into thinking the show had already started. I played three minutes of vox pops which loosened them up, then I came out live and told a few pre-written gags which warmed them up, gave audio a chance to test levels.’

Pope calls it loading the audience – getting bums on seats, setting the audio levels, and ensuring the herd is happy and focussed. The warmup is the usher between kerbtime and airtime. He has to make the stars feel loved the moment they grace the set just in case they don’t feel loved enough. He might also capture a bit of ‘wild’ on tape, industry slang for uncanned laughter, a raw product that might get added in post-production.

But how!? Quick, tell me. How can a phony like me conjure a giggle from a hundred strangers who’d rather be watching Rove McManus?

‘I’m a very spontaneous performer. So what I don’t do is tell a joke. A lot of standup comedians fall into the trap of doing their act, which works a treat in a comedy venue, but not in a studio.’

The Pontiff pauses. He looks at my pad of arrows and underlines and says, ‘Are you a standup?’
‘N-n-n-no.’
‘Then you might have a chance.’

##

Nunawading, the name, is Aboriginal for ‘battleground where warring parties come together’ which doesn’t go to soothe me. Two hours before showtime and a dozen fans loiter at the turnstiles of Global Television Studios, a fallout shelter off Springvale Road.

I join the queue. It’s freezing and the turnstile is locked. ‘Elvis Costello is on tonight,’ says Adam, a cabinet maker who wants to be a pornstar.
‘How do you know?’
‘It was on rove.com.’
‘Cool,’ I say in a ball of fog. The fans know more about Rove Live than me, and I’m in charge of winning their confidence. Then I realise I’m NOT the audience. Why the hell am I queueing? I’m RESPONSIBLE for the audience. I look for the VIP gate.

Kym from PR meets me in the foyer and says, ‘Nervous?’ and I say, ‘Good, how about you?’ We weave the white-walled warren of Rove Central and bump into the man himself, the telegenic host who gives me a matey punch and says ‘They’ll eat you alive.’

Kynan, my lifeline, my saviour, my last friend in the world, is stalking the main set. So too is Elvis Costello at 900 decibels, rehearsing. ‘Tear off your own head, tear off your own head,’ he wails and I’m mildly starstruck. Back in my teens I wanted to be Elvis Costello, my appetite for mimicry knowing no bounds, but now I’m a warmup apprentice, so I snub my idol and listen to my saviour.

‘See this bucket?’ shouts Kynan. ‘That’s your job.’
‘The lolly bucket?!’
‘Tonight you’re our lolly bitch.’

Among other jobs, such as etiquette rundown and being a fake-Rove for five minutes to get the audience prepped for the real McCoy. Gerard, the usual fake-Rove, has been bumped sideways into cuecard management. Kynan and I stride about the furniture. He points to an imaginary line on the Thrust Area (the jutting apron where Rove does his intro) and says, ‘You got your fake-Rove monolgue ready?’

Well, kinda, sorta. Not really. I’d been too busy this morning stealing some quasi-advice from Quasimodo.

##

When not playing cops in Stingers or Janus, Jeremy Kewley is playing clowns at Quasimodo’s theatre restaurant, or warming up fans at The Footy Show (the AFL version). Once, touring the TV show, Kewley fine-tuned 3000 people in London’s Theatre Royal. ‘I see my job as making the audience like me. That may sound a bit wanky, but if they like me then they’ll do whatever I ask them. But if I start off with a load of crap, and they think I’m an annoying git, then they’ll tell me to piss off.’

Thanks mate. I’ll bear that in mind. Standing on the landing, watching the audience flood the downstairs corridor, I’m chanting ‘Don’t be annoying, don’t be annoying…’ An icebox loaded with Red Bull cans is helping to galvanise the fans, as is Kynan who surfs a table saying ‘Hey, hi, welcome to Nunawading!’ The countdown has started. The mood is apres-ski, even before Kynan warms up. ‘Who’s come the furthest to be here tonight?’ he asks. And Sharon from Perth wins the hooray.

‘We usually start this way,’ whispers Gerard at my elbow. ‘Just to work out who’s in the crowd.’ Gerard, alias Ralph Malph, is a scholar of Arabic and economics. But instead of a doctorate, he’s doing comedy writing, what Gerard calls ‘the art of pre-ad-libbing’. He hands me a mineral water marked LB (Lolly Bitch) and tells me to get ready upstairs.

Like a security pass, my Rove Live T-shirt enables me to walk on set and wait for the bleachers to fill. Barry, a placid giant with a salamander tattoo, is tonight’s usher. I gobble Smarties from the show’s glassware in case my heartrate is slowing. It isn’t. I’m a fraud and the audience is yet to realise. Nobody has told them about this whole experiment. Within the next two minutes, they’ll probably cotton on, as soon as I open my mouth.

For peace of mind I jog through the insights of Sarah Kinsella, the only warmup gal found in captivity. ‘At any stage,’ said Sarah on the phone, trying her best to unjangle my nerves, ‘I’m watching the audience for wee or vomit situations.’

I should add Kinsella does warmup for a variety show pitched at ten-year-olds on Nickelodeon 5. ‘I auditioned to be one of the hosts but at the tender age of 27 I was too old, which is a bit sad. But I’m the youngest of ten kids, so I have 15 nieces and nephews, and my chief job is entertainer, which I am.’

Rove McManus is 28 – and 12 minutes from appearing. The warmup crew had better get their act together.

Kynan itemises the no-nos. No smoking, streaking, heckling, mobiles or behaving in moderation. Be excited – or else. Though the edict is redundant. The gang – clusters of girls in faux fur and eyeliner, fellas and couples, uni students, Sharon from Perth – are agog. A collapsible chair in the studio is a hot ticket, with Series 2 booked out.

Gerard slips me a cordless mike and disappears. Kynan says, ‘And this is David, our monkey boy for the evening.’
‘Monkey boy?’ I say. ‘I thought I was the lolly bitch.’
Kynan acts shocked, and the audience is alive.

I look for the bucket. ‘Forget the bucket,’ says Kynan. He’s flying now, a comet of sparks and bonhomie. The darkness is sniggering at our accidental banter. It’s pre-ad-lib. It’s a Clayton’s schtick where my every line is a witless ping to Kynan’s witty pong. He’s a comedian and I’m humorously not. Next he says, ‘Okay, now David is going to be a fake-Rove.’

In theory a fake-Rove schools the crowd in ‘entrance protocol’, how and when to react to the bona fide host. I retreat backstage, camera left, and hold my breath in the wings waiting for Kynan to introduce me. It’s 9:21. Nine minutes till blastoff. ‘And nowwww, the fake star of the show, the one and only Rove-lolly-bitch-David-McManus-person!’

It occurs to me, striding from cement to carpet, waving Rove-like and winking at sweethearts beyond the footlights, that Elvis Costello’s real name is Declan McManus, a namesake of the genuine Rove. Standing on the thrust area, tweaking invisible knobs that somehow adjust the ovation, I am the fake-McManus, just as my boyhood hero is the fake-Costello, fronting his real-life band called The Imposters.

The ironies lend me strength. I’m no popstar. I’m no Rove, and I’m no warmup guy. In fact, when you think about it, I’m actually a fake-fake-Rove, as fraudulent as Homo sapiens can possibly get. Such a coup can only warm the cockles as I launch the monologue.

‘First, a topical joke that’s more astute than funny…..(the audience titters)…..and now a very funny joke that makes you shriek….(the audience shrieks)….followed by a slow-burning joke that doesn’t seem funny at first, but the more you think about it, the funnier it becomes….(the audience gets it)….’

I fudge a fake guest list (Kate Winslet’s father’s accountant, the Hamburglar, Mr Sheen and so on) to regulate applause, and the crowd is somewhere between balmy and warm. A frenzied sowing of lollies ensures it. Give a man a bucket of candy and he can please most people. The excitement is palpable. Or more the prospect of Kynan and Co clearing off set. We oblige. As warmup guys, we defer to the reasons for coming.

Episode 22/Series 2 goes well, notwithstanding the tampering. Cathie Fox the floor manager marks out the minutes with cardboard numbers, but the hour flies. Fans clap and cheer on cue and we suffer no wee or vomit situations. I give credit to Kynan and the audience as an animus. Determined to enjoy themselves, they do. The so-called battleground of Nunawading feels closer to a lovefest with next to zero warming required. As the pre-show clowns we merely reflect the collective smile, and then, once the cameras get rolling, the original Rove does the smiling for everyone.

(Next Week: Air Traffic Controller For A Day)

[Sunday Life, August 2002]