“The TV business is uglier than most things,” Hunter S Thomson famously wrote.
“It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason. Which is more or less true. For the most part, they are dirty little animals with huge brains and no pulse.”
Harsh, I know!
But there are many exceptions. One of them was The Back Page, the sports panel show which has finished up this week after a 29-year run. As one who was on it for its first decade and a bitty, I have been inundated with emails, texts and calls this week, from those lamenting its demise.
Inevitably, many of the obits have focused on its latter years – which is fair enough because, to my amazement, it has been bloody successful for the last two decades, too, and really was a great show. With its latter-day incarnation hosted by Tony Squires and boasting panellists such as Crash Craddock, Adam Spencer and Candice Warner, the thing was still working and doing great box office.
I have no clue why Fox Sports has cut it off at the knees, save the possibility its new owners, the British-based DAZN, intend to channel more foreign content to this small outpost on the other side of the planet at the expense of local content.
The Back Page team, Christmas drinks, circa 1998. Back row: Peter Frilingos, Keeley Devery, Billy Birmingham. Front row: Mike Gibson, Saul Shtein, Peter FitzSimons.
But I digress. For my obit, let me focus a little on the first decade, when The Back Page proved the antithesis of Thompson’s dictum. It was a terrific show because we all really liked each other, and were close friends well beyond whatever we put to air.
The show was the idea of the veteran sports producer Saul Shtein. Knowing that Mike Gibson, the iconic sports broadcaster from Wide World of Sports, would be at the Atlanta Olympics at the same time as me, Saul asked me to duchess him on the idea of the show, after Mike had politely rejected his first approach. Mike and I got together one day at the beach volleyball, when Australia had just got the gold medal, and I pitched again.
“Come on, Mike! It’ll be fun. We put together sporting loudmouths with a floating array of experts and actual champions, and chew over the sporting issues of the day! We’ll shoot on a Monday arvo, put it to air that night, and Robert will be your uncle. Mike, you host, and direct traffic, we’ll shout at each other. Billy Birmingham will make jokes, and do brilliant mimicry!”
To the amazement of both Saul and myself, Mike agreed – and so it began. The stalwarts were Mike, Billy, myself, Ray Chesterton, Peter “Chippy” Frilingos, Tracey Holmes, Liz Ellis, Jon Anderson and Brian Taylor. Mike Colman came along near the end of my time there. It was produced by the great Australian netballer and now TV professional, Keeley Devery.
And it was a hit from the first. At one point we were getting over 100,000 viewers every Monday night, a staggering figure for pay TV. And the heart of it was how much we all really did love working together.
Another electronic medium dictum I love comes from the founder of Triple M, Rod Muir: “If it ain’t happening in the corridors, it don’t go up the stick.” The idea being that if you can’t be happy chappies and up-vibe when the cameras are switched off, it won’t work when you actually put the show together.
With us, it was not only happening in the corridors beforehand but frequently continued for an hour afterwards in the carpark. All of us grieved, alas, when we lost Frilingos and David Hookes in quick succession, early in the new century – Chippy from a terrible heart attack, and David from a shocking episode on a Saturday night.
For the most part, however, the show was a joy from first to last. The two most penetrating in their comments, time and again, were Holmes and Ellis. Before The Back Page, of course there had been women discussing sports issues of the day – but these two were phenomenal in dissecting those issues, and many times setting the sporting agenda for the week.
By late in the first decade, things started to come apart for us, if not the show itself. A cold wind started to blow for Tracey from the ABC and me from Fairfax. Tracey resigned in 2008, and I followed her the following year. (The issue for me was, I thought I was going for Best Actor, they thought I should be content with Best Supporting Actor – down to just one appearance a month. Nah, bugger it.)
My note to my cherished colleagues on departure, which I looked out this week, contains something of the vibe of that first decade. I wrote:
“Now, in the wake of Tracy Holmes’ supremely classy resignation letter at this time last year, I hesitate to note down my own thoughts – for fear of it appearing pale by comparison – but I thought I’d give it a go.
“Most importantly allow me to record, seriously for once, how much I have enjoyed working with you all over the years – not that it ever really felt like work. I have been on a lot of different shows, but Back Page will always stand out for the quality of the show we produced, and the great friendships we’ve formed.
“I will forever treasure the memory of so many happy clashes with ‘Chippy’ Frilingos – ‘That’ll do me!’ – and always be glad I got to form great bonds with him and David Hookes before both blokes met their tragic ends.
“Over the last 500 shows, the funniest moment, forever, will always be Billy Birmingham’s response after seeing Thomas Keneally’s NRL ad, ‘Blow that whistle, ref, blow that whistle’.
“Cue Billy: ‘Ah, blow it out your arse, Tom!’”
Oh, how we laughed. Billy didn’t mean it in a mean fashion. It was close to what sport was always meant to be: fun. But then we could do serious analysis too, with Mike always expertly judging when to switch gears and which direction to head. The final lines of my resignation letter also fit here:
“In short, Members of the Academy, here’s to Chippy, here’s to Hookesy, and here’s to us.
“Love yers all and – can I say it for once, Chippy? – ‘That’ll do me …’”
Vale, the Back Page. You were fun, and we were proud to sail on you.
