Hello!

And sorry everyone, for my absence last week. I’ve been very busy with various things….

But hey, you don’t want excuses from me, you want blog posts.

And so today, (and over the next two weeks as well), I’m going to take you back. Back in time, to an eventful period in my life, and a game show that I was intimately involved in. A show that teamed professional singers with professional celebrities. A show that had millions (or at least, lots) of Australians glued to their TVs – and their smartphones – every Sunday night, as it all unfolded live before their very eyes. I found myself caught up in the maelstrom of all this, while 700 km away, my brand new wife was struggling with very poor health, leading up to the birth of our child…

NOW READ ON.

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May, 2006.

I was living in Sydney, I’d recently won both Temptation and Australia’s Brainiest Quizmaster, and Judi and I were newly married and expecting our daughter. One day, I got a job offer from Brad Lyons – an executive at the Seven Network who I’d worked for earlier on the sketch comedy series Big Bite – to write the scripts for a new celebrity game show that the network would be producing soon. It was to take over the live Sunday night 7:30 timeslot for the network, which had been so successful for them with Dancing With The Stars.

And as it turned out, it was in a pretty similar vein to DWTS. In fact, it essentially replaced the dancing element with a singing element. 10 celebrities not known for their singing abilities would be teamed up with 10 professional singers, and the resulting duos would battle it out LIVE every Sunday night, for the judges, and the audience, over a 10 week season.

This was It Takes Two. 

It was an adaptation of the UK show Just The Two Of Us, which had started airing over there just weeks earlier. (When I watched the first episode of Just The Two Of Us, I was upset to see that the very first professional singer voted off was one of the heroes from my teenage years – Martin Fry from ABC.)

Bye bye, Mr Fry.

Although we didn’t urgently need the money, I accepted the job. This was probably mostly due to force of habit. Having been a freelance writer and actor since 1987, when work comes along, the knee jerk reaction is always to say yes. Even if it doesn’t sound great, there are always those things you tell yourself:

“It’ll look good on the resume”,

“I might learn some new skills”,

“I might meet people who may consider me for the next gig”, and most importantly

“I will make some money here, and who knows when the next job will come along?”

All of these thoughts occurred to me every time a job came along. To some extent, they still do.

So, I said yes. With the understanding that I wouldn’t stay until the very end – as our daughter was due – but I’d certainly be there for the first half of the season, to help get it all up and running. Over the next few weeks, I was very much thrust into the deep end, as the producers frantically tried to work out how best to wrangle this all-encompassing LIVE weekly TV event, which had so many moving parts, and so many egos to placate… In terms of on-air talent alone, there were 27 people who needed to be looked after. (2 hosts, 4 judges, 10 professional singers, and 10 non-professionally singing celebrities, and one orchestra leader). Then there was the orchestra, the technical crew and all the administrative staff required to keep the machine running.

As for my role? Well, it was essentially to write all of the hosts’ banter, one liners for the judges, along with any ideas for any of the contestants. I also had to co-ordinate, print, copy and physically distribute all the scripts to everyone who needed them, in every department. This was the most time-consuming part of a show with so many people working on it.

Actually, now that I think about it… no, it wasn’t. The most time-consuming part (in the first couple of weeks, anyway) was learning how to write show scripts using Microsoft Excel. This was an idea of one of the producers. Apparently, she’d always written scripts that way, and found it much easier, so she insisted I do it that way too. I’d only used Microsoft Excel a handful of times in my life. I’m a writer, not an accountant – I use Microsoft Word. This caused countless headaches and mistakes, while I stumbled through the program as the Executive Producer ran around, literally yelling “Come on guys! WHERE ARE THOSE SCRIPTS?! NEED THEM NOW!” In the end, I spoke to the producer and the EP and told them I needed to use Microsoft Word for the scripts. They’re scripts; they should be Word documents, not spreadsheets. They acquiesced, and so that part of things was streamlined a little…

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Not a lot, but a little.

Next week, the It Takes Two / expectant parenthood adventure continues, as we meet the show’s hosts, and examine a controversy that one of them sparked with a seemingly innocuous on-air comment…. 

Until then, then!