Spicktacular anniversary

Alan Brough, Myf Warhurst and Adam Hills from Spicks & Specks

Tonight is the 200th episode of the musical quiz show Spicks & Specks and team captains Myf Warhurst and Alan Brough will be challenged with questions covering the past 200 years of music from 1809 to today.

Will they rise to the challenge? Will their guests help or hinder them? And, most importantly, how do you prepare for such a challenge?

Brough likens the show to “playing Trivial Pursuit after dinner with your friends” and believes no-one is that concerned about the scores.

But maybe he would think differently if he were winning this season.

“It’s always been fairly even but this year Myf is really coming out of the box hard and fast,” he said. Friendly competitiveness aside, Brough’s musical knowledge is serious business. He’s been challenged with 3870 questions on the show to date, so what’s his plan of attack or technique?

“For me, it’s not really a technique,” he explains, “It’s more that I’m just constantly reading and listening to a lot of music, so it’s an ongoing love and passion for music that keeps me up-to-date.

“I don’t listen to a lot of commercial radio – not for any particular reason, I just don’t,” he said.

“I miss out on a lot of top-40 stuff and occasionally have to go on weekend-long binges of watching top-40 countdown shows so I can catch up with how many singles Pink has in the top 10, which at any given time in Australia seems to be between 15 and 20.”

His wealth of knowledge stems from his parents’ love of music, followed by stints working in record stores, plus reading and listening to a lot of Australian and international music magazines, podcasts and web sites.

Musically, his taste is eclectic, and when he looks over at a pile of CDs sitting on his desk, he reels off everything from soul, folk, classic albums such as Joni Mitchell’s Blue, to Health (a noise core band from Baltimore), and the new Phoenix album. But how he retains those facts is what’s most amazing.

“To be perfectly honest it amazes me as well because I don’t have a good memory at all,” he said.

“For some reason, just music and the names of wines that I like, stick.

“I regularly forget where the house keys are, what people’s names are, or the name of a book I really like that I own two copies of. But I can recall all sorts of bizarre music trivia.”

“It’s such a vast area that I just thought, we’ll see how this turns out,” said the Melbourne-based Brough.

“If I remember that episode rightly, Paul Grabowsky [spoiler alert coming…] pretty much wipes the flow with us all. We’re on a hiding to nothing when he’s on, because he knows a shitload.”

With jazz pianist/composer Grabowsky on Myf’s team and comedian Hamish Blake on Brough’s side for the 200th episode, any regular viewer of Spicks & Specks probably doesn’t need a magic eight ball to pick which team leads the point’s challenge after tonight’s episode.

“Only on rare occasions does Hamish come through, but there’s one episode this year where he clinches it, which is a strange and wonderful thing to behold to the point that many people will probably think it’s computer generated.

“What Hamish lacks in music knowledge though, he makes up for by being one of the funniest people in the country and so you can’t argue with that.”

Spicks & Specks’ 200th episode airs today at 8:30pm on ABC1 (Wednesday, September 9).

[Edited version published in the Today section, The West Australian, Wednesday, September 9, 2009]

Life on a ROLLERCOASTER

Elliot Spencer, RollerCoaster

What’s your favourite word of the moment? How about ‘freirdo’? That’s a freak and a weirdo rolled into one. Rollercastrian? It is defined as people who watch the TV show RollerCoaster. And Elliotness? It means being so cool it’s Elliot cool – and Elliot Spencer is the eccentric host of RollerCoaster, a show aimed at eight to 14-year-olds that’s broadcast daily around the country on ABCTV.

Tomorrow marks their 1000th episode of delivering entertaining segments covering everything from science to careers, recipes, quizzes and news, delivered at a fast pace that adults might have trouble keeping up with.

The Fetch segment, where kids send in their made-up words and definitions and Spenser combines them into a weird anecdote, is particularly fun.

As he says: “It takes a thousand voices to tell a single story…” and it’s the contributions by the kids that make this an “awesome little show”.

“Reaching 1000 episodes is not something that was totally expected,” says Spencer in the dressing room on set. “We’ve never been the type of people to count what we were doing or follow the ratings, if we were having fun we knew that it was right. It’s hard to look at the map when you’re driving.

“Some people say, ‘What are you going to do next?’ And I say ‘no idea’. We put so much effort into doing this. We’re a very close team of people; it just feels like we’ve achieved something really good.”

It hasn’t always been that way through. The show started after the creation of the web site in 2005 and while the theme has remained unchanged, it’s grown into a more sophisticated production with a bigger budget and the building of a proper set at the ABCTV studios in East Perth.

The kids didn’t necessarily buy into it at first, either. “In the first year, we would get heaps of emails and we’d read them out. They’d say: ‘You are a try-hard’. ‘When are you going to drop the act?’ And I’m like, ‘This is me – I’m not going to change’. They’d say, ‘Get rid of your glasses and stop trying to be cool’. It took just over a year for them to go, ‘That’s him’ and now if I go to a school and they meet me, I’m exactly the same.”

Being him is a 24-7 job. He gets 600 emails a day from kids, telling him how much they like the show, asking questions and also giving feedback.

“It’s such a privilege to be on the national broadcaster talking to the kids of Australia and they are talking back to us. We have a good rapport – they trust us and we trust them. We feel like we’ve got many friends out there and they talk to me like I’m one of their mates.”

These kids generate much of the content and the rest comes from Spencer and the team.

“The world is a very inspirational place when you put your sarcasm glasses on,” he says. “I’ve never run out of inspiration because there’s six billion people doing things every day, which we feed off and the more popular something becomes, the more you can pull it apart.”

RollerCoaster screens tomorrow (Friday August 7, 2009) at 4pm on ABC1.

[As published in the Today section, The West Australian, Thursday, August 6, 2009]

All go for YO GABBA GABBA!

Yo Gabba Gabba!

Australia “gets” the American children’s TV show Yo Gabba Gabba! So much so, in fact, that creators Christian Jacobs and Scott Schultz decided to do the world premiere of the live concert tour in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney a few months ago. It received rave reviews, not just from preschoolers, but parents too.

“I think Australians, at least the people I’ve been hanging out with, everyone has this ‘no worries’ attitude, which sounds cliché, but I think that’s why the show has caught on here,” says Jacobs.

“There’s definitely pockets in the States that get the show, but there is also a big gap that doesn’t. Maybe Australians aren’t afraid to get in there and have fun with their kids.”

While the show deals with issues topical for two to six-year-olds such as eating your vegetables, not biting your friends or being afraid of the dark, the show is centred on the music first and foremost.

As host DJ Lance Rock says, “Listening and dancing to music with our friends iiiiiiiiiis AWESOME!!”

“We wanted to make a live action music show that harks back to those old shows like Sesame Street and The Muppet Show – wacky variety shows,” Jacobs says. “We have all these great bands come on the show, but we end up writing all the songs because it’s too expensive to have a band like MGMT write a song. So we write all the songs and have the bands do them.”

Hence why the show has a cult following amongst adults too when it includes ultra-cool guests in series two like Jack Black, Jimmy Eat World, Mates of State, Rhys Darby, Datarock, and Chromeo.

“We love seeing what bands do with the song to put their own spin on it and to have them play it live – it’s a really fun way of doing things.

“I was in Europe recently with my band The Aquabats and we played with The Living End there. I talked to Chris Cheney (vocals, guitar) a little bit and he’s going to come out and be a part of the show. His daughter’s a big fan.”

Watching the show certainly makes you feel good and you can’t help but feel uplifted by all the positivity.

“We want to create that bonding experience with the adult and child, so the parents are like ‘this is really cool I want to watch that with my child’… Bring back that spirit of family togetherness and letting the parents get down on their hands and knees and just be kids again,” Jacob says.

Making a children’s TV show is not all fun and games, there are strict codes. “It’s very protected and sanitised and like a laboratory, they have people constantly testing, checking and making sure there’s nothing dangerous or scary.

“We’ve had a child psychologist attached to our show for the last two years and everything has to go through the proper channels to makes sure there’s nothing weird, which is kind of hard for us, because we have a tendency to push the boundaries.

“We’re just going back to the shows we watched as kids and I don’t think we are too out of our minds. That’s subjective of course, but those shows didn’t have such strong filters on them.

We’re constantly trying to see what we can get away with, which sounds like we’re trying to do something subversive, but not at all – we’re parents. We know there are issues out there that kids deals with, like touching something hot or staying away from the street, but how are you supposed to teach them if you can’t show them?”

[An edited version published in the Today section, The West Australian, Tuesday, July 28, 2009]

Losing sleep can be lethal

Seanan Donovan in Dead Tired

When you are tired, you make ten times more mistakes – not just a few extra mistakes, but ten times more. It’s a scientific fact.

And if you are really sleep deprived your brain will put you to sleep for five seconds or more, and it will do that up to 200 times a day. Your eyes might be open, but you can be fast asleep.

Let’s say you only had six hours sleep last night. Your brain may actually grab an extra hours sleep off you today, taking a minute here or 30 seconds there, and you’re none the wiser.

In the slick two-part documentary series Dead Tired, which premieres on SBS tomorrow night, award-winning filmmaker Paul Scott uses nifty camera tricks and real-life human stories to present the latest scientific research, which reveals sleep deprivation is an unsuspecting killer, triggering health problems like heart disease, obesity, diabetes and depression.

In episode one – Awake is the New Sleep, it follows a unique scientific experiment where you can observe in real time what happens when Seanan Donovan, a fit and healthy 25-year-old, cuts his sleep back from eight to three hours a night over a week.

“We’ve all seen and read things about tiredness not being good for us,” Scott said. “But we’re the first film to bring the real science behind it to say this is what happens to you.

“The experiment we did with Seanan took two years of planning. He’s wired up and filmed pretty much the whole time, and the two things we capture is he starts to dream while he’s awake, which is what happens to a person who is chronically sleep deprived.

“Dreaming is so important to the brain that the brain does it anyway whether you’re awake or asleep.

“At the end of the film we do an analysis of the sleep driving test and out of two hours, he was fast asleep for 25 minutes. Not just micro-sleeps, but fast asleep and in fact for 30 seconds he was in a deep sleep while driving.

“Scientists have known about this, but it has never been filmed and monitored at the same time,” Scott said. “They reckon it’s the cause of one in every four, possibly one in every three accidents.”

Scott travelled around the world uncovering this startling research, the result of which has the power to alter radically how you live your life.

“There’s been a lot of publicity about the right diet and exercise – millions of dollars has been put into informing people that (if not done) both of these can be killers, but sleep is the third one,” Scott said. “At the moment there is still resistance to it. A lot of corporations don’t want us to have the message that we need to cut back on work, they want us to work more.

“We tell a story about the world’s biggest sleeping pill, which is a multi-billion-dollar industry. I know that sleeping pills don’t really work.

“But they don’t want us to know that because it’s like the third of fourth biggest selling pill in the world. There are huge side effects if you use them over a period of time.”

Dead Tired screens tonight on SBS at 8.30pm.

[As published in The West Australian on Wednesday, May 27, 2009]

Something In The Water

Triple Js Robbie Buck states in the rockumentary Something In The Water that if he knew why Perth, the most isolated city in the world, was such a breeding ground for successful indie rock bands, he would bottle it up and sell it.

Eastern States expats Aidan O’Bryan and Janelle Landers, who run the media production company WBMC, were at the 2007 Big Day Out and it hit home that over half the Aussie artists on the bill were from Perth.

They got to work filming and interviewed a multitude of artists and industry folk like Eskimo Joe, The Panics, EMI’s Managing Director John O’Donnell, Rolf Harris, INXS’Andrew Farriss and the Hoodoo Gurus’ Dave Faulkner and asked them for their rationale on our sparkling pool of talent.

“The story was originally very different,” says director Aidan O’Bryan. “We drew a new hypothesis when we started filming and then as we got into it, every time we spoke to someone, it turned out we had to speak to someone else to get another part of the story.

“We wanted to know what was so special about right now, but in trying to answer that question we needed to talk to The Scientists and The Triffids to find out what it was like before.

“We needed to learn about the past to work out what had changed. I don’t think there’s suddenly this huge nut of talent – there’s been talented people here for a long time. But no one really knew that.”

There have been some attempts in the past to pinpoint what makes Perth a vibrant hub for music, such as Tara Brabazon’s academic book, Liverpool Of The South Seas. But nothing on screen that is specifically WA-themed.

Something In The Water isn’t some slick, big-budget production either, but it does go some way to explaining why Perth’s music scene has only exploded in recent years. It’s certainly timely and a fantastic history lesson on Perth bands from the late 1970s onwards.

“I’m now a bigger fan of some bands than I was before and I’ve discovered new bands I’d never heard of,” O’Bryan says. “But from the business side of things, I’m now even less enamored. Just the way that it works and watching the film you might get that sense… record companies are largely the reason that Perth got held back for such a long time.”

As is often the case with independent, self-funded projects, O’Bryan originally thought he was making a film for a select number of music buffs and maybe to remind those in Sydney in Melbourne that “even though we’re far away from the rest of the country we shouldn’t be ignored in the West.”

Late last year the film had a short cinema run and screened at some festivals, but gradually more people became excited about the story to the point that it had to be aired on television.

“It wasn’t the easiest thing in the world, but the ABC were keen to get it so we found a way to make it work,” says O’Bryan. “The trick is just working with public-broadcaster budgets… but they really wanted it so we worked something out.”

What will be shown on ABC2 tonight is a shorter version than the original, but it does include different interview grabs and some additional songs. There’s also a DVD release in the not too distant future and the soundtrack is available on CD.

“We uncovered such a great story and so much good music… people were reminded of songs they hadn’t heard for a long time, so we felt it was warranted to release a selection of tracks that we think are really good and important.

“They’re the bands we think have been important to the West Australian story and the bands we think are kind of cool.”

[An edited version of this appears in The West Australian newspaper on Wednesday, May 13, 2009]

Minchin verges on celebrity

Tim Minchin

When I chat to the former Perth, now London-based Tim Minchin on the phone from this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival, it coincidently happens to be the event that kick-started his career four years ago. Although his appearance this time around isn’t some last-ditch attempt to break into the comedy scene; instead he is in Melbourne performing a two-week stint of his latest show Ready For This? followed by sold-out dates across the country.

You can chart Minchin’s meteoric rise from obscurity to the verge of celebrity in Rhian Skirving’s self-financed film, Rock N Roll Nerd. This documentary-style film captures crucial moments in his comedy career – from performing in local Melbourne pubs through to his success at the Edinburgh Fringe and London’s West End. The plot is intermixed with Minchin and his wife Sarah’s journey together as a couple.

It’s a thoroughly engaging watch and one that gives you a great deal of insight into Minchin and what makes him tick. After watching the film you feel like you know him and that might have something to do with the fact that Skirving and Minchin are very good friends. Minchin is also an incredibly open character, but credit has to go to the filmmaker for her ability to capture the warts-and-all insights.

“It’s actually a testament to how good Rhian is that it wasn’t thousands of hours of footage, it was that she knew when to turn the camera on. There were times when I’d say, ‘Rhian put the fucking camera down I can’t be bothered or whatever…”

Minchin didn’t ever think the footage would appear in a feature film.

“We just thought it would be a little project that might end up on the ABC at midnight. We certainly didn’t think it was going to be this pseudo-celeb doc about the D-grade celeb I’ve become.”

While Minchin appears to talk freely about the film, this is actually one of the first interviews in which he’s talked about it. He confirms he had nothing to do with its making, citing it would be “against the ethics of documentary-making.” He’s very communicative in his desire to keep his own work separate from Skirving’s work as a filmmaker. And it’s not because he doesn’t like the film, he just finds it “squirm-inducing”.

“The reason why I dissociate myself from the project, it’s not because I don’t think it’s great or that it shouldn’t be up there, it’s simply that it is very uncomfortable for me. I don’t like watching the thing!

“It’s hard to listen to your own voice on your answering machine message… imagine what it’s like watching yourself in your undies? I just sit there thinking, ‘shut up you fucking idiot’. I hate how I behave and I especially don’t like the fact that the film is about my career.

“There’s no footage of me just being a casual, laid-back nice guy, I come across as quite intense and ambitious, more than I am,” he laughs.

Minchin reveals this isn’t a project he would embark on at this point in his career.

“From between the end of filming and now, things have changed by order of magnitude,” he explains. “I’m 20 times more known now and I’m not deluded about my fame or anything.

“It’s become a much more complicated thing than when it started out. I don’t want people to think I financed a doco about myself and that I particularly want the world to know about my life. It makes me feel like I’m saying, ‘look at me; I now have a doco all about me’ which is not what I’m selling. What I’m selling is my ranting, atheist, and swearing, sex-obsessed, piano-playing show.

Rock N Roll Nerd screens on ABC1 on April 30 at 8.30pm. Tim Minchin’s stage show Ready For This is playing at the Perth Concert Hall between April 28 – 30 and May 2.

[An edited version of this article appears in The West Australian newspaper on Thursday, April 30, 2009]

Paper Dolls: Pin-up Girls’ War Effort

Pin-up girls during World War II

When you think of pinup girls, it’s most likely to bring to mind images of raunchy centrefolds in Playboy Magazine, than something wholesome and homely. But during World War 2, photos of natural girls in tasteful bathing suits became the nation’s stars – a symbol of better times and a longing for fun – not something that could be classified as risque.

It wasn’t just professional models who became pinup girls. Friends or families photographed every-day girls who had never modelled before and sent their snapshots to papers and magazines. The most attractive girls were published and ultimately became collectable items for men in the military. Pictures of pinup girls adorned tent walls and mess halls, and some of the girls even became mascots for army battalions.

Historical consultant Dr Madeleine Hamilton did her thesis on Australian pinups of the 1940s and ‘50s as part of a Ph.D at Melbourne University. Her research inspired director Angela Buckingham and producer Yvonne Collins to make a documentary called Paper Dolls, which charts the growth of the Australian pinup through the recollections of three former pinup girls as well as some WWII veterans – who share how these pictures were morale boosters for men fighting in the war.

Running at 52 minutes, the documentary doesn’t seem long enough to tackle what is a surprisingly dense topic. After viewing, it almost brings about more questions than any really satisfying answers about the social standards of Australia at that time.

“You’d think the subject of pinup girls would be light and fluffy,” says Dr Hamilton on the phone from Melbourne. “But it does raise a lot of questions about relationships between men and woman, about women’s roles in Australian society during the war, their contributions to the war effort and propaganda…”

She has always had a fascination with women in the 1940s and ‘50s, particularly interesting women who live on the edge. “Borderline kind of women – good versus bad,” she laughs. “I guess that’s what interested me about pinup girls – that they turned out to be seen as more good than anything else.”

The documentary explores the line models couldn’t cross if they were to keep in favour with the public and government censors. “If they stayed nice, well that was fine,” Dr Hamilton explains. “Anything nude or a pose that was a bit questionable… well that would of been a more underground thing and the general public wouldn’t have seen it.

“There was a general approval for these photos that were kind of specific to the war. But after the war, opinions changed and images became more fallacious and had more of a sexual tone to them.”

The most interesting aspect of the documentary is the interviews with the three ex-pinup girls, now aged in there eighties. There is Lois Blacklock, who was a 15-year-old mascot for the ill-fated 2/21 division; Linda Browne, who received nearly 200 letters from lonely servicemen; and Adelie Hurley, who later became the first female press photographer in Australia.

“On the whole, many of these women saw being a pinup girl as a positive experience and they were proud to have contributed to the war effort in anyway they could. Many of them kept all of the letters they received over the years, so they must have seen them as very valuable and meaningful.”

You’ll believe in the WotWots

SpottyWot and DottyWot

Imagine creating the environment, fauna and flora of Skull Island and bringing to life the gorilla in Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong. What about making 10,000 prosthetic facial appliances, 3500 pairs of Hobbit feet, 2500 foam body suits, 1200 suits of armour, 2000 weapons and 10,000 arrows for The Lord of the Rings trilogy?

Well that’s just a day in the life of Richard Taylor and his wife Tania Rodger who together lead a team of 800 people at the Weta Workshop in Wellington, New Zealand. Their work has won them five Academy Awards and three BAFTAS. So what’s next you might wonder?

Over the past two and half years alongside author and illustrator Martin Baynton, they have created SpottyWot and DottyWot – two fluffy little aliens for a television show for pre-schoolers. Filmed at the Melbourne, Auckland and Wellington zoos, the WotWots (pronounced ‘what what’s’) follows the adventures of two siblings from outer space who delight in discovering the animals that live in the zoo.

But in typical Weta fashion even something as innocent and simple as the WotWots has been a long and complex journey – it’s no easy feat creating digitally animated puppets and a spaceship that can interact in a real-life setting.

“A lot of people have commented that it seems odd to them that someone who has worked on films like King Kong and The Chronicles of Narnia – that surely doing children’s television is a cut-down from there – but of course it isn’t,” he explains from his desk in the Weta Workshop.

“This is a very critical audience who needs beautiful entertainment that’s respectful to developing minds. It has been a challenging and creative process and in some ways is as challenging as any feature film for an adult.”

With two young children of his own, it’s important to Taylor that the characters are believable so that children can relate to them as friends.

“Children today interact with a very sterile world. The television set is a geometric box – the car is a very hard cold object,” he explains. “But in the world of the WotWots the spaceship is like a beautiful Fabergé egg – it’s driven by steam and it’s got simple little rotor blades similar to the seedpods that drop off trees.

“In The Lord of the Rings the characters had to feel like they came from a cultural inheritance, and when you design a character like King Kong, it’s critical that the audience can tangibly believe they’re real creatures.

“Similarly with the WotWots we are hoping that children will feel these creatures are living in the world along side them, because in doing that, they are more excited about going along on the journey you’re taking them.”

This isn’t the first children’s television show their production company Pukeko Pictures has created. In 2005 they produced Jane and the Dragon based on Baynton’s best selling books. The success of the series spurred them on.

“When we came to the end of Jane and the Dragon, we were floored by the fan mail that came flooding in from around the world from young girls,” says Taylor. “Jane and the Dragon was about empowering young girls to interact with the world above their own expectations and the people around them – to really reach out and do exceptional things.

“We thought we should try and share similar messages with younger children. An alien arriving in the local zoo is like a young child arriving in the world – and the world is there for their discovery, excitement and fun.”

While the WotWots might only communicate through body gestures and inquisitive noises, Taylor (who’s been collecting children’s television shows for over 20 years now) recognised mums, dads and grandparents will be watching the series too.

“We’ve tried very hard for it to be engaging at an adult level – there’s lots of WotWot actions that a young child wouldn’t relate to, but a parent will see the intricate qualities of the interaction between the characters through body language and the like.”

WotWots begins on April 16 at 8:25am on ABC1 and 12:45pm on ABC2 weekdays.

[As published in the Today section of The West Australian newspaper on Thursday 9 April 2009]

The Making Of Modern Australia

“My mother had eight children by the age of 29,” writes Karen Lawrence. “I felt and still feel she didn’t have much of a maternal bone in her body. Life and kids just happened to her in her early years… She was not a bad person… just immature and a victim of being poor.”

This is one of the many stories by everyday Australians popping up on The Making of Modern Australia website. They might be big stories that had ramifications for the whole community, or just the little stories about your first kiss, a special holiday, or a family member you adored.

Essentially they’re your own memoirs about growing up in Australia, and some of them will be chosen for a four-part documentary series to be screened on the ABC next April.

“We did a documentary project last year called Ten Pound Poms, which looked at the British migrant experience to Australia,” says producer Ian Collie.

“Some [of the stories] were very moving, some were very entertaining and funny, and some were about the British migrants who came here totally disillusioned and became the archetype of the winging pom. That was essentially post-war Australia – so we thought ‘let’s go beyond migrant experience and look at the whole social history experience of all Australians.’”

Collie, a producer of both drama and factual programming, has a keen interest in history and biographies. He recently produced Rogue Nation, which screened on the ABC over the last two Sunday nights. Also in his repertoire is The Catalpa Rescue (ABC), Johnny Warren’s Football Mission (SBS) and Suspicious Minds (Nine Network).

He says that by sharing stories we will get a bigger and more personal picture of what Australia is today.

“We are looking for those stories that tie in with some of the big events or the big transformations,” he explains. “It could be in looking at romance and relationships, one of the big changes was the introduction of the pill which opened up the whole sexual revolution. It didn’t happen overnight, but sexual morays changed as a result.

“If it’s religion – with the emergence of multiculturalism in society we saw other religions such as Islam or Buddhism, and of course, the disillusionment in western orthodox resulting in new age faith. So again looking at how some of these stories intersect with the bigger picture.”

But who knows what tangent the series will head down as peoples stories unfold.

“The beauty of documentaries is that you get these stories left-of-field, which can take you down a whole new storyline strand you didn’t anticipate – becoming richer because of it,” he says. “I think it’s that job of discovering new stories, new ideas, which people have forgotten about or didn’t know about.

“I think in any storytelling, sometimes the problem is we’ve heard it all before, so when it’s a new take or a surprise twist, that in itself is always refreshing.”

As for the style of the series, it will be presented in much the same way as Ten Pound Poms – using photos and home movies from people’s own archives, which will be given a graphic treatment so they come alive.

“From a TV perspective we’re probably looking for those stories which have some kind of visual media, which in conjunction with the interview, can help us tell the story – otherwise it gets a bit dry if you’ve just got a head talking for five minutes.”

While the web site is intended to live on well into the future, you had better get your memoirs in quick if you hope to be considered for the first two stories being developed for the series – on romance and religion.

“We’re starting to look for those stories now, but will probably start selecting them in the next month or so,” he says. “Although in the end we can only select a limited number for TV. The TV series is an add-on in many ways – a lovely add-on.”

Stories can be submitted online at http://makingaustralia.abc.net.au or by calling Essential Media and Entertainment on (02) 8568 3100.

[As printed in The West Australian - Today on Thursday 2 April 2009]