Don, thanks for the memories
THE passing of Australian TV icon Don Lane, affectionately known as 'the lanky Yank', sent my memories reeling.
PETER KOHN
Back to the 1970s and 1980s I travelled, to a time before Google, Twitter and texting, when TV ruled our evenings, and Lane ruled the TV.
The night-time airwaves on Mondays and Thursdays sizzled with his mix of irreverent fun, A-list guests, Bert Newton and that clattering carnie lottery wheel that used to turn up on so many TV variety shows.
They say we become nostalgic about events and places because they remind us of what we were doing with our families and friends and in our jobs at the time. The flickering TV tube was always there in the background, a metaphor for whatever we experienced and wherever we found ourselves.
As a kid growing up in Melbourne, I hadn’t been able to follow Lane’s Sydney Tonight program in the 1960s, when it was on after my bedtime anyway.
But I do remember that famous split-screen segment with ‘King’ Graham Kennedy in Melbourne, which showcased the powers of the coaxial cable that had been laid between the two cities. How we marvelled at that technology, which today seems very basic.
Kennedy bowed out of In Melbourne Tonight in 1969 — and I was at uni in the early 1970s when he made his tonight-show comeback — and soon tanked after his infamous “crow-call” incident. The crow-calls were suspiciously similar to a four-letter word. Unremarkable today, but it was enough to create blind panic in 1975. Kennedy was ordered to pre-record his shows, which he refused, and parted company with Nine.
Soon after, Kerry Packer brought in Lane to host a national tonight show. Initially he was part of a line-up of comperes. I still remember him bouncing on to the set at 9.30pm on Monday nights, calling out: “I’m Don Lane, I do Mondays.”
But Lane and Newton worked up such chemistry, the other shows were soon replaced. Colour TV had begun in March that year, and we had one in our house soon after. As one of the first new Aussie variety projects of the colour age, the show had an inimitable buzz and dynamism about it, broadcast in what Nine then branded as “living colour”, which beamed from a TV that looked like your aunt’s walnut-veneered credenza.
For me, it was The Sullivans at seven, tapping out an essay on my typewriter and cramming for a tutorial around eight, and back to the telly to catch some of the Lane show at 9.30.
Lane invariably opened his show with a monologue of one-liners and a comic routine with Newton. The gags were deliberately corny, like the one about the coffee manufacturer who married the bra salesman and woke up with 43 beans in every cup. The daggier the jokes, the greater the applause from the studio audience.
In 1981, at the height of their TV popularity, Lane and Newton also broadcast on morning radio. By that time, I was also in radio in my own small way, and I can still see myself behind the wheel of my 3MP news ‘patrol’ car, cruising down Brunton Avenue in Melbourne on my way to our office at State Treasury, while Don and Bert bantered from the car radio on 3UZ.
By 1982, I was in Los Angeles, doing radio news reports and other features for Australia, and one of my most treasured interviews was with the late Rick Nelson, the former child TV star, who had turned to country music and formed the Stone Canyon Band.
One of the reasons I scored the interview, I was told by promoters, was that Nelson was about to visit Australia, and was scheduled to appear on the Don Lane Show to promote his concert tour. It was the era of satellite TV interviews and Lane, from his set at Studio Nine, made it look so easy to shmooze across time zones with the cream of the entertainment world.
When I returned to Australia, it was a few days before the catastrophic Ash Wednesday bushfires in February 1983. I remember how hot and dry it felt here after spending a freezing winter in the American midwest.
Before the era of online news on something called a mobile phone, we clung to every scrap of news about the fires. The air conditioner was running, my bags were hardly unpacked, and we were watching the telly — and prime minister Malcolm Fraser appeared on the Lane show to talk about the inferno that had gripped Victoria.
At the end of 1983, flagging ratings in Sydney caused the show’s demise. I remember Ten running the mini-series, The Thorn Birds, against Lane, a move that didn’t help his show’s ratings that final year, and Lane quipping to channel-hopping viewers along the lines of “the priest is dead, you can stay and watch our show now”.
In November that year, 26 years ago, we sat glued to his final program, and I remember Lane singing Tell Them About Australia, a number penned for him by songwriters Jackie Trent and Tony Hatch, which he said had special meaning for him as someone not born in this country.
Being American gave him allure, being a New Yorker gave him grit, and working in Australia gave him a fascinating dimension — for a fan who has always studied the magical, perilous ways Australians and Americans, so similar, yet so different, interact with each other.
And yes, I have to admit, the fact that Lane was Jewish gave me a quiet sense of fraternal pride. They frequently called this son of a Bronx cop by his birth name, Morton Donald Isaacson, in that ribbing Aussie way, perhaps oblivious to the transformative American ritual of changing name and changing destiny. You wouldn’t call Bronx lad Tony Curtis Bernard Schwartz every other week without buying a fight. But in the Land of Chiacking, Lane somehow seemed good naturedly stuck with his discarded moniker.
I can’t put it any better than Paul Hogan, who said: “What a wonderful country it is when a lanky New York Jew can come here and team up with a tubby Melbourne Catholic [Bert Newton] and form a duo that is more personable, more entertaining than even Mike and Mal Leyland.”
If you’re under 45, and wondering who the hell Mike and Mal Leyland were, they were the Leyland Brothers. Think Getaway, 1970s-style ‚Ķ Or just Google it.