Tony Martin is not an easy man to contact. Word is he has no mobile phone, doesn't use an answering machine and only when he has reason to front the media to promote his latest hilarious book does he become slightly easier to reach.
I managed to track down an email address I was assured was Mr Martin's -- even though the name on it was Les SurnamebeginningwithN. I sent the email below to the address on March 4 and am yet to receive a reply.
Perhaps Mr Martin thinks I'm a potential stalker. Perhaps he doesn't want to confirm that he is Les SurnamebeginningwithN. Perhaps he thinks I'm a wanker.
Perhaps all of the above.
Hi Les (or may I call you Tony?),
Going through the storage room at the back of our garage-turned-into-an-office recently my wife came across a bunch of boxes chockers with VHS tapes.
These tapes -- most recorded on long play, each holding about six hours of material -- were recorded in the middle third (or so) of the 1990s when I wanted to write sitcoms for a living.
Stopped laughing yet? Thank you, let's proceed.
The total running time amounts to hundreds if not several thousands of hours of sitcoms recorded at all hours of the day. The material was my research, my self-schooling in how to write sitcoms. Did it work? Clearly not. Not only am I not writing sitcoms (but, I ask, who in Australia is?), I became a journalist instead. So that's a failed life dream, a misery compounded by more than a decade in the yellow trade. No need to cry on my behalf, I'm over it now.
Whereas once she saw the tapes as a potential investment in a rosy future (she even, during a period of unemployment, catalogued hundreds of them for me) my wife now sees them as space-hungry junk. We no longer have a video player to watch them, she says, adding that we seldom watch anything from our DVD collection as it is. And what with our Foxtel IQ box holding more content than we could watch in a year and the TV mostly used these days to run In The Night Garden and Mama Mirabelle's Home Movies etc for the kids, we'll never have any use for them. She suggested I back up the station wagon, stack it with boxes, and take the lot to the tip.
I had a better idea.
I see these boxes as a time capsule of 90s TV culture memorabilia. Sure, anyone can buy all five seasons of Just Shoot Me on Amazon. Frasier, Cheers and Hogan's Heroes are probably now available on blue-ray. And Seinfeld ... actually, the less said about Seinfeld the better.
But between the shows is TV gold. Commercials, promos for daytime TV, news bulletins presented by people probably long dead or at least in homes for the mentally deranged.
I confess, you were not my first choice of recipient of this glorious stash. Before this approach, the National Archive and Melbourne Museum politely turned down my well-intentioned bequest. Seems you have to actually die for them to be legally obliged to take possession of goods they'll inevitably end up dumping like an unloved great-aunt in the middle of Port Phillip Bay under the darkness of a dim crescent moon.
But then I remembered your frequent references on Get This to your VHS recording fetish, painstakingly editing clips, grabbing soundbites, watching hours of the sort of stuff I assiduously collected for years.
So here's my suggestion: you take the lot off my hands, no charge. That means years of material for you and more room in the garage-turned-into-an-office storage room for me. Win-win. Plus one happy wife. Win-win-win.
What do you reckon?
Gordon
PS: Did you spot the deliberate mistake above? Just Shoot Me ran for seven seasons (not five). If you did spot it, nice get!
PPS: I did pitch a sitcom to local networks. It was called Bernie's World. Set-up: a super-rich but coarse smallgoods magnate buys struggling high class news magazine and, to the dismay of its dedicated staff, reinvents it as gossip-and-celeb rag: "Making magazines is just like making sausages. The more you fill them with indigestible crap the more people want them.") They all passed on it, except Channel Nine who claimed never to have received the script.
About 12 months later, the third season of The Naked Truth screened on Australian television. The show had struggled in its first two seasons and its premise had been re-tooled: rough smallgoods magnate (Les Polonsky, played by George Wendt) buys struggling magazine and takes it downmarket, to the dismay of its dedicated staff ... I swear I recognised half the dialogue, including the line about magazines and sausages.
It screened on Channel Nine, the one network that claimed not to have received my Bernie's World pilot. Go figure.
PPPS: I should put on the record that I hate you. You're funnier in two paragraphs of A Nest of Occasionals than I could dream of being in a lifetime. You're probably smarter, too. Prick. But I have better hair than you. I feel good about that.
PPPS: If this is not the email address of Tony Martin (former radio star, author, typography freak), please ignore all of the above. Sorry for bothering you.
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