Sitch for brains

There's a line in one of the songs on the new Hives album which runs 'You become what you hate, and you hate what you've become.' It's hardly a profound line. It's hardly a profound song either, they're basically trying to sound like Is This It-era Strokes for reasons as bewilderingly unfathomable as the song is borderline unlistenable. But it has some resonance. Not with me, I should point out. Despite being homicidally unimpressed with the idea of having to turn 30, having done so I'm rather pleased about how I've actually made it this far and how I've turned out, despite the lack of Formula One world titles, FIFA World Cup winners' medals and/or sexually-exhausted, baby-oil-smeared supermodels littering my bedside. Who'd have thought thirty year ago we'd all be sittin' here drinking Château de Chasselas, eh? In them days we was glad to have the price of a cup o' tea. A cup o' cold tea. Without milk or sugar. Or tea. In a cracked cup, an' all. Oh, we never had a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled up newspaper...

Enough of that. Any more and someone will have to lick road clean wit' toonge. Anyway, the become what you hate/hate what you've become nexus ain't my bitch, it's that of a guy called Sitch. Fuck, we've gone all beat-poetry all of a sudden. Either that or Dr Seuss. I do not like green eggs and ham, largely because they've clearly gone off for fuck's sake.

Anyway, Rob Sitch. What a cunt. This is not exactly a breaking news flash to interrupt transmission on all channels with, but it's worth discussing.

When I was half the man I am today (mathematically, I mean, not as a result of some hideous bacon-slicer malfunction since remedied) Rob Sitch was one of my heroes. The D-Generation's 1992/93 Late Show was for me, as it was for a lot of you bastards, a Big Thing in my young adolescence. For a show on at stupid o'clock on a Saturday night, it rated its arse off; it spawned videos, DVDs and ABC Shop merchandising a-go-go; it launched careers (or re-launched them, after the D-Gen's original late-80s star had faded after an abortive attempt to go 'commercial' on Seven, and they'd ended up pulling breakfast shift on Triple M Mudbourne) and earned itself a place in the Strayan Generation X cult hall of fame.














Available from your ABC Shop, or wherever hastily-cobbled-together piles of offcuts and shite are sold









And Rob Sitch was pretty much star of the show, at least as far as I was concerned. Sure, Martin and Molloy were nominal hosts of proceedings with their stand-up-esque intro duologue segment (which they managed to parlay into several years of drivetime radio on syndicated commercial FM radio), Santo was funny and Jane was hot (then again at that age, half the girls I knew looked pretty hot, it's called Being A Teenager) but Sitch was in everything. The crap celebrity impersonations of the Late Show News? Check. The half-arsed stunts of Shitscared? Check. The less funny one out of Graham and the Colonel? Check and mate. (Which Jane eventually did, much to her discredit.) Plus he was the only one I remembered from the old D-Gen shows from the 80s (that Thunderbirds sketch is still piss-funny to this day).
















Just Roy and HG with Richie Benaud wigs

Anyway there was a Late Show sketch which remains memorable - largely because it made the Best Bits Of The Late Show Volume 1 video as well as the subsequent DVD - which ran the gentle viewer through the process of hosting a dinner party. Cue Sitch, in a preposterous pony-tail and jacket as the mother, father and daughter (all at once, providing 60 Minutes are shelling out for the interview) of all shit dinner party guests - loud, smug, pretentious, self-aggrandizing, self-promoting, punishing and insufferable. 'Why people invite Australian Democrats, it's got me beat' was Tommy G's not-in-any-way-telegraphed punchline for Sitch's bit (postscripted by some piss poor adlib by Sitch, fairly typically).

Fast forward fifteen years or so. We've had The Castle, The Dish, and The Panel, along with that fucking tedious fishing show they made, and that equally wank theatresports thing with all their tired old mates from the dusty archives of Australian television (Shane Bourne from Hey Hey, anyone?) Anyway, it's Christmas night 2007 and there's absolutely diddly fucking squat on TV, other than The Panel's Christmas special. And by Christ, have you ever seen such a fat, smug, faded bunch of has-beens as the former doyens of alternative, edgy Australian comedy - the ones whose original '80s ABC show used to follow on straight after The Young Ones, for fuck's sake - now fat and indulgent from their own success, and the Ten network's endless pandering to their every whim. And Sitch front-and-centre, bald, belligerant and spouting bollocks, barely one nylon-polyester ponytail from turning into the right-wing dinner party wanker he used to parody.

Which brings us to another ABC series. The last episode of series six of Red Dwarf - the last of the 'dodgy old special FX' series before they redid everything in the late 90s - had the crew meeting their future selves who'd found some magic widget and had spent the last umpteen years flitting about the galaxy basically on the lash. They'd turned into fat, bald, hideously over-indulged Florida matrons, in dire need of a rocket up the jacksie (which, in due course, followed.) Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the D-Generation. That's what was brought to mind by watching The Panel on Christmas Day. And that the old man has a bunch of decent stand-up DVDs I could have been watching, so what the fuck was I doing watching Sitch pretending to be Andrew Symonds with a faceful of boot polish slapped over his shit-eating grin?

All that said, still keen as buggery to get the Bargearse/Olden Days DVD. That, truly, is Champagne Comedy.

The Doctor is OUT.