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Steve Vizard: Audiences loved it Live & Unexpected

Nostalgia Week: Steve Vizard says the one saving grace for Free to Air is the thing most overlooked.

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When Steve Vizard looks back on his 4 years of hosting Tonight Live for Seven, it is the spontaneous, unscripted moments that he remembers most.

Unlike shows hosted by Don Lane or Rove McManus, Vizard’s show aired -incredibly- 5 nights a week Live for 4 years as late night TV.

“Because it wasn’t just once a week but every night, you can do excessively risky things. Harry Connick Jr. was coming on and said ‘Would you like me to bring my big band?’” he recalls.

“I topped and tailed the show and it was basically like a concert of just him doing the whole show.

“For the heck of it we did a show in black and white. We did a show where we gave every guest a number and (they came on as) random. We broadcast with Mick Doohan on a motorbike driving around Melbourne. One night I was sick and we did it from my bedroom. Or we picked up some Japanese tourists at the airport who were about to go to their hotel, but we put them in an open top car and drove them around for an hour!

“We took over the dining room at the Ritz in London and the line-up was Joanna Lumley, Michael Caine, Peter Ustinov, Bob Geldof and it was basically just a great lunch.

“We booked a whole show with Jimmy Barnes and no other guests, and after I announced him he had taken ill and left. So I had to do a whole show that was built entirely around him. I think I pulled someone from the audience and got them to pretend to be Jimmy Barnes and a couple of fans to sing a song!”

The roll-call of guests from 1990 – 1993 was typically A-list: Bob Hope, Audrey Hepburn, Mickey Rooney, Spike Milligan, Patrick Swayze, Peter Allen, Robert Downey Jr., Whoopi Goldberg, Peter Ustinov, Bob Geldof, Britt Ekland, Tom Jones, Mel Gibson, and Steve Allen. Hundreds more followed.

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“Where everything else is controlled and planned their one attribute is therefore the uncontrollable”

But while TV lacks a regular Tonight show, Vizard notes that Live and spontaneous television is an attribute that Free to Air networks are overlooking.

“I don’t like to say they’re missing the wood for the trees …but they’re actually missing the wood for the trees,” he insists.

“The single saving grace of Free to Air Television –the only saving grace- is while we can get everything else downloaded and stored for your own convenience, is therefore stuff that’s immediate, that is happening, unexpected, and not planned.

“In a world where everything else is controlled and planned their one attribute is therefore the uncontrollable, un-plannable and the chaotic.

“It’s that very virtue they bid for to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in football and sport.

“In Light Entertainment, which would cost a sliver of that, they’ve almost abandoned the field.

“It never ceases to amaze me how much they are playing into the hands of the Pay TV channels, cable providers, and people who are essentially providing On Demand viewing.”

“We are bound together when we don’t know the end of the script”

He cites The Project, Breakfast TV and Dirty Laundry Live, hosted by Laurence Mooney, as still flying the flag for Live Television. Mooney is one of several talent on the books of Profile Talent, for whom Vizard is a consultant.

“For all of his faults and virtues, I thought (Dirty Laundry Live) was a great show because it was Live. I’d rather watch that and see a dud one and a brilliant one, than watch something that’s been ‘averaged’ out week in, week out,” he continues.

“If you ask most people what are their favourite moments on TV, they always nominate when things are unexpected.

“We are bound together when we don’t know the end of the script, and so it is with Live TV.

“Nobody, not the producers, the blokes pointing the camera, nor the people organising it know which way it will go.”

Vizard has also been lending a hand to The Weekly with Charlie Pickering this year as the show’s little-known voice-over man. Next week his new play The Last Man Standing opens at the Melbourne Theatre Company with Peter Carroll, William McInnes, Alison Whyte, Toby Truslove and Nicki Wendt.

“It’s about a Royal Command Gallipoli concert where everything goes wrong until they discover it has a Colonel in charge of it who is just back from Kabul.

“They’ve built the entire concert around one last, living ANZAC who they discover was court-martialled.

“I’ve written the only comedy about Gallipoli!”

Fittingly, it opens on November 11.

TOMORROW: John Burgess

5 Responses

  1. Tonight Live was great. The show was “stolen” from Letterman, but Vizard mentioned that every night for at least the first month or so of the show. He never hid it. Always had interesting guest and some great bands too. Used to love Richard Stubbs when he used to host the Friday night shows too. Hard to believe it was so long ago.

  2. “It never ceases to amaze me how much they are playing into the hands of the Pay TV channels, cable providers, and people who are essentially providing On Demand viewing.”

    This. I have abandoned Aus commercial FTA TV because of their shenanigans.

    I used to watch Tonight Live pretty much every night if I was in. It certainly did tread new ground for Aus TV even tho’ it basically stole everything from Letterman to start with. I just don’t think it would work today.

  3. I do remember an episode of Tonight Live when they ran the whole show backwards….It started with the Credits rolling backward, then the weather and news….and finished with Steve’s welcome and the opener running backwards….

    Another show it was raining at Wimbledon in the UK on Channel Nine…….so they had rain in the studio for the whole show , Steve, guests, band and audience had raincoats and umbrellas so they did not get wet.

    It was different and fresh…nothing like we see today.
    Would love to have a live show on air again sometime. The Footy shows are as close as we come…..and they are boring and have been the same for the last 10 years.

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