IN MAUDLIN TONIGHT

He was so big his biographer simply called his book KING.

Not A king. Not THE king. Just King.

Graham Blundell was talking about Graham Kennedy – king of Australian television. The sub-title, The Life and Comedy of Graham Kennedy.

Recently I was in reader’s heaven – cruising the Pacific on the luxury liner Superstar Leo – and had reason to reflect on our TV superstars while reading Blundell’s book and then Gerald Stone’s spin on the Nine Network called Compulsive Viewing.

And it struck me that the way luxury liners eventually turn into rust buckets and end up on the scrap heap so do TV superstars.

Graham Kennedy was such a piece of flotsam – to continue the seafaring analogy.

And, not incidentally, Blundell got it wrong.

Gra-Gra was television royalty but he was not THE lasting king of TV. A bloke called Bert was and still is.

Bert Newton -- the professional second banana to Kennedy and then Don Lane -- still reigns after nearly fifty years on the “small screen” that sometimes seems smaller than his Moonface. This week, GMA, his daily interview-advertorial programme on the Ten Network, had its timeslot extended to two and a half hours!

To be honest, until I read Blundell’s book, I was not truly aware of the massive contribution Newton has made to television and the entertainment industry over nearly five decades.

I didn’t live in this country in the IMT early days of “make it up as you go along” TV in the late Fifties and was absent for most of the Sixties and Seventies.

To me Bert was merely a radio rival on 3UZ when I first hit the airwaves on 3XY in 1978.

The flamboyant Bernard King had warned me in Sydney that when I came to Melbourne there was one thing I should not do under the pain of ostracism or professional death: Criticise Bert Newton.

The camp cook said: “Bert is God down there”.

In my first interview (in which Jack Cannon called me “a Sydney hit-man”) I referred to Bert as a myth invented by the Reader’s Digest and cockily boasted I would beat him in twelve months.

It eventually happened but it took two years and a switch to 3AW.

But back to Blundell’s version of show biz royalty – Graham Kennedy.

And this is going to be hard to write because for a generation of Melburnians Graham Kennedy was as much a god as the man they called God in VFL-AFL Gary Ablett.

But, like Ablett, his off-field (off-stage) behaviour tarnished the crown and made colleagues doubt his worthiness for inclusion in any Hall of Fame.

Graham Kennedy, as his biography from a worshipping Blundell still shows, was a talented, at times loathsome, self-promoting, self-deceiving, brilliant entertainer.

He may have been the emperor of TV in the early days but he abdicated (or his crown was usurped) decades ago. In one contrived comeback period for two nights a week on Channel Nine he was beaten in the ratings on his own station by the new star Ernie Sigley and his ditsy sidekick Denise Ding Dong Drysdale.

Then, according to Blundell, Ernie got a touch of the Big Boots and Big Head and Kerry Packer called him down to the Australia Hotel in Collins Street after his first show of his third year and sacked him. Despite the ratings.

Sigley was replaced on his two nights a week by a lanky yank named Don Lane and a sidekick named Bert Newton. They lasted more than eight years.

Now Kennedy, Lane, Sigley and a pile of others have shuffled off-camera. Only Moonface survives.

But it is Kennedy who still evokes curiosity. The enigmatic Greta Garbo of Australia in more ways than one.

Gra-Gra, or Gay-Gay as Truth newspaper used to call him, was our first big star.

But, over the years, he developed into an acidic, acerbic, callous, cruel, bulbous-eyed toad.

He joked on camera about Toni Lamond’s drug problems “ welcome back druggie” and Bert Newton’s later confessed nervous breakdown.

But what of Kennedy’s own tortured soul? His arrogance. His ignorance. His pathetic attempt to deny his sexuality with the stunt that he was engaged to Lana Cantrell.

I would have had more chance of being engaged to Kennedy than she would and Jacki Weaver would have had more chance of being engaged to Cantrell than he would.

He was courageous on TV. His infamous “faaark” crow call which got him into deep trouble with the broadcasting authorities may have been a weapon to get him out of a contract but it also drew serious attention to the out-of-date, conservative, hypocritical, fuddy-duddies who tried to stifle dissent and bold new ideas on commercial television.

Kennedy made some good movies like Don’s Party and The Club and Travelling North. And some shockers like The Odd Angry Shot.

And sadly he became a recluse. Producers and writers and researchers on the late-news parody Coast to Coast could only communicate with him by faxes slid under his dressing room door.

For years he has existed on a diet of cigarettes and red wine and teetered on the edge of a self-dug grave.

Personally my lasting memory of Graham Kennedy is not a nice one. When I was hosting Midday on Channel Nine they coaxed Kennedy back for an interview with Ray Martin to celebrate his 60th birthday in February 1994.

They paid him $50,000 for the hour. There were arguments over whether it should come as a new kitchen at his farm in Bowral or a four-wheel drive.

From my dressing room I could hear the programme being recorded. Kennedy kept using the F-word and saying things like “ How many effing Gold Logies have you got Ray?”

It was a bit like that last bloated, sweating, talentless, televised final concert by Elvis in Hawaii. By then the King was definitely dead.

.©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2002