For many, Matinee Idle was the esoteric sound of summer holiday afternoons for more than 20 years. Then RNZ called time on the show. Photos / Supplied. Image / Listener illustration.
And so, there we were. The last day of the last season of – can this be right? – 21 years of the notorious Matinee Idle. And from the start of play, midday, Friday, January 9, something had changed. Not us – Phil O’Brien, our producer (and my son) Alec
– or the alleged playlist, a wild assortment of numbers, gleefully hoarded by each of us to inflict on the others and get a reaction.
It was the reaction of everyone else: dozens of emails, hundreds of texts, before we’d even started. The messages were mostly the same – shock, dismay and nostalgia in equal measure. Someone said it was as if there’d been a death in the family. That seems a bit excessive, more like someone bowled your old holiday home without any warning, perhaps.
Idle was seen as RNZ’s Christmas present to the nation. (“Just what I wanted, you shouldn’t have. Er, what is it?”) More than one letter darkly intimated that public radio had done what its detractors always said it would do and banned Christmas.
Of course, our audience has never been known for its restraint when it writes to the show, invariably in hundreds per day. For every, “You’re the greatest thing in the history of civilization,” there’s an equal and opposite, “You’re everything wrong with the 21st century. Expect torches and pitchforks.”
But the holidays aren’t the time for calm and rational thought. And our audience was made up of some of the country’s most serious and important people, who simply wanted a day off being serious and important. They included musicians, film stars, public servants, politicians, professionals and several people who proudly brandished their PhDs at us.
They also included one governor-general who used to drive the staff crazy at Government House by blasting Matinee Idle in every room.
So, when we reached the last day of the final season of the show, we were more than sensible of the precise issue which was at that very moment concerning us all.
All right, our audience – many of whom would have immediately spotted that old Peter Sellers quote – are that often-overlooked minority, the Gold Card-adjacent. And for a couple of weeks a year they were allowed to rule the roost. Like AA Milne’s Bad Sir Brian Botany, they took whatever we dished out with aplomb, even joy. “I am Sir Brian as bold as a lion, take that! – and that! – and that!”
As Matinee Idle’s founding father, Phil O’Brien, has always said, the show has three equal elements: There’s us – Phil, me and my son Alec the showrunner, who looks after the playlist, the emails and fact-checking. There’s the music. I know some people can and do question that description, but mostly it is technically music. And there’s the audience, who compulsively write in and request things, even though we constantly remind them it’s not a request show.
Unlike most shows that plead with their audience to get in touch with comments and “reckons”, Idle often fights them off. So correspondents simply challenge us not to read them out. Much of our reputation for “wit” and “insight” comes from simply reading out an impossible-to-ignore letter from some genius in Gore.
There have been complaints recently that the 21st season of Matinee Idle seemed tamer and more reasonable than its irresponsible childhood and teens. Some even called it musical. Was that true or was it Stockholm syndrome kicking in, as people gave up the fight?
I suppose we don’t play audience-baiting schmaltz like Charlene’s deathless I’ve Never Been To Me or Bobby Goldsboro’s cloying Honey as often as we used to. Not to mention the infuriating There’s No Norwegians in Dickeyville (The Goose Island Ramblers). But the window-shaking excesses of the Butthole Surfers, Alice in Chains and the like never really go away, if only in the daily “Alec’s choice”.
Matinee Idles: Phil O’Brien and Simon Morris. Photo / Supplied
On the last day, there were unexpected visits from friends and relations, a camera crew and a few RNZ buddies, though curiously no one from management.
Mind you, I don’t blame them. After years of benign neglect that essentially meant we could do whatever we liked, it’s significant that management’s one active contribution to Matinee Idle (and to my film review show At the Movies the month before) was to pull the plug on us.
Is Idle irreplaceable? Of course it is. Phil and I have been doing this sort of musical one-upmanship thing for years, before the show was even thought of. And Alec and I were doing the same thing since he was born.
That’s not to say you can’t come up with something else, though. It’s easy. Just be confident, unexpected, enthusiastic and amusing. Okay, the BBC’s founder, Lord Reith, would have hated us when we started. But 21 years later, he’d have been one of our staunchest supporters.
Magic moments
The Idle team’s most memorable discoveries.
Good Lord I: The first time I heard Dead Puppies by American cult band Ogden Edsl. That there is a song called Dead Puppies was my first surprise. My second was that our audience insisted it be played at least once a year thereafter.
Good Lord II: The first time Phil’s wife Gayle heard The Beach Boys’ Cuddle Up. More hankies!
Good Lord III: When Phil first heard late American, blistering, plank-spanking guitarist Danny Gatton. Another popular if deafening favourite.
The day we all turned bluegrass: Watching mandolin player Sierra Hull, aged about 11, step up with Alison Krauss and Union Station, toe to toe. A star (and killer musician) is born. Find it on YouTube.
Half Man! When old John Peel favourite and funny UK punk-folk outfit Half Man Half Biscuit made their debut on the show with Tending the Wrong Grave for 23 Years.
Favourite seasonal theme: The 12 days of Christmas. “Geese a-laying” was the hardest.
Favourite guest: Roy Phillips, of British jazz-soul group The Peddlers, by then resident in NZ, trying to work his tonsils round the intricacies of Louie Louie, live at an outside broadcast in Christchurch.
Defining artists: Phil – Harry Nilsson. Not Pat Boone. Simon – Jeff Beck. Not Burton Cummings. Alec – Robert Johnson. Nothing AI.
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