Master of the Ceremonies

MASTER OF THE CEREMONIES

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Master of the

Ceremonies

An Eventful Life

RIC BIRCH

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First published in 2004

Copyright © Ric Birch 2004

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

including photocopying, recording or by any information storage

and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the

publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a

maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever

is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for

its educational purposes provided that the educational institution

(or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to

Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

The author gratefully acknowledges the permission of the IOC

to incorporate its copyright photos.

Allen & Unwin

83 Alexander Street

Crows Nest NSW 2065

Australia

Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

Email: [email protected]

Web: www.allenandunwin.com

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Birch, Ric.

Master of the ceremonies : an eventful life.

Includes index.

ISBN 1 74114 417 5.

1. Birch, Ric. 2. Special events - Australia. 3. Special

events industry - Australia. I. Title.

394.4092

Set in 12/16 pt Granjon by Bookhouse, Sydney

Printed by Griffin Press, South Australia

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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To Richard Walsh, who thought there might be a story in ceremonies

To everyone I’ve worked with who made the story possible

And to Lara, Dylan and Jessie, who already have stories of their own

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Chapter One A ceremonial virgin 1

Chapter Two Magnets and maestros 11

Chapter Three Beginner’s luck 26

Chapter Four The lanky yank 42

Chapter Five California dreaming 49

Chapter Six Pie in the sky 66

Chapter Seven Spectak does Expo 75

Chapter Eight Flaps over frocks 99

Chapter Nine The happiest place on earth 123

Chapter Ten Spectak goes east 134

Chapter Eleven Tropical delights 151

Chapter Twelve Capital Catalans 163

Chapter Thirteen Another opening, another show 183

Chapter Fourteen We go to a land Down Under 201

Chapter Fifteen SOCOG gets serious 227

Chapter Sixteen Teamwork, fun and games 247

Chapter Seventeen More fun and games 268

Chapter Eighteen Showtime 290

Epilogue 307

Index 312

Contents

Contents

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1

one

A ceremonial virgin

A ceremonial virgin

I

t was November 2000. For the previous five years I’d been

living in Sydney, and when the 747 landed in Los Angeles I

felt like a deep-sea diver who hadn’t expected to see the surface

again. Drowning men are meant to see their lives flash before

them, and I knew what was going through their minds.

It had been a big year—my wife of thirteen years and I had

divorced, a business partner was never able to satisfactorily explain

where several hundred thousand dollars of mine had gone, an ex￾lover had also gone and cost me several thousand more, I’d had

an angioplasty operation for a blocked artery, and, oh yes, I’d been

the director of ceremonies, responsible for the opening and closing

ceremonies of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. Of the events of

that year, the ceremonies were the easiest to handle—at least I

knew what I was doing.

I hadn’t ever planned to become a ‘Master of Ceremonies’, as

the Australian media dubbed me. Actually, I hadn’t even known

what to do after leaving school. I was born in 1945 in Sydney and

learned to walk and swim at more or less the same time on the

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2 • Master of the Ceremonies

northern beach of Collaroy where we lived. My dad was in the

Royal Australian Air Force, which meant we moved every few

years, and so from an early age I became used to changing suburbs,

cities and even countries. This turned out to be good practice for

a life in television and event production. No one in my family had

shown any signs of wanting to be a producer, although several

generations on my mother’s side have included amateur painters,

writers and musicians. The men of the family tended towards the

law, farming and the Armed Forces.

So, when I left school and started an Arts/Law course at

Melbourne University in 1962, it was to be expected that I’d be a

lawyer one day. Fortunately, a life-long attraction to blondes led

me down a different career path. Only a few weeks after attending

my first lecture, I spotted a blonde woman studying a notice board

that called for volunteers to appear in, or work backstage on, the

Arts Revue. I followed her through the stage door and promptly

fell in love—with theatre. In a very short time I knew that backstage

was where I belonged, and over the next three years I had a great

education in theatrical production and learned a little about blondes

as well. My law studies were less noteworthy, so both the faculty

and I were delighted when I applied successfully for a job as a

studiohand at the ABC television studios in Melbourne. Before

long I had been promoted to floor manager, which meant wearing

a tie to work sometimes.

One day Sir Robert Menzies, the double-breasted British-to￾his-bootheels prime minister of the day, came to the Ripponlea

studios to record a message about Australia’s impending conversion

to decimal currency. Sir Robert was an imposing figure, from his

oversized eyebrows to his vast worsted suit, and I was a nineteen￾year-old floor manager. Muttering that the coinage should never

have been called ‘the dollar’ (he had favoured ‘the Royal’ as the

name of the new Australian currency), Sir Robert settled himself

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A ceremonial virgin • 3

into a chair on the set. Moments later he stood up and asked for

something more comfortable. ‘The chair is the most important

part of a television performance,’ he gravely told me as we waited

for a new chair to arrive. Sir Robert clearly valued his bottom

above any television interviewer—an insight into political priorities

that has stood me in good stead over the years since.

I enjoyed television even more than theatre because I received a

salary for doing my job, when I would have happily worked for

free as I had done at the Union Theatre. After a year at ABV-2,

I was selected for a director’s training course and soon I had moved

to Sydney, directing Four Corners and This Day Tonight, before

starting a sawn-off rock ’n’ roll show called GTK. In its own small

way, it was a precursor to MTV, and I was very proud of it. Many

years later the Australian rock historian Glenn A. Baker asked me

to write liner notes for a compilation album he’d put together of

performances from GTK. I wrote:

I don’t try to tell my kids what it was like in the sixties. The photos

show the heels and the flares, long hair and paisley shirts, beautiful

people and long lost friends. But there’s nothing that tells what it

felt like to be trusted with a national television program at a time

when I wasn’t meant to trust anyone over thirty. ABC’s Director

of Television in those days was Ken Watts—one of the great unsung

heroes of the ABC’s Golden Age—who told me he wanted teenage

viewers at 6.30 p.m. And that was it. No marketing studies, no

demographics, no committees. So I got on with it and the result

was GTK.

I’m still very grateful to the ABC for giving me and other

young film and television people such amazing freedom to express

ourselves. It has changed our lives—those of us who were directly

involved in the production as well as some of those who were

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4 • Master of the Ceremonies

watching. It sounds pretentious to claim a philosophy for GTK—

but in the late sixties we really believed that music was going to

change things for the better and not just for the bankers.

GTK taught me all the things I didn’t learn at kindergarten and

remains one of the best times of my life. But I couldn’t remain a

twenty-something teenager forever, so I left the ABC and spent

several years working as a freelance director in commercial

television. In 1978 I returned to the ABC on contract to produce

several variety series with Marcia Hines, Debbie Byrne and John

Farnham and found the same cameramen and sound recordists

still there. The ABC was a great place to work in those days, and

I often wonder what would have happened if I’d stayed on as a

television producer. I don’t think I would ever have ended up as

director of ceremonies for the Sydney 2000 Olympics.

Sitting on the tarmac in Los Angeles in November 2000, I

seemed to have come full circle. Eighteen years earlier I’d produced

and directed the opening and closing ceremonies for the

Commonwealth Games in Brisbane—my first major international

event. And then, as now, I’d moved back to Los Angeles to live

and work.

People with less eventful lives occasionally ask if I have any

regrets about mine, and generally I don’t. Back in 1981 when my

career as a television producer and director took a new turn, I

certainly didn’t regret it. At the time, I was in pre-production for

an airshow that was to be televised live in celebration of the Diamond

Jubilee of the Royal Australian Air Force. I’d been up in Malaysia

for a week, risking my life at the bar in the Officers’ Mess with

Jeffrey Watson (now much better known as a bon vivant and

frequent flyer on Channel Nine’s Getaway) while we shot some

video inserts for the program, and had then caught an RAAF

Hercules cargo flight for the very long haul back home to Sydney.

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A ceremonial virgin • 5

To my surprise, on landing at RAAF Richmond, a sleek

Commonwealth car was waiting for me, while Jeffrey and the crew

had to catch the ABC minibus. It turned out that they were being

taken home, while I was being taken to Sydney’s domestic airport.

Shagged out after the long flight and in need of a shower, I arrived

at the terminal to find my boss, Alan Bateman, waiting with a first￾class ticket to Brisbane and a smile like the Cheshire Cat. He’d

arranged for us to present an outline for the opening and closing

ceremonies to the Brisbane Commonwealth Games Foundation,

but assured me that he’d do all the talking. He just wanted me for

backup. While I’d been selflessly facing danger from unlabelled

wine bottles in the Officers’ Mess in Malaysia, back in Sydney Alan

had gathered together a few of the ABC’s finest minds to come up

with suggestions for the ceremonies. They too had been exposed

to some dangerous wine (Bateman is notoriously parsimonious

with expenses) and had thought of several ideas of which Alan

could only remember a flag on the field and a 3D version of Matilda

the kangaroo, the Commonwealth Games mascot. Now we had a

little less than sixty minutes’ flying time to come up with a presen￾tation. Sleepily, I asked for a piece of paper so that I could work

out roughly how many performers would be needed to form a

human rectangle containing a hollow circle about fifty metres in

diameter. Alan whipped out a calculator the size of a credit card

and we played schoolboy geometry for a while. It seemed that about

7000 schoolkids would do it.

By the time we landed in Brisbane I was asleep, but after

showering at the ABC and changing into a suit from the wardrobe

department, I was ready for the presentation. Alan told me that

four different production companies had been invited to bid for

the ceremonies, including the ABC. This was a very unusual

situation because we were never in open competition with the other

networks, let alone the independent production houses. In those

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6 • Master of the Ceremonies

days the ABC was regarded as the last bastion of gentlemanly

amateurism, so I was a little overawed at the thought of competing

against hardened professionals from the—gasp!—commercial

networks and I was still more than a little jetlagged. Fortunately,

Alan was at his best when competing, so he pushed me into the

boardroom and away we went.

Alan thanked the Foundation for the opportunity. He explained

that the ABC was the natural home for national events, and that

we had spared no effort in gathering the ABC’s full resources for

an opening and closing ceremony that all Australians would proudly

embrace. He then kicked me in the leg to ensure I was awake and

declared, ‘Ric will be producing the ceremonies, so he’ll tell you

what to expect.’

A boardroom table of faces turned to me as I rubbed my shin,

trying to remember what we’d talked about on the plane. Playing

for time, I outlined something that sounded extraordinary, while

Alan confirmed that we had done all our planning on a computer—

a very exotic piece of equipment in 1981. He told me later that a

pocket calculator was a computer, and I guess it is. When I reached

the part about presenting dancers from those nations that had big

migrant populations in Australia, I got the attention of the Chair￾man. He was a Supreme Court judge, whose international travel

schedule to jurist conventions was found later to coincide uncannily

with the world’s great horse races. As I described how a group of

Australian Aboriginal dancers would introduce the segment and

then invite dancers from many lands to join them in the centre of

the field, the chairman interrupted with a merry twinkle in his

eyes. ‘Tell you what, Ric, all you’d have to do is chuck a bottle of

sherry into the middle and watch those black buggers dance!’ He

roared laughing, while the others around the table chuckled. Alan,

ever the diplomat, turned to the woman taking notes and said

quietly, ‘Strike those comments from the minutes.’ I think the

chairman was surprised.

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A ceremonial virgin • 7

It was my first experience with one of Queensland’s ‘colourful

characters’ and I never got used to them. Eventually a Royal

Commission uncovered just how colourful some of the characters

in the Queensland Government were and put them in jail. The

chairman wasn’t one of them.

Having presented the proposal to the board, Alan and I flew

back to Sydney and expected to hear from the Foundation within

a month or two. In fact, it was almost nine months before a decision

was made. Meanwhile I had an airshow to produce, as well as the

1981 Australian Film Awards, a Rolf Harris special and an

Australian entry for the Pacific Song Contest.

The Rolf Harris special was an unexpected chance to work

with one of my favourite Australian entertainers. I went to school

in England and so I’d first seen Rolf on BBC television, where he

appeared somewhere between Bill and Ben, the Flowerpot Men and

University of the Air. He told stories that involved a squid which

he drew on the back of his hand, and he could paint extraordinarily

rapid cartoon-like images on white walls using only a large

wallpaper brush and black paint. Over the years, Rolf’s career

bounced around like the kangaroos he sang about—sentimental

favourites like ‘Six White Boomers’ and the little soldier boy who

had room on his horse for two, and music hall numbers like ‘Jake

the Peg’ and ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport’. Often derided as a

‘professional Australian’, Rolf should instead be venerated as one

of our great entertainers who made life easier for the many who

followed him. While rehearsing and taping his show at the ABC’s

Gore Hill studios one day we were talking about the differences

between Australian and North American audiences. He told me

about a concert he’d performed in Canada.

‘Mate, there was standing room only and I’d laid ’em in the

aisles. The show was huge and the applause went on for hours, so

when I got back to the dressing room I was feeling pretty good.

There was a fella waiting there for me, introduced himself as a

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