The producers are calling it "the show the Thetare Royal didn't want you to see". After being rejected by Hobart's most historic theatre, Simon Bryce and Andrew Guild have found a new venue for their show, Busting Out, and a planned Tasmanian tour will go ahead next year. It will run at the Derwent Entertainment Centre, in "lyric mode", on June 11, along with dates in Launceston, Burnie and Devonport. Bryce said in a media statement: “I’ve taken it as a personal challenge to get this production to Tasmania. Why should a show that’s been seen by over 230,000 people in over 50 other theatres around Australia and New Zealand, miss out on coming to Tasmania?” You can read more about the saga and the show, starring Emma Powell and Bev Killick, here and here.

November 7, 2009: Joe Maross, 86, US stage, TV and film actor. He featured in many series including The Rockford Files, Perry Mason, The Twilight Zone and Murder She Wrote.
Links: Variety

Tim Ross, one half of Sydney's Merrick and Rosso radio double act, has decided not to re-sign with Nova. Acccording to the Daily Telegraph, he will leave the station next month, throwing into doubt the future of the Nova breakfast show he co-hosts with Merrick Watts and former Home and Away star Kate Ritchie. Although they are beaten in the commercial FM ratings by the Kyle and Jackie O Show on 2Day, Merrick and Rosso have been solid longtime performers for Nova, and the adition of Ritchie a couple of years ago is seen in industry circles as having merely extended an act that was approaching its due-by date. Ritchie is also expected to leave the station. As I have noted on many occasions, the entire radio landscape is changing. With Nova's Sydney sister station Vega opting for an almost music-only breakfast format, and with ad revenue in decline, anything could happen. Two things are certain: whoever replaces them will receive less money, and they will not pull the same audience, at least not initially. As Brisbane's B105 discovered a few years ago, building a new show takes a long time. Of course, the decision does give Nova something of an advantage in the next cycle, because it'll have probably bedded-in a new show by the time Kyle Sandilands leaves 2Day (which, despite his recent ratings surge, will be relatively soon.) When he does go, Sandilands will be the last of the megabuck radio stars in Australia as broadcasters look to the bottom line and discover that winning isn't everything when it comes to running a profitable business.

.. or should that be shocker? After encouragement from his colleague Kelly Higgins-Devine, 612ABC's Spencer Howson has made of video of himself singing his newly penned Christmas song. Listeners to the breakfast show (on which I'm a regular guest) have been invited to do better:

This has all the makings of a so-bad-it's-good cult favourite; spread the word and let's see if we can make it a YouTube hit.

I regularly see the Brisbane City Sights bus rumbling through Fortitude Valley, and it's always empty. To be fair, maybe it's not yet in service when I see it. But I still can't help wondering exactly what Brisbane's sights are. Many of our oldest buildings have been knocked down, so there's certainly not a lot of historic interest. I snapped this picture when the bus went past the other day and I gather from the illustrations that the tour includes such highlights as City Hall and King George Square, the Old Windmill (fair enough from an historic viewpoint, but hardly spectacular), the casino, Suncorp Stadium (aka Lang Park), the "beach" at South Bank Parklands and the imitation Eiffel Tour in Park Road, Milton. I hope they don't charge too much.

Spotted in the Queen St Mall in Brisbane on the weekend.

November 7, 2009: Vic Davies, 55, Australian radio announcer, of lung cancer. With Mal Lees, he formed the popular duo "Club Veg" for Sydney stations 2SM and Triple M.
Links: news.com.au

Further evidence today that Queensland Rail isn't at all about the customers, and nobody in any authority there ever looks at the usefulness (or otherwise) of the service from a passenger's perspective. When I got off the train at Central today, I alighted near the barriers leading to the subway under Anzac Square. So I swiped my GoCard and proceded down the stairs -- to find the exit locked. A QR staffer told me the exits were always closed on weekends. Why then, I asked, were the barriers still operating? She explained that there was a sign above the exit -- but, of course, from the angle I approached that could only be seen once someone had gone through the barriers and started to go down the stairs. Once outside on to the concourse, I noticed one of the big escalators was being maintained but the down escalator was still functioning. People coming up had to use the stairs. On the way back, I asked the repair guy if it would make more sense to have the one operating escalator going up, since it's easier to walk down stairs then up them. "Not our decision, mate," he replied. "It's up to QR."

A CITY ICON TURNS 80

On 8 November 2009, the Regent Theatre will celebrate 80 years of continuous use as an entertainment venue in Brisbane.
This is a record of unmatched service to the community, providing not only films but also live entertainment and music. Until QPAC was opened, the Regent, being larger than Her Majesty’s, served Brisbane as the premier theatre and was the largest proscenium theatre ever built in this city. Its prestige and opulence was unmatched, with almost unbelievable decor and luxurious surroundings inside.
The Regent was the first public building to have air conditioning in Brisbane and the first theatre in Australia to have aisle lighting. It had the biggest illuminated theatre sign in Australia at the time. It s proscenium was also the widest for a picture palace in Australia. It was also the last great picture palace built in Australia, opening just a week before the stock market crash in 1929 and was generally regarded as the best Regent that Hoyts built.It was designed by two Brisbane-born architects, Richard Gailey Jr and Charles Hollinshed. A J Dickenson built the auditorium part and J & E L Rees built the Regent building off Queen Street. Both were local builders. Materials used in its construction included fibrous plaster and stucco mouldings, gold leaf, marble, bronze light fittings, Belgian carpet, velvet curtains, cut glass mirrors etc.
The magnificent interior was all locally made and a credit to Brisbane tradesmen and interstate specialists who built it. What remains is an incredible snapshot of 1920s building techniques and materials used to create these splendid “cathedrals of the motion picture”. Even the Elizabeth Street rear façade is a rare example of 1920s-era commercial building brickwork still remaining today.

read more

Brisbane Radio 4BC will axe its Sports Today program, hosted by Peter Psaltis and Billy J. Snith, and replace it with a new 6-8pm program hosted by Psaltis and Ian Maurice. According to a staff memo from station manager David McDonald, the new show "will have a much broader focus on sports and recreational activities" (maybe they were listening when I told afternoon host Peter Dick earlier this year that BC should have an arts and entertainment program as well as its sports show!). Walter Williams will replace Maurice in the 8pm to midnight slot next year. Sports Today will continue over the Christmas holidays with Rupert McCall and Rick Mitchell in the chair before the changes take effect in the new year. Smith will remain with the station as a fill-in announcer.

How can Brisbane commuters get a better deal from Queensland Rail? Well, how about it if everybody involved in QR management, from Transport Minister Rachel Nolan down, is forced to use only public transport for at least a month? Perhaps some enterprising media outlet can escort Ms Nolan and senior QR managers on a regular commuter train and let them hear what the passengers are saying. I'd wager that most QR and Transport bigwigs haven't caught a regular rail or bus service in years. Take away their taxpayer-funded cars and see how they fare!

Surely, the lack of on-time performance is the problem.
PS:The story goes on to say that average on-time performance is 92.5 per cent. Well, I'd like to know how that is calculated. Every commuter I know has had to endure the cancellation of trains on a regular basis. Now, by my reckoning, that's an on-time performance of 0.0 per cent for those services, making it extremely difficult to get an average in the 90s. I'd certainly like to see separate figures for peak-hour services.

This just arrived in my Hotmail inbox:

This Email is from Hotmail Customer Care and we are sending it to every Hotmail Email User Accounts Owner for safety. we are having congestions due to the anonymous registration of Hotmail accounts so we are shutting down some Hotmail accounts and your account was among those to be deleted...

It's a phishing scam, of course -- and a very crude one -- but how come Hotmail can't identify it as such and put it into the junk mail folder? Answer please, Microsoft?

Clubs and pubs in Fortitude Valley -- the inncercity Brisbane suburb where I live -- are resisting a Police Union suggestion that they close early in a bid to curb late-night and early-morning violence. How about the licensees pitch in some of the money they make from the extended opening hours to pay for an increased police presence, and see how that flies?

ABC managing director Mark Scott has issued guidelines for the use of social media such as Twitter by ABC staff and contractors. The policy's four enforceable standards are:

1. Do not mix the professional and the personal in ways likely to bring the ABC into disrepute. 2. Do not undermine your effectiveness at work. 3. Do not imply ABC endorsement of your personal views. 4. Do not disclose confidential information obtained through work.

Seems sensible enough to me.
Update: The Australian has a report on Scott's digital strategy, as revealed at the Media140 conference, here.

It's either a case of bad luck, or something is seriously wrong with the Brisbane suburban rail system. In the past few days, there have been serious disruptions on the Gold Coast, Cleveland and Nambour lines, and today it's the Ferny Grove line. Time, I think, for some enterprising journalist to make some freedom of information requests about maintenance and other issues at Queensland Rail, and to put some hard questions to Premier Anna Bligh and Transport Minister Rachel Nolan, who want to charge us more to use a system that is often, to use the technical term, stuffed. With a growing population, of which we are constantly reminded, it can only get worse.

As I've said on this blog, and on radio, I am open to paying for online news, if what's on offer is appealing to me. However, most of the websites I currently visit have a long way to go before the deliver something I'd pay for. I definitely will not pay to see picture galleries of Jennifer Hawkins or Megan Fox. Apart from the actual content, I hope the people who are presumably creating the paid-for offering for the big publishers have a close look at the navigation systems of their sites. If I'm going to pay for content, I want to be able to find it quickly. Yesterday, I took my virtual protractor and slide rule to couriermail.com.au, which has one of the most confusing menu systems I've ever encountered. If my counting skills are functioning properly, the menu system offers up 13 main categories, with 12 extras underneath. With the dropdowns, there's a total of 79 options for the confused reader to try to work their way through in an attempt to find the content they want. Now that's just crazy. You'd be lucky to get 79 pages of news in the average daily paper, let alone 79 different categories. One of the things that's great about newspapers is that people know how to navigate their way around them: news up the front, features, opinion and business in the middle, and sport at the back. The website should be just as intuitive, and some streamlining is urgently needed.
PS: By way of comparision, the UK Digital Publisher of the Year winner, telegraph.co.uk has 14 main menu items plus changing "hot topics" links.

I've just received an email from the folks behind news aggregator Wotnews inviting me to trial a news service called Team Stream. It promises a "better way for companies to read the news" and says, after the free trial finishes, it will cost "less than $1 / user / day with discounts for larger networks". How much of this will go to the content creators, I wonder.

November 3, 209: Claude Levi-Strauss, 100, French anthropologist, intellectual and author whose books included Tristes Tropiques, The Savage Mind and The Raw and the Cooked.
Links: BBC

According to Yoko Ono, who should know, Apple Corps (not Apple Computer) and EMI wil release a limited-edition apple-shaped USB that will include all the tracks from The Beatles' stereo albums. Only 30,000 will be available. The world still awaits the MP3 release of that wonderful back catalogue. More here.