Hey! What Happened to My Hey Day?
Let’s face it, there are pros and cons to ‘getting the band back together’. As a positive, it would be kind of cool to see Spandau Ballet in concert. And The Blues Brothers – which minted the actual phrase ‘We’re getting the band back together’ – is a bona fide classic that makes reuniting a pack of superannuated musos look like A Very Good Idea and the greatest romp since Republican jelly-wrestling night at the Playboy Mansion.
And for the negative – tipping the scales, like the inestimable Mikey Robins before his lapband surgery – we have Hey Hey It’s Saturday.
I’ve not wanted to whinge about the reformation of Hey Hey. Too obvious. It’s such a large, plump, fatuous target, with ‘Daryl Somers’ written all over it in zany, multi-coloured eighties font, and ‘kick me’ taped to its back. But then I watched it, and it’s been bugging me ever since, like a toddler in the confectionary aisle.
There’s something very, very wrong with this show, and it’s not, as you might be expecting, the conveyor belt of innuendo larded with fat, fat chick, and blonde jokes. Let’s face it, if I arced up every time women were patronised, my pancreas would explode. It’s the sense of stasis. The show is paralysing; I had to keep reminding myself to breathe.
Watching a current episode of Hey Hey is identical to watching it before the show went off air in 1999. The gang, reunited, is making exactly the same stupid jokes, cutting the same hijinking japes, in exactly the same stupid segments, as before. It’s beyond bizarre, it’s the televisual equivalent to The Picture of Dorian Gray, where Daryl, John, Wilbur and Red get older and older, but their mental age (which I’d guestimate to be around seventeen) stays supernaturally suspended in time, like a fly caught in aspic. Meanwhile, the interchangeable cute female sidekicks are eerily stuck in their mid-twenties. Watching this show gave me the screaming creeps.
I’m not being ageist here. I’m in no position to be bucking against mid-career creatives being given a gig. Jobs for anyone over thirty in Australian television are as thin on the ground as new sponsors for Melbourne Storm. Good for them. I just think there should be a better reason for a band or group to reform than ‘We’re out of ideas/money’.
Duplicating exactly what you did ten, or twenty, years ago is a dangerous indulgence open only to musicians and, occasionally, entertainers. Writers don’t get to reprise their hit novel – they have to sit on their bony, underfed bottoms and write another one. Artists can’t re-release that sell-out exhibition from 1982. Actors don’t reprise the roles that made them famous, unless they’re allowed to play their own mother in the prequel.
This is mostly a good thing; artists are like sharks, they keep moving or die. It must be very tempting to reform and play your hits – when Sting and The Police toured recently they grossed about $340 million – but getting the band back together is often a creative cul-de-sac. It’s about looking backwards and attempting to reanimate something that is long gone, which may explain the ‘undead’ air of many of these reunions.
There’s certainly a zombie whiff to Hey Hey. Everyone hitting the marks that they remember from when the show was killed off, no fresh ideas, lumbering jokes, the only concession to time passing being that Livinia Nixon is reading her interjections from a laptop.
It is unfortunate for Hey Hey that it has been exhumed at a time when the most popular shows – MasterChef, So You Think You Can Dance, The Biggest Loser – are all transformative in nature, showcasing personal journeys and the spectrum of emotions from agony to joy. Unless ‘whacky’ counts, there hasn’t been an authentic emotion on Hey Hey since 1976, and it dates the show more profoundly than its blithe reaction to the ‘Jackson Jive’ debacle.
In their Hey Heyday, Daryl Somers & Co ruled the small screen. It’s as disturbing as blackface to see them trotting out the precise same schtick.
This piece originally appeared in ‘The Big Issue’.
Fiona Scott-Norman is a Melbourne-based writer and broadcaster. Her book, ‘50 Reasons to Quit/Keep Smoking’, is published by Affirm Press. Visit her website.
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