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Juice, December, 1995
Tim Ferguson has made being hyper an
artform on 'Don't Forget Your Toothbrush.' Chris
Johnston finds out how.
It's not that i've got anything against
dancing. Quite the opposite actually, but it's
never been quite like this before - in the front
row of the charged Melbourne studio aurdience for
Don't Forget Your Toothbrush.
We're doing the Chicken Dance, me and the girls
in the front row, really havin' it. Then the
Locomotion, and finally a slow, cumbersone sway to
a suitably crap Don Lane number. In between we
wave smiley faces in the air - big white cardboard
circles with texta smileys attached to a wooden
ruler, nothing fancy - while shouting and
whooping. It's all rather undiginified but
certainly excellent fun. (The next morning the
phone rings and it's a long lost pal who was
passing through Sydney and chanced upon the sad
spectacle: "Saw you dancing on the telly," he
says. "What's up with that?")
The real Dancing Homer, however, is the host of
this unbelievably expensive live extravaganza, Tim
Ferguson. For him, Toothbrush is the
ultimate prize. He gets to sing (the Tom
Jones/Elvis/Sinatra/Don Lane axis), wear
unfeasibly garish suits (this night's was classed
as "banana"), sit on audience members (I'm really
big with middle-aged women, let me tell you..."),
say dumb game show things ("Here's our band,
aren't they grand...") and, of course, dance.
The Ferg-Dance is an updated legacy of his days
in irreverent comic trio the Doug Anthony All
Stars, where he was the pretty one, the show-off
with no morals. It's a little like pretending to
be an ostrich: the important factors are to have
your arse high in the air and to spank it while
hopping, perhaps backwards, and smiling. It's
quite a thing, and it has probably never been done
on national televison before.
"You're the first person to comment on my
dancing," Ferguson says later. "Thank you very
much."
The DAAS days are now long gone for the
31-year-old Ferguson. Since the group's demise
he'd been doing spots for Channel Seven on The
Times and starring as dorky Grant in Funky
Squad before Nine snapped him up and gave him
Don't Forget Your Toothbrush, his own wet
dream of a eekly game show. The ratings suggest as
many people watch it on Tuesday nights as Ten's
Melrose Place but, to Nine's annoyance, nowhere
near as many as Blue "Rinse" Heelers on
Seven.
Toothbrush is based on a British formula
(which worked spectacularly well for one season
and then flopped) and revolves around sacrificing
something you love for money. In one show a woman
allowed her teddy bear to be drowned in Sydney
Harbour for $2000. It also revolves around pranks
- a man on a crane throwing pizzas around, couples
wearing each other's clothes. On my night in the
main prize was a trip to Hong Kong and the booby
prize a trip to Hanging Rock.
While it officially marks Ferguson's entry into
the TV mainstream, the show also puts him in the
same curious televison netherworld as Andrew
Denton, whose wit and intelligence Ferguson much
admires and even takes after. Like, what next? Is
our conservative TV set-up really ready for the
new breed? And what will they want to do now they
have a foot in the door? Both hosts are driven by
a desire to simply get away with it on tv TV, to
infiltrate and possibly subvert the drug of the
nation from within. Where either of them will end
up is anyone's guess, but we should hope it will
at least be somewhere. The thing is that
Toothbrush whether it lasts or not, feels
eerily and prematurely perfect for Ferguson with
it's high camp, tongue-in-cheek prime time
buffoonery. He makes it appear like no one else
could pull it off.
"I love the inanity of it," he says. "There's a
lot to be said for inanity. It's underestimated
far too much. People love it. The most stupid
things work far better than the wittiest
observations."
The traditional aspects of the show - the big
band, the singing host, the pretty girl - are
exactly what turn Ferguson on. And the political
incorrectness of it. He loves to tip that whole
movement on its head. The very mention of it is
the cue for him to begin one of his spectacular
rants.
"I love embracing it," he says of the throwback
attitude. "Boots and all. 'Please can we see a
little bit more leg this week, Miss Wendy?' I love
the cheek of that. It's politically incorrect. It
is not possible. Where's the surprise? Where's the
shock?"
He posits a hypothetical. "'Okay, here we have
an all-women's circus troupe who'll be reading
from Lenin's early work, without the anti-Smitism.
They'll also be embracing the works of Trotsky
except for his views on women and polygamy.' It's
not going to work, is it? Political correctness,
the way it has been defined by two girls in a
women's room at ANU [the Canberra University where
DAAS formed] has not been embraced by society at
all. It's stupid. It doesn't make any sense. It's
irrelevent to people's lives. It's an inflexible
doctrine that is about to expire. In ten years,
political correctness will not exist. Full stop.
Sorry."
Tim Ferguson is contracted to Channel Nine now,
which means they'll use him wherever they can. He
will probably have his way and continue as he
began - by getting away with it, but this time on
the omnipresent Kerry Packer-fied arbiter of our
TV tastes.
This is, after all, the chap who once ran for
parliament in the snooty Melbourne seat of
Kooyong, against sitting Liberal Andrew Peacok,
and got the last laugh when he was put on the
cover of The Bulletin. His heroes, by the
way, include fellow Nine newcomer and former
Senator Graeme Richardson, Graeme Kennedy, and
Starsky and Hutch. Ferguson claims that he doesn't
mind what he does for the network as long as he
can help write it and dance a lot. These are
reasons enough to stay alert.
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