craig-parker.net > Stage & Screen > Public Appearances > Comedy Debates > Celebrity Comic Debate 2000 Transcript
Celebrity Comic Debate 2000 - Craig Parker "The End of the Golden Weather"
Thanks to Skybly for taking the time to type all this out!
John Hawkespy: Craig has the kind of confidence that comes with youth - knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn. Like self-plagiarism, it's a wonderful gift. Ladies and Gentlemen, Craig Parker.
Craig: Thank you John. The shoes are by Gucci.
Linda: the hair is by (?)
Craig: Mr Hawkesby, Mr Porter, Ms Bridgewater... We are the fallen, the heroes of legends past, the gods forgotten on Olympus. As Shakespeare once said, "our revels now are ended". Or perhaps that was Paul Holmes... eh...
(?): It's "revel", "revel".
Craig: We have seen the end of the golden weather. We slouch before you - has-beens. Now you may feel pity, you may feel disgust, but know this: A has-been by its very definition is someone who once was. And what a glorious, golden was we were! We bestrode the world - well, at least the two main islands and toe-touching Stewart islet. Our summer was long, the weather and tans golden. This land was our (?). We played on burning sands beneath cloudless skies, tepid waters lapped at our worshipped feet. Like the gulls above our ratings soared, our fame soared, and our paychecks soared. Our bachos became condos, our dinghys superyachts, and our names household. Now, to look at us now, you may find this hard to believe - we three, well-weathered and saggy-ended men, in mourning for our lives...
John Hawkespy: Speak for yourself there, Craig - I send my bottom to the gym every day, I do!
Craig: But once we were like Prometheus, bringing golden light into your sad little humdrum lives. Dear storm-battered Gary, dear rambling, prematurely blonde Gary, the gold lame suits may have gone the way of all things television, but be assured even naked he would still stand lambent with his former glories. This broken man was once a virile young thing. Kerouc-esque on the road and picking up chicks, a raconteur before most people in this country knew what it meant, and his was an indian summer - spanning decades. At an age when most men were taking up lawn balls and calling "Talkback", Gary was there still, snorting Viagra. Gary, a peripatetic puck, wowing rotarians and seducing their daughters.
Dear, dear Michael. New Zealand's own Gary Coleman. So faded now is his glory that he's resorted to hijacking tour groups, palming them off as his own fanclub. But this was not always the way. Once, this diminutive derelict you see before you was loved by millions, his picture above the bed of countless teenage girls and the odd gladiator-movie-loving boy. He was Olivierand Danny Kayerolled into one, (which they often did), on the stage he could effortlessly move from shakespearian tragedy to slapstick comedy, and often on the same night. Star of the historical drama "Hercules, The Legendary Journeys", his was the acting part of an acting duo. Now granted, towards the end, Michael's swashbuckling Iolaus buckled more than he swashed, but in his day he was a god. Or was it a demi-god? Or maybe just a friend of a demi-god. But he was magnificient with it.
And myself. I was a star. No, dammit - a social working supernova. And how I burned, like Ruatoria on a Saturday night. Oh, the sweet, sweet life of a soap star, ablaze with a burning that even penicillin couldn't touch. People gathered around, warming their hands - and other bits - around my hearth. Every weeknight the nation tuned in for my rakish good looks, my devastating charm and my frightening charisma. *sighs* Mmm. Magazines clamoured for myimage, teenagers worshipped my signature like a holy relic. I was Lourdes, and how the faithful came to dip in me, washing away their pain and standing before me moist. I had the earning power of Rodney Dean, and the pulling power of Dover Samuels.
But - I speak of lives in past tense. The world has moved on. Today, we are bones unearthed by paleontologists, to be gawked at by school children, crumbling temples of former times. But inside our petrified bones and eroded stone, the memory of glory remains. Our greatness recorded forever on celluloid and etched in the hearts and minds of generations, and through the magic of re-runs, we will endure.
Even our magnificient MC, Mr John Hawkesby, once the most trusted man on television, reminded every night at six pm that his own golden weather has ended, but what comfort he must draw from the golden glow of his now enumerous gold cards. A perfect example of the end of the golden handshake. But we do not ask for sympathy, we do not need your pity, for we hold summer within. The weather may have turned, but we are warmed by one thing hotter than the summer sun: smugness. The smugness that we once were. At the end of the golden weather, a vintner settles back from his toil of tending and harvesting the vines, to uncork the new vintage --- which you're enjoying right, there.
John Hawkespy: Can I have the speech when you're finished with it, Craig?
Craig: We are that fine vintage - slightly fuller body than last year, perhaps, but mature to perfection and rich to the taste - or, in John's case, just plain rich. We are a Mouton Rothchild, whereas the opposition - mutton dressed as lamb. They claim to have not reached the end of the golden weather - well of course! For you cannot end something you have never begun. See, no glorious summer for these three - just the hollow emptiness of autumn, crumpled, turning brown and drying out. Their darling buds of May withered by the cold winds of July. They will pass as all things do, leaving no great monument, no great achievements, and in that passing what comfort will they draw? It is they who deserve your sympathy, your pity. These hollow women who have never tasted the salty tang of a summer's day.
Michele: In a spooky way we have
Craig: Dear Michele, a very special woman, a Woolworth's "Friday Special" woman, cheap at $9.95, our own Zsa Zsa Gabor, Rose Portius Hancockor Elizabeth Taylor, the much married Michele brazenly claims not to have reached the end of the golden weather, but consider this: taking Mason's "golden weather" to be a metaphor for youth, and given Michele's inappropiate relationship with an extremely youthful man, we must assume that she's at least seen his end, if not reached for it.
And Linda, the poor channel's Jane Young - well, a poor channel now that John's finished with them - former political editor who somehow managed always to get the story, but you have to ask yourself: why is it that now she's left the beehive, they're ripping up the carpet? Eventually, her foul mouth got her into trouble. Blasphemy too much for the public, she was removed from public broadcasting and placed in the safer arena of the printed word. So today, perhaps because of her journalistic acumen, or more likely having her name on the opposite page to former editor Lindy Dawson on ACP's Rolodex, she edits Grace magazine. A woman who separates the wheat from the chaffand prints the chaff.
And finally Pam. How often she must hear that - "finally Pam". In the ratings, at award shows, and on the party list. But a battler, bravely weathering the storm - when radio didn't work for her, she took to politics, and when she couldn't give a stuff about that anymore, she became a pizza salesperson. And when that didn't work either, when others would try desperately to cling to what shred of dignity they have left, she was not too proud to go crawling back to the wireless. Bless her.
All three struggling on bravely, in the hope that maybe, one day, they will become someone, that they may know what it is to be great as we once knew. Our summer is over. With all these lingering memories of sandy pockets and faded photographs, their's has never come. Now, if I seem unkind, this is not my intention. My wish for them is to know the joy of the golden weather, to soar as we once soared, but though I wish this for them, I doubt it shall be. To embrace fully this perfect season, one needs to prepare in spring. And for these dear women, these never-were's, I fear that winter comes.
I stand by the porch, the broom is almost bare of flowers, and as I watch, a jaundiced bloom flatters off the bush, and sustained by the light breeze charts a hazy course before coming to rest beside me. I pick it up and somehow I know, as I finger the jaded petals, that summer is quite at an end. Thank you.