Exceptionally Uncaught

Ah, Australia Day. How can you describe it to someone from another country? It's the one day of the year where we all openly say how much we love our country, cover ourselves in the flag and do all that stuff we normally pay the Americans out for doing all the time. Except since it's Australia, while we're doing it, we do it all as if we're actually taking the piss.

"Oh, check out my Australian flag thongs! Oz as mate!"

Wow I love my country - even on the one day when you're allowed to care, you can't care too much.

So anyway, we went to the Australia Day Live! Concert on Australia Day eve. The line up was impressive (that's "impressive" with a fair amount of scorn by the way). Actually that's a little unfair. There was some decent performances - Bob Downe was great at hamming it up as usual (surly I'm not the only one who keeps thinking he's really Lorne from Angel?); Thirsty Merc weren't too bad; Joel What's-His-Name and the Modern Day Poets were clearly very talented and even though beatboxing isn't really my thing, were pretty fun to watch; Lior was as good as I expected.

I felt a bit sorry for the guy who was hosting (who's name I cannot remember). He'd done all the talking since about 5pm, and then just as it gets to 8:30pm when the television coverage was meant to start, Gretel Killeen takes over. But it wasn't like she was then hosting. No, this guy still had to deal with the audience whenever there was an ad break (which was quite often). So basically he did 6 hours of work, but wouldn't have even got a second of TV time (oh, and it's not like Gretel cared about talking to the crowd when she wasn't on air - the one time he tried to call her up she couldn't get away fast enough). Seriously, it's time to go Gretel...

I do have two favourite moments from the night though. The first was just after Andrew G did a spot from the top of a cheery picker hanging over the crowd. After the TV had finished with him, I saw him turn around, pull out his own camera and take a couple of shots. I'm always a sucker for those moments when you realise "famous people" do actually get excited by the cool stuff they get to do.

My other favourite moment was the grand finale. We got to hear Russell Crowe's band "perform" (much like the "impressive" from before, take the "perform" with a mountain of salt). As the title of this post says, they were terrible. Well, that's not quite true - the band seemed alright, but Russell's singing was something to behold. I cheered every time he had a "rock hair" moment (well, I did for a while, but there were so many I got bored). Karina's comment was "do you think he can hear the piano player?". The whole thing really did seem like he was starring in a movie about a rock star, and this was the bit at the end where you finally get to see them perform - the actor's bad, but you can imagine that the character is good. Unfortunately it wasn't a movie.

But still, there are many ordinary to terrible bands out there. And I'm certain that if any of them had the money and influence to position themselves like Russell Crowe's band, they all would.