Lawn Bowls, Reality Check, Anna Calvi...

1. BOWLS WITH KNOWLES

At a training course for young journalists recently, the facilitator announced that I had “more than 30 years experience in journalism and the media.”
I felt like The Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey, minus the wrinkles, thanks to my new Botox regime.
Paranoia set in. I was convinced these bright young things were staring at me in barely disguised incredulity that I was not hunched forward as pools of dribble trickled from my mouth, or that I was able to walk without the aid of a stick.
One smartarse even asked if “there was TV back then?” Making a mental note to reduce Mr. Smartarse to a laughing stock and place shards of glass on his chair during the lunch break, I began my little introduction, after being wheeled to the podium, oxygen tank in tow.
I put on a brave, neutral face. I didn’t snarl at them or even frown, again thanks to the Botox, which I’m starting to think I maybe overdoing.
“Well firstly, I didn’t start out as a television journalist,” I began. “And secondly, I am 48 not 100.” Then a wave of nostalgia swept over me, or perhaps I just lost my train of thought.

CUE: Back-in-time dream sequence, scary music, clumsy dissolve segue; Voiceover: ONE HUNDRED, One hundred, a hundred….

Wollongong, Australia, 1981
Not many people reach 100, but Beryl Cheadle was among them. She was the first person I interviewed for the first story I ever wrote on my first day as an 18-year-old cadet reporter on my hometown newspaper, the Illawarra Mercury.
It was an easy assignment, the chief of staff assured me. Ask her a few questions, get a photo of her in a party hat, preferably holding a balloon, and that would be that. Beryl was as bright as a button and a barrel of laughs, the nursing home staff had assured him.
Wrong.
Beryl was a foulmouthed, demented old bag.
When I wished her happy birthday she spat a mouthful of cake all over my face, before launching into a tirade about what a no-hoper of a son I had turned out to be, how I had made nothing of my life and how I had left her to rot in this “stinking shithole.” Evidently she had mistaken me for one of her offspring who, understandably, never visited her.
Beryl’s centenary celebrations culminated with her scowling at the photographer, letting out a loud fart, soiling her nightgown and ripping her party hats to shreds while yelling at us to "Piss off." It wasn’t an auspicious start to my career but not quite as bad as having to interview a ventriloquist's doll when the visiting ventriloquist himself refused to speak the following week.
Beryl ended up as 2 lines below a tiny photo on page 7, I ended up on the sports desk.
It was compulsory for all cadets to spend a year covering sport back in those horse and cart days. Most of them excelled at it, turning out rip-snorting reports regaling readers about rugby matches, golf tournaments and fishing contests. I was the exception.
While I was a reasonable volleyball and tennis player at school, sport did not interest me in the slightest, nor did I know the slightest thing about it. I couldn’t tell a quarterback from a lock-forward, a birdie from an eagle and I wouldn’t have know a flathead if one had jumped up and bitten me on the ass.
I was so bad, they ended up consigning me to purgatory by putting me on the lawn bowls round.
Lawn bowls, for those of you not familiar with it is “a lawn game in which the objective is to roll slightly asymmetric balls so that they stop close to a smaller ball called a jack,” according to Wikipedia. It is played outdoors on a bowling green, which in Australia are located behind booze-selling bowling clubs. The average age of the typical lawn bowler in 1981 was 107, or so it seemed to me.
But my grandfather had been a champion bowler, so I was familiar with the environment, which usually involved beer and slot machines inside the clubhouse, and I managed to turn in copy that wasn’t a total disaster.
In fact, after a few weeks the desk gave me my own column.
It was called – wait for it – “Lawn Bowls with Craig Knowles” and featured a picture byline of my still pimply face next to an image of a bowls ball whipped up by the art department. My column was published every Monday. It was opposite “Tennis with Dennis” and next to “Fishing with Phil.” I swear I am not making this up. The Mercury, or Mockery as it was often called, loved these little rhyming humiliations.
To this day, I still don’t know the first thing about lawn bowls, I could never grasp the concept or see the point of it. But it did teach me two golden rules of journalism: 1) When in doubt, bullshit your way through things, and 2) everyone, even lawn bowlers, have a story, you just have to ask.
After a while, my initial horror at the embarrassing column, for which I was mercilessly ridiculed, and dismay at covering this ridiculous sport began to dissipate.
Because of my inability to come to terms with the technical side of things, I went for the feature stories.
Among others, I found and wrote about amputee bowlers, blind bowlers and a woman bowling club president who celebrated her 80th birthday by parachuting from a plane onto a bowling green.
She actually missed her mark by miles and had to be disentangled from a tree by the fire brigade, sustaining serious injuries and suggestions she may never walk again.
But the sub-editors cut that bit out and my “Flo’s Flop --Parachute Plunge a Fiasco” ended up as “Flying Flo an Inspiration at 80!” You gotta love tabloids.
Astonishingly, after a few months I began to build up a following. In fact I was becoming a ‘personality’ in the Greater Illawarra lawn bowls community, my first brush with fame!
People wrote in to commend some of my stories, or to point out the 45 glaring errors in my match reports.
I was invited to VIP events, emceed weekly meat raffles, guest judged ballroom dancing contests at various bowling clubs and even took part in the 1981 annual Illawarra “Celebrity Bowls Match.” I have it on good authority that I still hold the record for the worst ever performance.
My year on the bowling greens, or at least looking out at them from my bar stool, culminated in winning the Cadet Journalist of the Year Award for a story I’d written on a Vietnam vet who had taken up bowls to help overcome post traumatic shock then became an outspoken advocate of Asian migration, urging Australia to take more refugees, especially victims of the Indo-China Wars, an admirable and brave thing to do in the racist steel town that was Wollongong in the early 1980s.
I felt a bit of a fraud in accepting the award. (Another recurring journalist's trait).
I’d stumbled into journalism by accident. During my final year of high school, with absolutely no idea of what I wanted to do with my life --my preferred choices for work experience – where you went and worked at a ‘real’ place for a week –- swimming pool lifeguard, frock salon assistant or bartender, fell through. The first two had been snapped up early, the third was a non-starter because at that stage I was 17 and not legally entitled to enter a drinking establishment. So I was relegated to the Mercury as a last resort and was completely indifferent about it.
But as soon as I walked into the smoke-filled newsroom, saw the mayhem, heard the clatter of typewriters, abuse and expletives being hurled from the tele-printer to the subs desk, met the eccentric, outrageous, borderline personality disorder, substance abusing hacks and inhaled the post-lunch, or rather pub break alcohol fumes that seemed to permeate from every pore of every reporter, my life changed in an instant.
These were my people. I knew I had found my place. So after finishing school, I spent about three months partying before hounding the editor until he gave me a cadetship.
Bowls gave way to triple homicides, drowning deaths and level train crossing accidents as I graduated from the sports desk to police rounds and general reporting. You were thrown in at the deep end in those days. It was old school, your copy would be torn up, editors would yell, bellow and bang on and on at you until you got it right. And eventually you did. The skills I learned in those four years gave me the grounding I needed to work all over the world, which I have done, eventually moving from print into radio and TV.
And to think, I owe it all to lawn bowls.
I didn’t share all this with the young journalists. These bouts of nostalgia are occurring more frequently of late. Face it, I do have decades of experience and I am old, almost old enough to take up lawn bowls myself, though people say I don’t look my age. This may well change when my complimentary Botox coupons run out.

2. REALITY CHECK

I am officially over my obsession with reality TV. Hooray, you say.
It wasn’t that I finally got bored with the falsity, the foolish fame-whore contestants or my own inability to become one of them and get on a show despite 54 auditions in 4 years. It was Bangladesh that did it. Yes Bangladesh.
I arrived home a month ago after shooting a film about malnutrition in one of the poorest nations on earth, dumped my bag, switched on the telly and up came The Biggest Loser.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I despise fat people -- except on airplanes, trains, in cinemas and on dance floors -- it just felt like I’d been catapulted into a parallel universe.
From having just interviewed people who were lucky to scrape together a plate of rice a day, and witnessing heartbreaking scenes of pot-bellied children on the brink of death, here I was staring at 420 pound Americans in pink polyester pullovers “trying to get their lives back” and “change their eating habits” which apparently had involved 78,345 McNuggets, 96 pizzas and five buckets of ice cream a day until they managed to get on the show.
I used to weep at their breakdowns, cheer them on, shed tears of happiness when they broke the 100-pound barrier. I cried and cried and cried watching that show, which in hindsight I think may have been my outlet for Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome.
Now I stared at these morbidly obese morons and actually started hurling abuse at my TV.
“Send them all to Bangladesh for a month, that’ll sort them out,” I shrieked, sounding alarmingly like my father (I’m often a bit odd when I return from shoots). “None of this luxury Malibu ranch bullshit. If you don’t want to end up weighing 743 pounds then don’t eat 754 donuts for breakfast for fuck sake. “ I wanted to throttle them.
To be fair, I still like The Amazing Race and Top Chef, but traveling to some of the poorest parts of Asia seems to have put things in perspective, given me a reality check so to speak.
Then I got to thinking, and others have helped with this including my fabulous friend MP Nunan in New York, that maybe there’s a market for more humorous, Asian-based reality shows that satirize all this U.S. nonsense.

In fact, I might even pitch them to funders. Picture these:

This week on Reality Check Asia Channel….

--Fatima and Faheeda come to blows as a sari sale turns ugly on the Real Housewives of Sindh Province, Pakistan….

--Marianne Soo travels to Canberra, Cheboksary, Putra Jaya and Banda Seri Begawan as her quest to discover The Dullest City on Earth switches into top gear….

--With just five refugees remaining it’s Krispy Kreme Donut time on The Biggest Gainer….

--Six self-righteous plain people compete to construct a yurt for Mongolian AIDS orphans while vying for the title of Asia’s Most Insufferable Aid Worker….

--Four domestic servants struggle with nausea in the blue-cheese platter playoff in Maid in Thailand. Who will take home the $16 winner’s cheque?

--The capacity building Bosonova and Conference Call Cha-Cha prove unsustainable for some semi-finalist stakeholders in So You Think U.N. Can Dance…

--With nine teams eliminated Mindanao, West Papua and Southern Thailand are left to battle it out for the 2012 Insurgent Idol Crown….

--With the Hmong sarong and Lahu shoe challenges behind them, some ethnic designers are running out of ideas on Project Hilltribe….

--Eight teams make their way to Luang Prabang in Laos where they must perform an ancient Animist dance while dressed as Liza Minnelli on Amazing Gay Race Asia….

--And in a twist that trumps all of this season’s dramas, Asia’s Next Miss Supermodel degenerates into a tequila-fuelled slap-fest when it’s revealed that half of the remaining contestants are actually male. Will they be disqualified?

These would be much more entertaining than those awful housewives, the Bachelorette and Bill and Giuliani, don’t you think? Oh I just thought of another one:

--Kim’s callousness turns to caution following Chloe’s fatal inflatable jumping castle accident. With two down and six to go, how much longer will it take to KILL THE KARDASHIANS..

Bravo!

3. AWESOME ANNA

And finally, last blog it was Lovely Lana, this time it’s Awesome Anna Calvi.
Thanks to my good friend Marg, who I have know since our shared Illawarra Mercury days 30, yes THIRTY years ago, for turning me onto this week’s diva

Check her out…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo267BTLnZk