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Many hope and pray, that some day we will be graced by one more 12th Man record (OK maybe 2 more records,) but...
RedHotPie Editor | December 19 2011
Manly merch - The 12th Man interview
Many hope and pray, that some day we will be graced by one more 12th Man record (OK maybe 2 more records,) but according to Billy Birmingham, the man behind the 12th Man, that’s not likely.
The doyen of Australian comedy has had us doubled over for the last 27 years with his hilarious send-ups of Ritchie, Bill and Tony, the stalwarts of the Channel Nine cricket coverage, but now, he is hanging up the microphone.
It’s scary to think that the next generation will grow up, ignorant to the marvels of the scrotometer, or the wondrous love that can exist between a man and a pigeon; but true to his super-hero status, The 12th Man has left us with a parting gift, a range of u-beaut summer party items that will have his timeless words sounding throughout the ages, or at least until the batteries give in.
On the promotional trail flogging his new range of merch (which includes a talking bottle opener, can cooler and coffee cup, as well as a new range of shirts – all available at www.the12thman.com) Billy Birmingham got on the blower with RedHotPie and discussed the past and the future...
(RedHotie) Billy, tell us about the comedians that influenced you growing up
(Billy Birmingham) Well I do remember a couple of records that stick out; there was Bob Newhart, and he had a record called The Button-Down Mind Of Bob Newhart and his favourite thing was to do one sided phone conversations, have you heard of him?
Heard of him yes, but haven’t heard that album
Yeah, one sided phone conversation, so he says stuff like, Sir Walter Raleigh discovered tobacco in the colonies back in whenever it was, and there is an imaginary phone call of him ringing back to England telling his superiors about this thing he’s discovered called tobacco; so you just hear this one part of the conversation and I found that extremely funny, and as anyone that knows my records knows that I’ve got a few scenes like that where there’s one sided phone conversations with Tony Greig speaking to Greg Matthews about hair hats...
Yes, it’s a classic
Look, I can’t remember off the top of my head but there’s a couple of other ones there where I’ve had the same thing, oh that’s right, when Bill Lawry’s on the phone to Snozza Warehouse getting a nose transplant.
So to a certain extent that was my homage to those early days listening to Bob Newhart of course most people know him these days a sitcom actor, but in the early days he used to be particularly hot back in the sixties and seventies as a stand-up comedian and he made these recordings which were pretty much that kind of vibe you know, those one sided conversations, not always necessarily phone conversations.
I do remember one fabulous record I used to listen to called You Don’t Have to Be Jewish, which was kind of like an ensemble cast of Jewish actors and actresses and I was lucky to be introduced to that sort of humour by a friend of mine’s father and look, that’s the sixties, I’m now trying to think about the seventies...
Well maybe we could throw a few Australian comedians at you and get a few thoughts?
OK, fire away...
Righto, let’s start with Kevin Bloody Wilson.
Kevin, very funny, a lot of the time when my fans are talking to me they mention Kevin, Rodney Rude and myself in the same breath; and Kevin is of course very big overseas. When I did a tour of the UK, a lot of people over there were very quick to sing his praises.
He’s pretty mad; I mean he’s pretty out there. All I tend to do on my records, which some people regard as rude is use profanity, whereas Kevin takes it that one step further, it’s not just that he uses swear words you know, it’s the style and the material he uses them around that’s pretty heavy going but no he’s a pretty funny guy.
Couple words on Chad Morgan
Chad, well I never quite got the Chad story. I’ve worked with him a few times, not in comedy circles, but because of one of my previous jobs; I had to make some commercials for Chad’s albums and look, well-loved by country people but I must admit I didn’t quite get Chad’s humour myself, it was mainly silly songs of course.
And of course, Austen Tayshus
Austen Tayshus, well that was funny times working with him. His natural style of humour is not very much like Australiana which I wrote for him, so to a certain extent, Australiana did him a lot of favours in that it made him known and it made him some money and got him some recognition, but also it was not his natural style of humour, the word play thing was more the Billy Birmingham style, so unfortunately a lot of people were going out to see Austen Tayshus on the strength of Australiana and they found a very different act when they went to see him because it’s far more in your face kind of humour.
He’s still a mate of mine and I still see him around and still see Rodney (Rude) around and you know, those were pretty good days for all of us back in early eighties when Rodney opened the Comedy Store in Sydney and stand-up comedy, which I've never done personally, but it sort of took off in Australia as a result of the Comedy Store that Rodney opened in the early eighties.
And what do you think of the state of comedy in Australia today?
I don’t go and see any stand up so I’m not sure how that circuit’s looking, mate, but there’re always enough funny people popping up on TV doing sketches and bits and pieces, I mean you get people like Hamish and Andy where, I dunno, sometimes the whole show doesn’t meet a certain standard, but there’re certainly enough sketches within it to get a chuckle and a lot of the panel shows I enjoy watching, you know, Spicks n Specks where you get good byplay and you usually get a few laughs.
I miss shows like any of the Andrew Denton shows cause he had Money Or The gun and Live And Sweaty and blah blah blah and I always found those pretty good for their weird formats and the sort of guests they would have on, and I also miss shows like The Panel, you know I would always get a good chuckle out of Tommy Gleisner and Rob Sitch and Glen Robbins and those guys with special guests coming on every now and then just talking shit, just crapping about stuff.
There’s one interesting new comedian that’s crossed our bow recently, Steve Hughes, have you heard of him?
Haven’t heard of Steve, what’s his game?
Well he’s and ex-pat death metal fan with some interesting opinions on global corporatisation and other fun topics
Steve Hughes, I will as they say, Google the bastard
Get on the Youtube’s
How old is he?
Dunno, forty odd
Alright, sounds good.
Now there’s a painful moment on The final Dig where the commentary team gets accosted by the Bankstown Fuglys
Yes, the Fuglys, they were on their way to the end of season trip I think.
That’s right, does that happen to you much?
Well not much, I’ve had a pretty good run actually, punters are usually pretty good about coming up and having a yarn to me, I’m usually appreciative of the feedback because I don’t work live so, if someone does engage me in a conversation whether it’s hanging out a car window, which is usually a brief conversation because they’re usually just yelling ‘marvellous effort that’ and all that kind of stuff, and yelling out their favourite 12th man-isms, but often you’ll see someone at a bar or a party and they’ll come up and have a talk, it’s good you know. I always say to Jimmy Barnes and those guys, ‘your audience doesn’t come up and start singing to you,’ where as my fans actually come up and start reciting my records, which is always weird, but good feedback.
Well it seems everyone in Hollywood is turning to prequels, do you think a prequel about the team’s formation could work?
Well... a prequel, a prequel would almost have to be, I don’t know, what would it be, it would have to involved the early Kerry Packer meetings...
Yes, Ritchie’s a bit greener perhaps?
Well Ritchie was never green really because he came from BBC commentary, so when Kerry Packer got him involved, I don’t think Tony Greig had done any commentary, but certainly Ritchie was well established as a BBC commentator.
I guess Bill would be Green, maybe Tony’s making the difficult transition from being a player back into the working world.
Bill would have been, well I don’t think Bill was a commentator, whether he did any stints on the ABC radio I don’t know.
Perhaps he was still trying to make it on the professional pigeon circuit?
Yup, could have been that, he would have had the odd champion Bird I would have thought, but yeah Bill certainly and Tony, Tony we knew as a skipper for England and then Bill we knew as a former skipper for Australia, none of us certainly my friends had ever heard them commentate and similarly we knew that Ritchie did a job for the BBC in the UK but we hadn’t heard much of his commentary style which is why his voice was such a shock to us all when we heard him.
Because it really was one of the strangest voices to hear, you know, ‘Welcome to the Melbourne Cricket Ground for this opening match in the Benson and Hedges World Series Cup’, and just looking at him with the permanent sun tan and not a hair out of place; the cream, the bone, the white, the off-white, the ivory or the beige, and you know, his bottom lip with a mind of its own, when he turns side-on and it almost disappears out of the camera shot.
So we were all just sitting around saying ‘gee, did anyone know that Ritchie sounded like this?’ Everyone’s going ‘no, I certainly didn’t,’ and suddenly everyone’s doing Ritchie Benaud impersonations; ‘super effort that’, you know ending everything in ‘that’, ‘wonderful effort that’, ‘super stroke that’, and then ‘Marvellous’ was his famous adjective of course, which I’ve noticed him desperately trying not to use these days. It’s what happens when you point something out to somebody, you know I pointed out that Tubby Taylor talks in, pretty, short sharp grabs, you know, he’s got a, pretty broad, Australian accent and, what he tends to do, is ahh, put his sentences in little, short clumps, with gaps between, and when you point these things out to people, when you’ve done a record, you watch them next time they’re commentating and they’ve taken it on board.
Tubs sounds a bit like Captain Kirk on speed.
Well one of the reasons I’ve hung up the microphone is because I had a go at doing Tubby on Boned and I got away with it and I did Mike Nicholas as Austen Powers, ‘Yeah smashing, baby,’ because he just looks and sounds so smooth and he looks like he’d shag everything in sight; but really, now that Ritchie’s no longer in the central commentary position and Tony very rarely goes down and sticks those keys of his into the pitch and the weather wall and the player comfort meter have all disappeared and now you’ve got Tubby and Heals, Slats, Warnie, they’ve all got pretty similar sounding voices so, when you consider what it was that I was taking the piss out of over the years, which wasn’t just the game, it was the Channel Nine commentary presentation, and now that that presentation has changed so much, and it’s lost a lot of the characters and idiosyncratic sort of styles that I used to take the mickey out of, well that’s one of the main reasons that I’ve decided that I’ve had a very good run doing this.
I’ve done seven albums and a few singles and everything’s done really well and I’d very much hate as you can imagine to do the record that doesn’t work.
Well it’s been a blemish free career thus far.
Well that’s why you’d very much like to leave it while you’re at the top of your game.
I keep telling people I rang John Farnham and asked him how long I need to wait before I do a comeback and he said ‘Ahh ya mongrel, you got to wait at least a couple of weeks.’ So if I do another 12th Man record it may not be taking the piss out of Channel Nine’s cricket coverage, it might be taking the mickey out of something else, but at this stage there’s no intention to do that, mate.
I've heard Tiger Woods and Prince Charles are big Kevin Bloody Wilson fans, have you ever learnt of any 12th Man fans that have surprised you?
Yes, I’ve heard that Mick Jagger was a bit of a 12th Man fan, and I think Eric Idle from the Monty Pythons was a 12th Man fan, Tim Rice from Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice fame was a 12th Man fan, and when I was over in England doing my 1999 tour of the UK with a special double album compilation for England of all of my cricket stuff, I did an interview on the BBC with Jonathon Agnew and when I came up this guy walks over and says “Are you Billy Birmingham?’, so I said ‘Yes’, he says ‘I’ve just had Earl Spencer on the phone, Princess Di’s brother, he’s a big 12th Man fan and he’s having a charity event at the family home up at Althorp and he’d love you to come along. So next thing I’m in the back of some stretch limo with some page three bird, going up to Northamptonshire to the Spencer family home. You know, it was pretty eerie; at one stage I was just standing down on the edge of the river having a cigarette, looking across at the island upon which princess Di was buried, but that was with a whole bunch of British cricketers and golfers and boxers and socialites and whatever, all because Earl Spencer was driving down the highway listening to me on the BBC and he had a few 12th Man CDs and he quite liked them, so he asked me to come along, so that was a pretty strange old night.
Get your hands on the full range of 12th Man merch at www.the12thman.com
The doyen of Australian comedy has had us doubled over for the last 27 years with his hilarious send-ups of Ritchie, Bill and Tony, the stalwarts of the Channel Nine cricket coverage, but now, he is hanging up the microphone.
It’s scary to think that the next generation will grow up, ignorant to the marvels of the scrotometer, or the wondrous love that can exist between a man and a pigeon; but true to his super-hero status, The 12th Man has left us with a parting gift, a range of u-beaut summer party items that will have his timeless words sounding throughout the ages, or at least until the batteries give in.
On the promotional trail flogging his new range of merch (which includes a talking bottle opener, can cooler and coffee cup, as well as a new range of shirts – all available at www.the12thman.com) Billy Birmingham got on the blower with RedHotPie and discussed the past and the future...
(RedHotie) Billy, tell us about the comedians that influenced you growing up
(Billy Birmingham) Well I do remember a couple of records that stick out; there was Bob Newhart, and he had a record called The Button-Down Mind Of Bob Newhart and his favourite thing was to do one sided phone conversations, have you heard of him?
Heard of him yes, but haven’t heard that album
Yeah, one sided phone conversation, so he says stuff like, Sir Walter Raleigh discovered tobacco in the colonies back in whenever it was, and there is an imaginary phone call of him ringing back to England telling his superiors about this thing he’s discovered called tobacco; so you just hear this one part of the conversation and I found that extremely funny, and as anyone that knows my records knows that I’ve got a few scenes like that where there’s one sided phone conversations with Tony Greig speaking to Greg Matthews about hair hats...
Yes, it’s a classic
Look, I can’t remember off the top of my head but there’s a couple of other ones there where I’ve had the same thing, oh that’s right, when Bill Lawry’s on the phone to Snozza Warehouse getting a nose transplant.
So to a certain extent that was my homage to those early days listening to Bob Newhart of course most people know him these days a sitcom actor, but in the early days he used to be particularly hot back in the sixties and seventies as a stand-up comedian and he made these recordings which were pretty much that kind of vibe you know, those one sided conversations, not always necessarily phone conversations.
I do remember one fabulous record I used to listen to called You Don’t Have to Be Jewish, which was kind of like an ensemble cast of Jewish actors and actresses and I was lucky to be introduced to that sort of humour by a friend of mine’s father and look, that’s the sixties, I’m now trying to think about the seventies...
Well maybe we could throw a few Australian comedians at you and get a few thoughts?
OK, fire away...
Righto, let’s start with Kevin Bloody Wilson.
Kevin, very funny, a lot of the time when my fans are talking to me they mention Kevin, Rodney Rude and myself in the same breath; and Kevin is of course very big overseas. When I did a tour of the UK, a lot of people over there were very quick to sing his praises.
He’s pretty mad; I mean he’s pretty out there. All I tend to do on my records, which some people regard as rude is use profanity, whereas Kevin takes it that one step further, it’s not just that he uses swear words you know, it’s the style and the material he uses them around that’s pretty heavy going but no he’s a pretty funny guy.
Couple words on Chad Morgan
Chad, well I never quite got the Chad story. I’ve worked with him a few times, not in comedy circles, but because of one of my previous jobs; I had to make some commercials for Chad’s albums and look, well-loved by country people but I must admit I didn’t quite get Chad’s humour myself, it was mainly silly songs of course.
And of course, Austen Tayshus
Austen Tayshus, well that was funny times working with him. His natural style of humour is not very much like Australiana which I wrote for him, so to a certain extent, Australiana did him a lot of favours in that it made him known and it made him some money and got him some recognition, but also it was not his natural style of humour, the word play thing was more the Billy Birmingham style, so unfortunately a lot of people were going out to see Austen Tayshus on the strength of Australiana and they found a very different act when they went to see him because it’s far more in your face kind of humour.
He’s still a mate of mine and I still see him around and still see Rodney (Rude) around and you know, those were pretty good days for all of us back in early eighties when Rodney opened the Comedy Store in Sydney and stand-up comedy, which I've never done personally, but it sort of took off in Australia as a result of the Comedy Store that Rodney opened in the early eighties.
And what do you think of the state of comedy in Australia today?
I don’t go and see any stand up so I’m not sure how that circuit’s looking, mate, but there’re always enough funny people popping up on TV doing sketches and bits and pieces, I mean you get people like Hamish and Andy where, I dunno, sometimes the whole show doesn’t meet a certain standard, but there’re certainly enough sketches within it to get a chuckle and a lot of the panel shows I enjoy watching, you know, Spicks n Specks where you get good byplay and you usually get a few laughs.
I miss shows like any of the Andrew Denton shows cause he had Money Or The gun and Live And Sweaty and blah blah blah and I always found those pretty good for their weird formats and the sort of guests they would have on, and I also miss shows like The Panel, you know I would always get a good chuckle out of Tommy Gleisner and Rob Sitch and Glen Robbins and those guys with special guests coming on every now and then just talking shit, just crapping about stuff.
There’s one interesting new comedian that’s crossed our bow recently, Steve Hughes, have you heard of him?
Haven’t heard of Steve, what’s his game?
Well he’s and ex-pat death metal fan with some interesting opinions on global corporatisation and other fun topics
Steve Hughes, I will as they say, Google the bastard
Get on the Youtube’s
How old is he?
Dunno, forty odd
Alright, sounds good.
Now there’s a painful moment on The final Dig where the commentary team gets accosted by the Bankstown Fuglys
Yes, the Fuglys, they were on their way to the end of season trip I think.
That’s right, does that happen to you much?
Well not much, I’ve had a pretty good run actually, punters are usually pretty good about coming up and having a yarn to me, I’m usually appreciative of the feedback because I don’t work live so, if someone does engage me in a conversation whether it’s hanging out a car window, which is usually a brief conversation because they’re usually just yelling ‘marvellous effort that’ and all that kind of stuff, and yelling out their favourite 12th man-isms, but often you’ll see someone at a bar or a party and they’ll come up and have a talk, it’s good you know. I always say to Jimmy Barnes and those guys, ‘your audience doesn’t come up and start singing to you,’ where as my fans actually come up and start reciting my records, which is always weird, but good feedback.
Well it seems everyone in Hollywood is turning to prequels, do you think a prequel about the team’s formation could work?
Well... a prequel, a prequel would almost have to be, I don’t know, what would it be, it would have to involved the early Kerry Packer meetings...
Yes, Ritchie’s a bit greener perhaps?
Well Ritchie was never green really because he came from BBC commentary, so when Kerry Packer got him involved, I don’t think Tony Greig had done any commentary, but certainly Ritchie was well established as a BBC commentator.
I guess Bill would be Green, maybe Tony’s making the difficult transition from being a player back into the working world.
Bill would have been, well I don’t think Bill was a commentator, whether he did any stints on the ABC radio I don’t know.
Perhaps he was still trying to make it on the professional pigeon circuit?
Yup, could have been that, he would have had the odd champion Bird I would have thought, but yeah Bill certainly and Tony, Tony we knew as a skipper for England and then Bill we knew as a former skipper for Australia, none of us certainly my friends had ever heard them commentate and similarly we knew that Ritchie did a job for the BBC in the UK but we hadn’t heard much of his commentary style which is why his voice was such a shock to us all when we heard him.
Because it really was one of the strangest voices to hear, you know, ‘Welcome to the Melbourne Cricket Ground for this opening match in the Benson and Hedges World Series Cup’, and just looking at him with the permanent sun tan and not a hair out of place; the cream, the bone, the white, the off-white, the ivory or the beige, and you know, his bottom lip with a mind of its own, when he turns side-on and it almost disappears out of the camera shot.
So we were all just sitting around saying ‘gee, did anyone know that Ritchie sounded like this?’ Everyone’s going ‘no, I certainly didn’t,’ and suddenly everyone’s doing Ritchie Benaud impersonations; ‘super effort that’, you know ending everything in ‘that’, ‘wonderful effort that’, ‘super stroke that’, and then ‘Marvellous’ was his famous adjective of course, which I’ve noticed him desperately trying not to use these days. It’s what happens when you point something out to somebody, you know I pointed out that Tubby Taylor talks in, pretty, short sharp grabs, you know, he’s got a, pretty broad, Australian accent and, what he tends to do, is ahh, put his sentences in little, short clumps, with gaps between, and when you point these things out to people, when you’ve done a record, you watch them next time they’re commentating and they’ve taken it on board.
Tubs sounds a bit like Captain Kirk on speed.
Well one of the reasons I’ve hung up the microphone is because I had a go at doing Tubby on Boned and I got away with it and I did Mike Nicholas as Austen Powers, ‘Yeah smashing, baby,’ because he just looks and sounds so smooth and he looks like he’d shag everything in sight; but really, now that Ritchie’s no longer in the central commentary position and Tony very rarely goes down and sticks those keys of his into the pitch and the weather wall and the player comfort meter have all disappeared and now you’ve got Tubby and Heals, Slats, Warnie, they’ve all got pretty similar sounding voices so, when you consider what it was that I was taking the piss out of over the years, which wasn’t just the game, it was the Channel Nine commentary presentation, and now that that presentation has changed so much, and it’s lost a lot of the characters and idiosyncratic sort of styles that I used to take the mickey out of, well that’s one of the main reasons that I’ve decided that I’ve had a very good run doing this.
I’ve done seven albums and a few singles and everything’s done really well and I’d very much hate as you can imagine to do the record that doesn’t work.
Well it’s been a blemish free career thus far.
Well that’s why you’d very much like to leave it while you’re at the top of your game.
I keep telling people I rang John Farnham and asked him how long I need to wait before I do a comeback and he said ‘Ahh ya mongrel, you got to wait at least a couple of weeks.’ So if I do another 12th Man record it may not be taking the piss out of Channel Nine’s cricket coverage, it might be taking the mickey out of something else, but at this stage there’s no intention to do that, mate.
I've heard Tiger Woods and Prince Charles are big Kevin Bloody Wilson fans, have you ever learnt of any 12th Man fans that have surprised you?
Yes, I’ve heard that Mick Jagger was a bit of a 12th Man fan, and I think Eric Idle from the Monty Pythons was a 12th Man fan, Tim Rice from Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice fame was a 12th Man fan, and when I was over in England doing my 1999 tour of the UK with a special double album compilation for England of all of my cricket stuff, I did an interview on the BBC with Jonathon Agnew and when I came up this guy walks over and says “Are you Billy Birmingham?’, so I said ‘Yes’, he says ‘I’ve just had Earl Spencer on the phone, Princess Di’s brother, he’s a big 12th Man fan and he’s having a charity event at the family home up at Althorp and he’d love you to come along. So next thing I’m in the back of some stretch limo with some page three bird, going up to Northamptonshire to the Spencer family home. You know, it was pretty eerie; at one stage I was just standing down on the edge of the river having a cigarette, looking across at the island upon which princess Di was buried, but that was with a whole bunch of British cricketers and golfers and boxers and socialites and whatever, all because Earl Spencer was driving down the highway listening to me on the BBC and he had a few 12th Man CDs and he quite liked them, so he asked me to come along, so that was a pretty strange old night.
Get your hands on the full range of 12th Man merch at www.the12thman.com
