Tuesday 15 April 2003

Speaking as I was earlier about the guy who does the crowd warmups at the MCG reminded me of the last person to hold down that role, the infamous Voice of the G.

(Actually I think they had Drew Morphett doing in for a bit last season, but he obviously wasn't wacky and zany enough for them. They should have played the footage of him absolutely pissed while he was presenting the Sandover Medal one year, that really would have gotten the kids interested.)

Now, as I've said here before I only started going back to the footy at the end of Melbourne's horrific 1997 season so I'm not quite sure how long this idiot had been at it but he lasted right up at least until the end of 2000, if not a bit longer (I may have blotted some of the horror from my mind).

Anyway, the first thing I thought when he appeared on the screen at that first game back from self-imposed exile (a shock 19 point win over Carlton) was "Hey, that's the wanker from the Colin Carpenter Show." And it was. I must have been the only person in Australia to remember his small and absolutely shithouse performance as Colin's roommate in that short lived show. If that wasn't bad enough it turned out his role was to do "zany" things on matchday like interview the crowd. Sadly the closest I ever got to his hillarious antics was shouting "WANKER!" at him outside the ground one day.

He was so irritating on a weekly basis that I actually recall the one funny segment he ever did. I can't pinpoint exactly when it was, or who was playing (although I have the sneaking suspicion it was before one of the Australia/Ireland International Rules tests) but I remember he came on playing some old guy and referring to himself as "Spokesperson of the Arena". Maybe it the phrase that struck me as comical (it still does oddly enough) or the fact that four years of "Spokesperson" would have been far more entertaining than the wankfest he produced every week but it entertained me greatly. I even lifted my generous offer of a thousand dollars for the first person to hit him live on camera for a week. Sadly next time we saw him it was back to normal and the fatwa was redeclared.

Things really got disturbing during 1998 when the shadowy people who run the MCG decided that they needed a theme song to compete with that Greg Champion song that was all over Channel 7's coverage at the time. Thus Voice of the G's sole contribution to Australian rock "Nothing Beats the Footy at the MCG" was born. And by christ did they plug it a lot - you got the full thing twice before the game, once at quarter time, twice during the half-time break, once at three-quarter time and as many times as they could after the siren before everyone was removed from the stadium. We stayed behind after a game against Fremantle (Melbourne by 23 points) to have a punt on the hallowed turf and we conservately estimate that they played it 15 times before they threw us all out.

I've never met anyone ever who bought a copy. I seriously don't think anybody ever did, and that's probably why he ended up getting the sack. After three years they probably realised his "Don't worry, keep pressing copies, it'll break into the charts any day now" prediction wasn't going to come true.

Presumably he's back on the dole, or the theatre restaurant circuit, now but he'd be proud knowing that the other day I was sitting around doing something and suddenly thought "You know, Nothing Beats the Footy at the MCG wasn't such a bad song after all." What's that they say about artists never being fully appreciated until they're dead?

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