"With 83 per cent of all musicals failing on Broadway, Spamalot is a hit. It made its money back in seven months, which is a record. We are now bringing it to London to see if you will fall for the same thing." So said Eric Idle at the London launch of the hit musical based on Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Spamalot will open at the Palace Theatre on the West End in October. Will we ever see it in Australia? Well, as I

While Channel 7 was screening Dancing with ths Stars tonight, Grumpy Old Men was on the ABC. Ironically, the amusing BBC whinge-fest was, in part, about the modern cult of celebrity and how every minor soap actor was now regarded as a "star" or "superstar". On a related topic, the following exchange actually happened in my office last week:
Me: "It's my ambition to be a C-grade celebrity."
Colleague: "You already are a C-grade celebrity."
I took is as a compliment.

The Brisbane radio ratings are in, and it looks like Triple M has rebounded to the No.1 place overall and in the important breakfast shift. Nova is second overall, with 97.3 in third position. In breakfast, Triple M leads 4BC and Nova. Austereo has posted the results here.
9pm update: There's already renewed chatter in the industry about anomalies in the results, which are gathered from the diary system. Unfortunately for the critics, Commercial Radio Australia has just renewed Nielsen Media Research's contract for another three years, meaning there's slim chance of a more accurate audience measurement system until at least 2009. As I've noted before, the big players simply don't seem to be in a rush to get more detailed information about radio listeners' habits. I wonder what it is that they don't want to know.

Channel 7 Brisbane is claiming victory in the first official week of television ratings. The station claims a 32.0 share, ahead of Nine with 28.7, Ten with 21.4, the ABC with 13.0 and SBS with 4.8. Things are going to be very interesting this year in TV land - and in radio, where the year's first survey will be released tomorrow. Given the changes on the dial over the summer, insiders say they expect a lot of "sampling" - i.e. people trying out different stations. In other words, nobody's quite sure what's going to happen.

With the BAFTAs just announced, the Academy Awards are looking more and more like being dominated by Brokeback Mountain and Capote. Ang Lee seems set to get the Best Director Oscar and Philip Seymour Hoffman must surely be the red hot favourite to pick up Best Actor. Mind you, I've been wrong before

Want to tune in to Brisbane newspapers, radio and television stations on the Internet? My new Brisbane media links page is here, and it's also now listed in the site menu. Updated theatre and other arts links coming soon.

Podcast 2 is now online, with some chat about Menopause the Musical, Absurd Person Singular and Cirque du Soliel's Varekai. If you've got a spare five minutes, please download it, have a listen and send me some feedback.

Channel 9's Extra has been such a television success story that even Bert Newton has to play second fiddle. In Brisbane, his Bert's Family Feud is on at 5pm, not 5.30pm as it is in other states. Still, the folks at Nine certainly know a cross-promotional opportunity when they see one. In an interview for Extra, Newton was asked about his hair - and the picture (above) shows how he responded. To see more, you'll have to watch Extra on Monday.

According to unconfirmed reports on an Internet newsgroup, former leading Brisbane DJ Wayne "Waynee Poo" Roberts is returning to the airwaves. He's rumoured to be moving into the breakfast slot on River 949 in Ipswich, but there's no mention of him yet on the station's website. Roberts was popular on 4BK and 4IP in the 1970s. He made a late-1990s comeback on 4BC, but never quite hit the same heights in talk radio as he did on the music stations.

It looks like our very own The Veronicas have really made it. They've received a positive mention in the British-based email scandal sheet Popbitch. An item on songwriter Max Martin goes over his recent success stories, including Pink and Kelly Clarkson, and concludes: "But there's even better to come. The Veronicas are 20-year-old identical twins from Brisbane, Jess and Lisa Origliasso. Signed by Madonna's former mentor, Seymour Stein, in the States, their first single is a majestic Max Martin pop-rock

The Queensland Theatre Company kicked off 2006 last night with a production of Alan Ayckbourn's Absurd Person Singular, directed by Michael Gow and starring a fantastic ensemble comprising Andrea Moor, Robert Coleby, Helen Howard, Peter Marshall, Helen Cassidy and Mark Conaghan. My review will appear soon in Brisbane News.

The February 10 edition of the American magazine, Entertainment Weekly, has a well-researched article on Australians in Hollywood that told me a few things I didn't know. Apparently, May Robson was the first Oscar-nominated Australian, for a 1933 film Lady for a Day. Other early Aussie or part-Aussie contenders were Dame Judith Anderson (Rebecca, 1940), Cecil Kellaway (The Luck of the Irish, 1948, and Guess Who's COming to Dinner, 1967), Diane Cilento (Tom Jones, 1963) and Peter Finch (Sunday Bloody Sunday, 1971 and Network, 1976).

There'll be a bit of nail-biting in the world of Australian radio over the weekend, with the first ratings for the year due to land on Tuesday. In Brisbane, all eyes will be on B105 in its first post-Jamie Dunn survey.

A remake of the old TV series Monkey has caused a stir of excitement in Asia. According to the BBC, the series was watched by one in three people in Japan, and the show has been sold across the continent. The good news for Brisbane fans of the show, based on a 16th Century Chinese myth, is that Grin and Tonic theatre troupe is performing Monkey and His Magic Journey to the West live on stage in Roma St Parkland. Details here.
PS: In other television news, SBS has confirmed it will screen the controversial episode of South Park where Tom Cruise locks himself in a closet and refuses to come out. It will be screened on Monday.

I have been reprimanded by a 12-year-old over the inclusion of the word "cool" in my vocabulary. Apparently it's not cool for a person of my age to refer to something as being cool - even though I've been doing it since I was 12. The conversation got me thinking about terms that were in vogue a few decades ago but we rarely or never hear now. The first that comes to mind is "groovy". Everything used to be groovy; there was even a Simon and Garfunkle song called Feelin' Groovy. Now the word is restricted to Austin Powers movies. A little before my time, people who weren't hip to the beat were squares, or perhaps a bit uptight (which was also the name of a TV show). For a few years, the police weren't cops, they were "the fuzz". Where have these words gone? Perhaps, like "cool"

Brisbane theatre club The Glugs of Gosh met today at the Greek Club with Kurt Lerps as special guest. Lerps (pictured above, at right, with Kevin Radbourne and Chief Glug Muriel Watson) spoke about his time as a "gypsy" dancer with the Philadelphia Players, including shows with Lucille Ball and Buster Keaton, and his more recent experience with community theatre in Queensland.

It was a case of life imitating art when Hungarian prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsany did a Hugh Grant impersonation in a wedding gift video. The real PM cut himself into a scene from the film Love Actually, where the actor plays a fictional prime minister getting jiggy to a Pointer Sisters number. Government spokesman Andras Batiz, for whom the video was made, said: "The scene even surprised us who meet the prime minister daily and obviously know him in a way most people don't." Mr Gyurcsany, who watches either Love Actually or Notting Hill precisely at dawn every New Year's Day, wrote about the incident on his weblog (in Hungarian). I'm not making this up.

Hugh Jackman has launched his arena tour of The Boy from Oz and Chrissy Amphlett, Colleen Hewitt and Angela Toohey will be sharing the stage with him. If you want to go along to the Brisbane Entertainment Centre to see him, you'd better save your pennies. They cheapest seats are $99, and they're up the back. The A-reserve seats will set you back $249 each - but you can pay as much as $499 per person for a premium package that includes a cocktail party before the show, guaranteed seating somewhere in the first nine rows and other goodies. They go on sale on Friday from Ticketek.

Bert's Family Feud is on the air, and the evergreen Bert Newton seems relaxed in the game-show format. After a few jokes about Channels 9 and 10, it was down to business. The big question: Can Bert make Family Feud his own or do audiences prefer him in the more familiar variety format? (Perhaps there'll even be a cry for the return of Rob Brough!)

1970s pop star Leo Sayer - who, I believe, now lives in Australia - is back at No. 1 in the UK charts. It's all thanks to a remix by a bloke called Meck of Sayer's 1977 hit Thunder in My Heart. Who says a souffle can't rise twice?