Brett Debritz’s archive

The buzz on the aus.radio.broadcast newsgroup is that Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O will take over from Bert Newton as morning hosts on Channel 10. A newsgroup poster says they will host the TV show immediately after doing their radio shift on Sydney’s 2DAY FM from an auditorium at the Austereo radio studios.
PS: In the Sydney radio ratings released today, Sandilands and O came fourth in breakfast after 2UE’s Alan Jones, WSFM’s Amanda Keller and Brendan Jones and Nova’s Merrick and Rosso.

Born again adult rock station Triple M has again won the Brisbane radio ratings, with commanding leads overall, in the breakfast shift and across most of the day. The second-last survey of the year also provided some joy for Nova 106.9, which is blitzing it with the 10-24 year olds and has improved across many shifts (but not breakfast), and for 4KQ, 4BH and ABC 612, which all lifted their performance in the important breakfast shift. Talk station 4BC’s lineup reshuffle of a few months ago is also paying off, with strong results across the day – including holding on to the No. 2 spot in breakfast and enjoying an incredible 4.5 percentage point rise in the evenings. Former unassailable market leader B105 is still in the doldrums, at fifth overall and in breakfast _ a result not helped by the perception in some quarters that the station is marking time until longtime breakfast star Jamie Dunn’s departure at the end of the year.

Batman Begins has been named the best film of 2005 by readers of the UK’s Total Film magazine. Ian McDiarmid won the best villain award for his roles as Palpatine in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and Sin City star Mickey Rourke was voted “man of the year”.

The Dance of Jeremiah, La Boite’s Roundhouse Theatre, Kelvin Grove, until November 5.
Harvey, Harvest Rain’s Sydney St Theatre, New Farm, until November 19.
Kiss Me Kate, Queensland Musical Theatre presentation at the Twelfth Night Theatre, Bowen Hills, November 11-20.
Biloxi Blues, Brisbane Arts Theatre, Petrie Tce, November 5-December 3.
A Christmas Carol, Queensland Theatre Company production at Cremorne Theatre, QPAC, South Bank, November 10-December 10.

Peter Jackson’s King Kong went US$32 million over budget – which is an obscene amount of money that could buy a lot of food and medicine for the Third World. Also of concern to moviegoers should be the fact that it’s three hours long. The studio is already saying it’s a masterpiece. It would want to be.

Things are looking a little grim for William Shakespeare. Experts have declared there is no evidence to suggest that the so-called Grafton portrait widely used to illustrate tomes of the bard’s plays is actually Shakespeare. This follows the discovery that another portrait, The Flower Shakespeare, was not painted in his lifetime, and a recent book giving some compelling reasons why Will didn’t even write the works attributed to him.

“Television by default is not real. It is a stage. A small part of our scheduling is real but it is, in reality made up of silly programmes that mean nothing. What happened to mental stimulation? What happened to taking a risk?” That’s part of an email sent by a BBC employee after he was sacked for playing an “‘shag, marry, or over a cliff’-style game” that referred to his colleagues. He titled it: “A Jerry Maguire type of email”.

Doch is a German word meaning “but”. What that has to do with the 24-piece Doch Gypsy Orchestra that played at the Brisbane Powerhouse on the second of three cabaret shows last night I don’t know. I do know, however, that the show is so good you really ought to get along to see it. Except, like last night and the night before, tonight’s show is sold out. Best to try to buy one of their CDs and watch out for future dates, then.

The Italian Film Festival will be in full swing at the Palace Centro today after launching last night with the comedy Manual of Love. This often hilarious (but uneven and, it must be said, too long) comedy about relationships was a huge box-office hit in Italy and was warmly received on a wet Brisbane night. Details on the rest of the festival are here. Meanwhile, in Rome, all is not well in the arts. Italian Culture Minister Rocco Buttiglione has threatened to resign if the government carries out plans to cut the arts budget. Buttiglione says: “This is not only a battle for the opera and the struggling Italian film industry, but also for the theatre, for libraries and archives. We have to defend ourselves on a broad front.”

Fancy purchasing some Beatles memorabilia? Best get over to Madame Tussauds in London, where the waxworks used for the cover image of the Sgt Pepper’s album are up for sale.