Ending badly

I saw RocKwiz Live in ’25 at the State Theatre on Saturday night.

The evening got off to a confusing start and ended badly.

I was a RocKwiz virgin until that moment.. The TV show is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year … and I’ve never seen a single episode.

DD has shown me music clips from it over the years, but I didn’t really understand what it was.

When he told me he’d booked tickets for us to see it live I was nonplussed.

And when the actual event rolled around I asked him to explain the concept to me.

Apparently the idea was born in 2002 when Renegade’s Ken Connor and Peter Bain-Hogg met with comedian Brian Nankervis (he was on Hey, Hey It’s Saturday) to conceive a TV show that combined their mutual love of live music and pub trivia.

SBS agreed to run it and more than 180 episodes followed. It’s since morphed into RocKwiz Live, a theatrical touring show with Julia Zemiro, Brian, an orchestra filled with big name musos, special mystery guests and punter contestants from the audience.

Essentially what that means is that you watch two teams of three play pub trivia, with musos alternating between competing and performing covers of songs.

The State Theatre is such a divine spot and we had excellent seats. Most of the audience were around retirement age, so I was a little taken aback that interval was at 9.30pm. Read the room guys, that’s everyone’s curfew at their retirement villages.

Our guest singers were Casey Donovan, David Campbell and Grinspoon’s Phil Jamieson. They all have powerful sets of lungs, but Casey was next level. She lifted the roof with a cover of ‘Rolling in the Deep’ and also joined David for a duet of Cold Chisel’s ‘Saturday Night’.

And here are the hosts with some of the audience members who participated …

I enjoyed the show, strange concept that it was.

But then came the hell of getting home. We walked outside into absolute chaos as elderly people stood in the gutter aimlessly, while others dodged and weaved through the traffic.

I suggested we walk down to Wynyard to get a bus. The queue for the bus snaked off into eternity, so we caught a cab.

Big mistake. Huge.

Traffic on the Harbour Bridge was at a standstill due to the Warringah Freeway upgrade that’s been dragging on for a gazillion years and has no discernible end in sight.

We discovered our exit was closed, then the cab ran over a piece of construction material and blew a tyre.

The cabbie had to pull over in no man’s land, a girl in high-viz walked us to safety and we flagged down another cab.

Then I had to walk the dogs. It was after midnight when I finally crawled into bed, but my eyes sprang open before 6am as they always do.

A very weary Sunday followed, where I restocked my fridge with vastly expensive low-disaccharide food, went for a glorious swim at Bilgola and drank gin & tonics with DD’s neighbours.

Hello Monday, I’m not ready for you.

How was your weekend?

Song of the day: Cold Chisel “Saturday night”