The Comfort State

It’s a project that immediately stands out from an already high quality Queensland Music Festival 2011 schedule: RocKwiz stripping down their shtick and rebuilding it as The Queensland Country Comfort Hour.

It's an idea that the Rockwiz team had kicked around for a while: creating an hour-long variety show for radio and performing it live, perhaps at the National Theatre in Melbourne. But it took the QMF's artistic director, Deborah Conway, to approach Rockwiz guitarist James Black and 'second banana' Brian Nankervis to make the project a reality.

“Deb Conway said, 'You know. If you've got any ideas for shows, I'm always looking for new ones,'” explains Nankervis. “We all love radio, and we love variety, and we thought, 'Let's do something that's totally different and make it like a radio show with all the ingredients that a great radio variety show might have’.”

Suddenly the RocKwiz Orkestra was being transformed into the Country Comfort Orkestra, and the team went to work formulating the contents of their Queensland shows.

“You have myself as a host, you have guests, you have traffic reports, you have poetry competitions, you have quizzes, you have a radio play and I've gotta say that I'm very excited about this: we have a seven minute radio serial, like a real cliff-hanger, and that's been written especially - we've commissioned it as a new work from Hugh Lunn.”

Nankervis' enthusiasm is infectious, so it's not too much of a leap to imagine how he got the revered Lunn involved. A connection existed between the two via Queensland journalist, Adrian McGregor, and when the team realised they needed a playwright, it was Lunn's name that immediately came up.

“He's interesting because 'Over The Top With Jim' was such a big hit. He's a beauty, and he's written a play that I know will touch the hearts of all Queenslanders - and we've got Julia Zemiro playing the leading lady in the radio play, and she's playing opposite two very fine actors, one of whom is a Brisbane boy - Andrew Buchanan - and the other is Bruce Spence.”

The other aspect of the show that Nankervis is keen to talk about is The Queensland Country Comfort Hour poetry competition. “We're very excited about that,” he chuckles. “There's a poetry competition where we're asking people to write about 200 words - a poem based on the theme, 'What's so great about the sunshine state?' Basically, I'm going to read out one or two poems each night, so if people don't send them in I won't be able to read them out. I'd love that to happen; I'd love people to get onboard with that.”

The Queensland Country Comfort Hour will be broadcast on ABC local radio throughout the state, but will also tour along the east coast, taking in Brisbane, Townsville, Caloundra and the Gold Coast. The logistics of mobilising an entire show is something the RocKwiz team has experience in, having come to Queensland for a slew of dates last year.

“Last year was great - we did Brisbane, Cairns, Townsville, Bundaberg, and Mackay - and we really loved being up there and just fell in love with some of those towns. So I think when Deb came up and approached James, we were really keen to do it.”

It's this live tour component of the show that Nankervis is keen to stress. What will be an hour's entertainment on the radio will be a whole night's worth if you go to see The Queensland Country Comfort Hour in person.

“The show is in two halves,” he explains. “The first half is stuff that's not going to air. We're just prepping things and we'll need a couple of volunteers from the audience, so we'll be finding them. There's a bit of singing, and once the show starts, it'll be one hour on the dot, because that's how it has to go to air. So audiences can expect musical interludes - there'll be songs, there'll be stories, and there'll be interviews. We've got a [phone-in] segment where we speak to someone in a far-flung place, and we've got a massive map on the set, and their town will light up. We have some absolute legends of the Australian recording industry. We've got a couple of sporting legends, and there's a couple of guests that I'm incredibly excited about.

“The idea is to keep it really state-based and celebrate Queensland. We really like this idea of comfort - what gives you comfort? What gets you through the night, if you like. It might be swimming in the lakes on Fraser Island, or it might be wandering through the Daintree, or it might be reading David Malouf, or practicing yoga in the hills out behind the Gold Coast - we really want to explore that.

THE QUEENSLAND COUNTRY COMFORT HOUR BLOWS INTO CALOUNDRA JULY 17, BRISBANE JULY 19-20, AND THE GOLD COAST JULY 21 AS PART OF THE QUEENSLAND MUSIC FESTIVAL (QMF.COM.AU). SEND YOUR POETRY ENTRIES TO This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it." ' + path + '\'' + prefix + ':' + addy82402 + '\'>'+addy_text82402+'<\/a>'; //-->