Rove McManus Articles/Reviews

[unfrufru]

there's a few other rove articles floating on the back pages, i'll merge them with this one eventually.

i think a lot of people forget that he used to do standup

[EVIL EVOR]

I think it's Rove's turn to defend himself, it's abit of a read though:

Back to my roots
Source: The Age - 22nd of June, 2005


Rove McManus says he doesn't need to return to the lonely spotlight of stand-up comedy. But he wants to, desperately. The triple Gold Logie winner tells why, while admitting to nerves, anxieties and apprehensions.

"Feeling jittery, Rove? Are you rusty? Getting nervous that you don't have what it takes?" No, not until you brought it up!

Yet these seem to have been the first questions most people were asking me about getting back up on stage to perform stand-up comedy. That and "why?" That's all anyone kept asking me, "Why do you need to go back to doing stand-up? Why do you need to stray from the safety of a television screen? Why do you need to keep quoting me?"

Well, it isn't so much a need but more of a want. I know a lot of people will find this surprising but I actually want to get back to live stand-up. It's what got me to where I am today and it's something I have missed over the years.

Apart from the whys, hows, nerves and frantic writing that come with getting back out to do live stand-up comedy, the one thing going through my mind above all else now is that I can't bloody wait. I truly am looking forward to it and hope everyone enjoys it as much as I'm sure I will.

I must admit when I first committed to the idea of getting back on to the stand-up stage there were a few butterflies in the old stomach — and these were the big Ulysses kind too, not the piddly little cabbage moths you get in your garden.

My main concern was that I was starting from scratch, with a completely new show that needed to be at least one hour in length, and I didn't have any new material.

All of my creative energies and writing had been going in to the TV and radio shows and the last new standup material I had written was years ago.

Luckily for me we live in a country that keeps voting into office a tiny man who talks funny and looks like Mr Sheen, so I do have one or two leftover lines from previous years that still sound relevant and don't have to be completely thrown away.

The thing is, though, a comedian normally gets to work up their material during the course of the year, maybe testing five minutes here, 10 minutes there, and slowly building up a full-length show. I started with nothing for this show and had to go straight into scribbling like a madman to generate enough material to at least fill a half-hour for my trial show.

For those who aren't aware of what performing a trial show is all about, basically it's like one of those secret rock gigs you hear about, where the band performs under a secret name and the people turning up get a huge shock to discover the no-name pub band they thought they were coming to see is actually a more famous artist.

This is the same when doing a comedy trial show, although in my case not only is it nowhere near as cool, but also the audience of comedy diehards knew they were turning up to see a performer test their new material, but didn't know who that person was going to be (famous or otherwise), so it was a bit of a gamble for them.

Thus the danger for your comedy trial show audience: they could come in wanting to hear some high-brow political satire and be stuck with a bunch of fart jokes. Indeed, some people just love a good fart joke.

In a lot of ways it's like comedy Russian roulette — with just as much chance of seeing someone die. So you can imagine my relief when, after it was announced that the comedian trialling material would be me, nobody got up and left. So far so good.

Before I stepped from behind the curtain and on to the floor of the Glitch bar in North Fitzroy, I was hoping to walk off with about half an hour of usable material for what would eventually become a onehour show. After going through all my material, I left the stage feeling like I had been there for about 20 minutes. Twenty minutes? That was less than I had expected and I was panicking that my hope of a full-length show might have to be scrapped, or at least padded out with some song-and-dance number from myself which no one should have to suffer through.

But then I looked down at my cheap stopwatch and discovered that although it only felt like 20, I had actually managed to waffle on for 40 minutes. That was 10 more than I'd hoped! I guess being longwinded and having the ability to dribble a lot of verbal diarrhoea had paid off. The comedy gods were truly smiling on me.

This was reinforced two weeks later when The Sun newspaper in Britain released to the world photographs of Saddam Hussein in his underpants. Comedy gold! That's a news story every comedian can enjoy.

I've certainly found it interesting to discover what I find funny at the moment, as it comes out of my strange, simian brain and through my laptop keyboard. With topics as wide-ranging as Saddam Hussein and the war in Iraq to the intelligence of dolphins and my love of hard rubbish day ending up in my material, I'm beginning to wonder just what the hell is going on in this head of mine. Add to that my obsession with the Michael Jackson trial and its re-enactments (sigh, I will miss them now that it's over) and you have all the makings for a show with a wealth of wide-ranging topics in what will now definitely be over the one-hour limit.

Perhaps one day I might conduct a Big Brother-style sociological experiment on my brain by placing a bunch of tiny cameras in there 24 hours a day to find out what makes my comedy tastes so incredibly varied, but at the moment I'm too busy trying to work out how to get from alien abductions to The Supernanny in one simple segue to care.

So strap yourselves in and prepare to hop on board my favourite ride in the park: a live stand-up comedy show. There'll be twists and turns, ups and downs and maybe even the odd loop-theloop before we're through but I'm sure like me you'll come out the other side asking, "Can we do that again?"

By the way, with me being in this show, this will be one ride guaranteed to have no height restrictions. So as I ready myself to walk the boards, step up to that microphone and stare into the inky blackness surrounding that one bright spotlight staring at me like God for the first time in five years, I can't help but be buoyed by some words of wisdom from a fellow comic about getting back up after a lengthy absence: "It's pretty much like riding a bike — if you do it without the seat on, it can be a lot more interesting." Wise words.

ROVE McMANUS
WHERE Athenaeum Theatre, city
WHEN Tonight until Saturday
HOW MUCH $25-$36
DETAILS www.ticketek.com.au


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Free JackoBy Charles Purcell
July 1, 2005





"Why, Captain Carruthers, you've caught me without my pantaloons!" Rove gets wacky.




At least one person out there thinks Michael Jackson is innocent. Rove McManus reveals why on the eve of his return to the stage.

ROVE McMANUS LIVE

Where Enmore Theatre, 130 Enmore Road, Newtown
When Wednesday to July 9
How much $39.40
Bookings 9550 3666

I have a confession to make. I once confronted comedian John Safran before the stage of the Valhalla Cinema over the fatwa he had placed on Rove McManus. Several hundred people watched as I stood in front of Safran holding a giant sign that read "I Wuv Rove", complete with pictures of McManus and his recently burnt-down office.

"You what?" McManus says.

I asked Safran why he put the fatwa on McManus, only for Safran to say he had already taken the fatwa off.

"Yeah, he did," McManus says. "It was only a gag thing, anyway. It was only to illustrate the point of how easy it is to put a fatwa on somebody. But I knew he was going to do it, anyway, and even if I didn't there was no malice about it. It's just a gag and, holy cow, I make enough jokes about other people, you'd think I could take one at my expense."

McManus is stepping away from the comfort zone of his television show to return to the stand-up stage. One might wonder why the comedian feels the need to do so.
McManus is the biggest name in light television entertainment. He has won three Gold Logies. He owns his own TV production company, Roving Enterprises. He married former soapie star Belinda Emmett earlier this year. By any measure, McManus has made it. There is seemingly nothing left for him to prove.

"I'm just proving I'm a man of my word," he says. "For years I kept getting asked if I was still doing stand-up and I used to say no because of TV and radio commitments.

Now that I don't have all the commitments of a radio show any more I'm really happy to get back up there."

Driving McManus must be the eternal need of all comedians - to keep proving that they are still funny. Seinfeld could buy his own Neverland ranch from the money he made from his sitcom, but he returned to the stand-up circuit. Billy Crystal only needs to work one day a year hosting the Oscars, but he still hit Broadway with his own stage show.

It is part of stand-up folklore that all comedians must make a pilgrimage back to the live scene to prove they still have the chops.

McManus says the main difference going from television to stand-up is the opportunity to improvise, to run with something knowing he doesn't have a fixed time limit holding him back. Will we see a newer, edgier Rove? Hear jokes about the sexual uses of gerbils, perhaps?

He doesn't like the word "edgy" - he finds it too broad - but it's clear we won't be getting his carefully scripted, squeaky-clean TV persona.

"I swear, I cover topical material, I give my opinion on issues," McManus says.

"I talk about the Michael Jackson trial, I talk about [former hostage] Douglas Wood, the whole Iraqi war and Saddam Hussein and what is happening with George W. Bush.

"At the same time I talk about everyday topics and some very left-of-centre ideas."

Michael Jackson, then - guilty or innocent?

"My belief is that he's innocent," he says.

"I think the only thing he's guilty of is having missed out on a childhood. He has the mind of a 10-year-old and, yes, in my opinion he probably does share his bed with children, but there's nothing sexual in it.

"It's like when you were 10 years old and you slept in a friend's bed, there was nothing sexual in it."

The TV host is aware that there is a chance he could die onstage. He has carked it onstage before - "It's terrible, it's the worst thing in the world" - but reckons there are worse fates.

"That's the audience just talking [while you're on]," he says. "That's worse than dying because at least with dying they're paying attention to you."

McManus has been Mr Nice Guy during his five years hosting Rove Live on Network Ten, a persona only briefly interrupted when he said the "f" word at the Logies. Which guests floated his boat?

"The top of my list are Matt Damon and Will Smith, you know when they come in you're going to get a great chat guaranteed," says the munchkin of mirth.

"No one has really pissed me off, but some people have made it tough for me. I found Lisa Marie Presley to be a very tough interview. Whatever the topic was, she didn't want to talk about it."

Nietzsche once said that all higher culture is based on cruelty. Is all comedy based on suffering?

"Yeah, absolutely. I wouldn't say all of it, but the best jokes are always at someone else's expense."

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Back to my roots
http://www.theage.com.au/news/arts/b...321731107.html
June 22, 2005
Rove McManus
Photo: Nicole Emanuel

Rove McManus says he doesn't need to return to the lonely spotlight of stand-up comedy. But he wants to, desperately. The triple Gold Logie winner tells why, while admitting to nerves, anxieties and apprehensions.

"Feeling jittery, Rove? Are you rusty? Getting nervous that you don't have what it takes?" No, not until you brought it up!

Yet these seem to have been the first questions most people were asking me about getting back up on stage to perform stand-up comedy. That and "why?" That's all anyone kept asking me, "Why do you need to go back to doing stand-up? Why do you need to stray from the safety of a television screen? Why do you need to keep quoting me?"

Well, it isn't so much a need but more of a want. I know a lot of people will find this surprising but I actually want to get back to live stand-up. It's what got me to where I am today and it's something I have missed over the years.

Apart from the whys, hows, nerves and frantic writing that come with getting back out to do live stand-up comedy, the one thing going through my mind above all else now is that I can't bloody wait. I truly am looking forward to it and hope everyone enjoys it as much as I'm sure I will.

I must admit when I first committed to the idea of getting back on to the stand-up stage there were a few butterflies in the old stomach — and these were the big Ulysses kind too, not the piddly little cabbage moths you get in your garden.
My main concern was that I was starting from scratch, with a completely new show that needed to be at least one hour in length, and I didn't have any new material.

All of my creative energies and writing had been going in to the TV and radio shows and the last new standup material I had written was years ago.

Luckily for me we live in a country that keeps voting into office a tiny man who talks funny and looks like Mr Sheen, so I do have one or two leftover lines from previous years that still sound relevant and don't have to be completely thrown away.

The thing is, though, a comedian normally gets to work up their material during the course of the year, maybe testing five minutes here, 10 minutes there, and slowly building up a full-length show. I started with nothing for this show and had to go straight into scribbling like a madman to generate enough material to at least fill a half-hour for my trial show.

For those who aren't aware of what performing a trial show is all about, basically it's like one of those secret rock gigs you hear about, where the band performs under a secret name and the people turning up get a huge shock to discover the no-name pub band they thought they were coming to see is actually a more famous artist.

This is the same when doing a comedy trial show, although in my case not only is it nowhere near as cool, but also the audience of comedy diehards knew they were turning up to see a performer test their new material, but didn't know who that person was going to be (famous or otherwise), so it was a bit of a gamble for them.

Thus the danger for your comedy trial show audience: they could come in wanting to hear some high-brow political satire and be stuck with a bunch of fart jokes. Indeed, some people just love a good fart joke.

In a lot of ways it's like comedy Russian roulette — with just as much chance of seeing someone die. So you can imagine my relief when, after it was announced that the comedian trialling material would be me, nobody got up and left. So far so good.

Before I stepped from behind the curtain and on to the floor of the Glitch bar in North Fitzroy, I was hoping to walk off with about half an hour of usable material for what would eventually become a onehour show. After going through all my material, I left the stage feeling like I had been there for about 20 minutes. Twenty minutes? That was less than I had expected and I was panicking that my hope of a full-length show might have to be scrapped, or at least padded out with some song-and-dance number from myself which no one should have to suffer through.

But then I looked down at my cheap stopwatch and discovered that although it only felt like 20, I had actually managed to waffle on for 40 minutes. That was 10 more than I'd hoped! I guess being longwinded and having the ability to dribble a lot of verbal diarrhoea had paid off. The comedy gods were truly smiling on me.

This was reinforced two weeks later when The Sun newspaper in Britain released to the world photographs of Saddam Hussein in his underpants. Comedy gold! That's a news story every comedian can enjoy.

I've certainly found it interesting to discover what I find funny at the moment, as it comes out of my strange, simian brain and through my laptop keyboard. With topics as wide-ranging as Saddam Hussein and the war in Iraq to the intelligence of dolphins and my love of hard rubbish day ending up in my material, I'm beginning to wonder just what the hell is going on in this head of mine. Add to that my obsession with the Michael Jackson trial and its re-enactments (sigh, I will miss them now that it's over) and you have all the makings for a show with a wealth of wide-ranging topics in what will now definitely be over the one-hour limit.

Perhaps one day I might conduct a Big Brother-style sociological experiment on my brain by placing a bunch of tiny cameras in there 24 hours a day to find out what makes my comedy tastes so incredibly varied, but at the moment I'm too busy trying to work out how to get from alien abductions to The Supernanny in one simple segue to care.

So strap yourselves in and prepare to hop on board my favourite ride in the park: a live stand-up comedy show. There'll be twists and turns, ups and downs and maybe even the odd loop-theloop before we're through but I'm sure like me you'll come out the other side asking, "Can we do that again?"

By the way, with me being in this show, this will be one ride guaranteed to have no height restrictions. So as I ready myself to walk the boards, step up to that microphone and stare into the inky blackness surrounding that one bright spotlight staring at me like God for the first time in five years, I can't help but be buoyed by some words of wisdom from a fellow comic about getting back up after a lengthy absence: "It's pretty much like riding a bike — if you do it without the seat on, it can be a lot more interesting." Wise words.

[unfrufru]

http://www.theage.com.au/news/review...724522755.html
Athenaeum Theatre, June 22-25

In a theatre crammed with the unfeasibly young and chirpy, Rove McManus stepped beyond the artificial margins of television with poise.

Stripped of prime-time mediation and the need to pacify the network appetite for all-purpose white-bread schtick, Rovey let rip with a little edit-proof smut.

Expectations are high and highly constructed when half your audience is wearing your merchandise.

Rather than affect a humble comedian posture and discount the conspicuous good cheer in the room, he played the wry star to the hilt.

McManus toyed with the notion of his relatively advanced celebrity and enticed a truckload of laughter in the process.

He struts his structurally taut theatrical stuff in front of four enormous images of himself. Fuzzy childhood pictures of Rove's past provide the backdrop to this back-to-basics production. Playing affably with the notion of his outsize celebrity, McManus' chiding of his own amplified reflection provides some of the show's strongest and most insightful instants.

Even when unprocessed by television, McManus' genial presence immediately demands that you adore him as you would a favourite cheeky cousin.

As a raconteur, he is competent and engaging.

His quotidian insights about council hard waste, for example, are a hoot and his global political insights are entertaining and adequately informed.

But it is when he looks at himself and the bizarre, composite construction he inhabits as a media presence that Rove genuinely shines.

When Rove talks about real things in the real world, he's a competent comedian.

And when he tears the electronic media to bits and reveals the means by which television torments us, he is almost great.

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WHERE would Rove McManus draw the line - would a Kylie joke be funny? What about Schapelle, or Douglas Wood?

Where to draw the line is the art that separates a great comedian from a run-of-the-mill one. The ones who make you laugh until your stomach hurts tend to venture past the point of good taste, but not into the quagmire of disgust.
McManus pondered the question ahead of his return to the stand-up comedy stage in Melbourne last night, his first solo show for five years.

"It's (about) finding the right subject matter for the right audience - what will work in a smoky comedy club is probably not going to be successful in front of the broad audience you'd get at a Melbourne Comedy Festival gala," McManus said.

"I saw people doing jokes about Princess Diana on the day she passed away.

"The way they wrote it or delivered it, it didn't come out as being an unnecessary shock for the sake of making a mention of what happened."

The only thing McManus was worried about when he was thinking of returning to stand-up was whether people would want to pay to come and see him.

As it turned out, they did.

His Melbourne season is virtually sold out, Sydney is close to being so and his show is selling strongly in other states.

His parents will wait until the show gets to their home town of Perth to see it, but brother Luke McManus was in the audience last night, along with McManus's Rove Live sidekick Peter Hellier, Before the Game colleague Sam Lane and Melbourne Comedy Festival director Susan Provan. Wife Belinda Emmett was not there, but is expected to attend during the season.

Returning to stand-up, McManus said, had nothing to do with proving himself, or regrounding himself after three Gold Logie wins. It was about wanting to do it.

"If people think (my feet are off the ground) now, then unfortunately doing a stand-up tour is not going to fix it. It might even make it worse," he said.

"I'm a pretty down-to-earth person anyway. I wear jeans and T-shirts, I shop at my local Coles, I go to the movies, and I won't be sneaking in the back door, I'll be behind you waiting patiently in line."

He welcomed the contrast with television.

"On a stand-up stage, if it's not working you've got the rest of the show to try to dig yourself out of the hole you're in, and sometimes that can be a difficult thing."

Review: Rove's still funny, most of the time
By Martin Ball

AS if winning a swag of Logies isn't enough to sustain his sense of adulation, Rove McManus is hitting the boards with a show of stand-up comedy.

Beginning a nationwide tour in Melbourne last night, Rove and his microphone kept the audience entertained with the classic staples of stand-up - lots of jokes about body parts.

There were the expected breast jobs from Extreme Makeover, and the Chinese woman who didn't have an anus. Remarking on the photos of Saddam Hussein in his underpants, Rove was moved to quip he was the guy who put the "dick" in dictator.

Iraq, in fact, featured quite heavily in the show's content.

Rove didn't hide his contempt for George W. Bush, with frequent derogatory (and funny) comments on the American President. And the show closed with a song-and-dance spoof on Private Lindy England and the goings on in Abu Ghraib prison.

Rove is a short fellow, but he knows how to cope with that - pick on someone who's even shorter. In this case, Anthony Callea. Cruel, but funny - can't wait for Rove to get his comeuppance on that from someone two inches taller than him.

Michael Jackson is ripe for stand-up, and of course Rove took his place at this rich feeding trough, though given the possibilities, the result wasn't the hit it might have been.

The show went well over length, mainly because Rove was enjoying himself so much, he kept adding to jokes midstream.

Clearly, he was trying out all of his material, some of which works a treat, some of which is a bit lame (such as the extended dolphin sequence). No doubt it will tighten over coming weeks as the pretty boy takes his show around the country.

His Melbourne season is virtually sold out, Sydney is close to being so and his show is selling strongly in other states.

Returning to stand-up, Rove said, had nothing to do with proving himself, or regrounding himself after three Gold Logie wins. It was about wanting to do it.

The mostly young crowd seemed content to laugh at anything he said, anyway.

When you're hot, you're hot - even if the porridge is only lukewarm.

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http://www.smh.com.au/news/entertain...e#contentSwap1

Is Rove too nice?

Gabriella Coslovich
July 1, 2006

'If people want me to punch them in the face, they should just say so!' - see i read this as punch me in the face and i thought where's the queue??

Rove McManus... the stand-up sits down - for a moment.
Photo: Fiona-Lee Quimby


John Henry Michael McManus is a dag. So says friend and fellow comedian Corinne Grant, in the nicest possible way. Irish humorist Dave Callan doesn't quite say so, but does reveal that the teenage John McManus, dubbed Rove by his siblings, had exceptional dress sense when the two were growing up in Perth.

"He used to wear a Daffy Duck cap..."

No!

"No, wait, it gets better! With a satin Daffy Duck waistcoat, over a T-shirt of Daffy Duck, with happy pants and Converse runners." He adds: "Nowadays, he's very stylish."

Tune into Channel Ten's Rove Live at 9.30 on Tuesday nights, as an average of 700,000 Australians do these days, and you will find that the goofy teenager from Perth has ditched the happy pants for garb by Arthur Galan, designer to the hip and groovy, creator of paisley shirts and finely tailored suits of velvet, pinstripe and bold contemporary hues.

Like the jockeys on his dad's side of the family, Rove McManus is compact and lean. But despite his height (173 centimetres), he's a handsome man, with an aquiline nose and a mischievous glint in his hazel eyes. "Matinee-idol good looks" is how Callan puts it. McManus's straight-talking wife, former soapie star Belinda Emmett, puts it rather more bluntly. She declared her man a "spunk" when the two wed last year, and many a prepubescent girl agrees. McManus's manager, Kevin Whyte, says he is one of those revered men who "wouldn't be kicked out of bed if he farted".

Not that one imagines McManus would. The prevailing view is that he's altogether too nice. Herein lies his appeal and his Achilles heel. For some, nice is a euphemism for bland.

"It's odd that people kind of say that as a negative," McManus says when we meet at his company, Roving Enterprises. "I don't know whether they want me to walk around and be a prick. If people want, when they come up to me in the street, if they want me to punch them in the face, they should just say so!"

"It's the tall-poppy syndrome," the loyal, protective Callan says. "People forget that Rove did so many hard years on community TV and in stand-up to get where he is now."

McManus, 32, has certainly done the hard yards, but that doesn't mean he should be above criticism. His Channel Ten show Rove Live has been around for six years and McManus admitted when ratings began to slide last year that the show had become "too structured". After reaching a peak of 1.2 million viewers nationally in 2003, the show oscillates at about 700,000 a week, falling or rising depending on the calibre of guest.


When McManus is on fire, he can be very, very good. He has an impish charm that is difficult to resist. Some have gone as far as comparing him to Graham Kennedy, another man whose face was loved by the camera. But reputations are hard to dodge and the one that McManus has acquired over the years is for being slick but uninspiring. Rove Live steers towards the safe, mainstream, non-threatening, apolitical, blokey side of comedy. Certainly, there's risque behaviour on the show, but one man's racy is another man's naff.

Ask McManus whether he feels creatively hamstrung by the requirements of commercial TV and his answer is a slightly hesitant "No".

"We actually have it pretty good, especially for a live show. We have a lot of leeway. We've had American guests who come on the show who are astounded with, for a network show, what we can do. They can't even blaspheme [in the US]. We had a guy streak through the audience the other night. We can have nudity if we choose to have nudity," McManus says, barely concealing his enthusiasm.

The show, however, isn't quite as irreverent and edgy as McManus likes to claim. When gay American comic Scott Capurro was a guest in 2001, the network was unimpressed with his routine, which included profane jokes about the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ, and placed a ban on comedians as guests. Capurro claimed Ten executives had seen a video of his performance and knew exactly what they were getting, but McManus toed the network line, distancing himself from Capurro.

McManus founded Roving Enterprises in 1999, ensuring that he owns the shows he produces, which include Rove Live, the footy show Before the Game, the ARIA Music Awards since 2002, the defunct comedy series Skithouse and one-off specials. The company churns out Rove Live merchandise such as mugs, T-shirts and caps.

His office is not at all suggestive of a company director; it perpetuates the image of McManus as hyperactive man-child. Long and spacious, it is crammed with so many soft toys - one of McManus's many fixations - it could double as a playpen. This lot were won during lunchtime competitions between him and his staff at the nearby food court.

His walls are covered with movie posters, photos of him and Emmett with Hollywood stars such as Sylvester Stallone, and a bizarre print of his hero, Bert Newton, in the guise of Mona Lisa. Rove's other obsessions include wrestling figures, Pez dispensers, hippos (his favourite animal), birds, nature documentaries and large roadside attractions such as the Big Prawn, the Big Pineapple, the Big Banana or, as he said off-air on Rove Live, the Great Big F---ing Whatever.


In 1997, when McManus was the host of The Loft Live, a chat show on community station Channel 31, he had a five-year goal. "Within five years, I wanted to get invited to the Logies," he says, straight-faced.

Invited. Not nominated. "I'm very protective of the Logies," he says. "It's our awards night and I think people should embrace it. That's why I get a bit grouchy with people who beg, borrow, steal to get a ticket so they can walk the red carpet and be seen there and then spend the whole night in the foyer having drinks, so there [are] empty seats in the room. I just think that's pretty disrespectful."

By 2000, not only did McManus get his longed-for invitation, he was nominated, unsuccessfully, for a Logie for most popular new male talent. By last year, McManus had notched up three gold Logies and three silver. This year, he went home with another silver Logie, for most popular television presenter.

Yet, McManus's treasure chest of Logies doesn't convince everyone. His old-school, variety-show humour divides people. But his defenders say that criticising him because he's not edgy enough is missing the point. Even Grant, who left Rove Live because she was feeling unchallenged, believes it is ridiculous to complain that the show is light.

"Rove is for people who come home tired from work and they don't want to think about their mortgages, the cost of their kids' schooling, their jobs. They just want to switch their brains off and laugh. It's light entertainment - that's the format of the show."

McManus is not so naive as to think the show doesn't have a use-by date; he just doesn't think it's any time soon. "I'll quite happily keep doing this till I fall off the twig and, unfortunately, it's not my call to make. If you go out the front of GTV9 in Melbourne, I think there are still fingernail claw marks from when Daryl Somers was dragged out of that place. So, yes, out of our hands, unfortunately."

TV critic Ross Warneke says favouring McManus is his "boy next door" image. "He is not flash, he is not perfectly spoken, he stumbles over things, he is like Daryl Somers before his ego got the better of him. Then there's his loyalty to Belinda and I think that picks up a lot of points for him. I think a lot of people appreciate that."

Emmett has spent most of her adult life fighting cancer. She was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 1998, aged 24. She was in remission when the couple met at the end of 1999, but a year later was found to be suffering secondary bone cancer.


Emmett has called McManus her "rock" and he has said she is his greatest reward. "If the choice had to be made between this and her, I'd hand back every single Logie," McManus said after winning his second gold Logie in 2002.

Although in fragile health, Emmett is regularly photographed at McManus's side. In recent photos she's been looking stronger than she has in years, but McManus won't be drawn on rumours she may have overcome her illness.

"It's an exceptionally personal thing to go through, exceptionally personal, and so that's how we keep it," he says with a certain rawness. "There are times in the past where I've attempted to [talk about Emmett's health] and it just gets blown out of all proportion. People don't respect the situation. They want to sensationalise it."

The couple have been together for six years and there is one personal question McManus doesn't mind answering. Are they planning to have children? "Oh, of course!" he says, but will not elaborate. "That's enough of an answer."

This year, McManus was ranked 21 in BRW's list of top-50-earning entertainers, making $4 million last year.

"I think people sometimes get confused with how much comes into the company that gets put into projects and how much actually gets put into my bank account," he says. "But that's OK, that's OK."

For now, McManus is happy doing what he's doing. "This is something that I've always wanted to do and now that I'm there I'm loving it, and I want to be able to stay, not for my own ego, and not to prove people wrong, and not for anyone else's benefit, just because I love it. I love it, you know?"

Rove Live airs on Ten on Tuesdays at 9.30pm.

[Mythor]

Rove in Leno's hot seat:

Originally Posted by The Daily Telegraph

HE'S the cream of the comedic crop in the local television industry, but Rove McManus could be laughing all the way to the bank if his assault on the US is a roaring success next week.

Armed with his wit, bright smile and long-standing manager Kevin White, the three-time Gold Logie winner will travel to America on Monday for a series of business meetings as well as a scheduled appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on Wednesday.

The pint-size king of TV entertainment will hang up his hosting hat to switch seats and guest star as a well-known Australian comedian on Leno's popular NBC variety program.

A spokeswoman from McManus's management company Token Artists was tight-lipped on further details, but said the much-loved entertainer had scheduled the trip to coincide with the fact that there would not be an episode of Rove aired on May 6 due to the Logie Awards broadcast.

``It's merely a case of a producer from Jay Leno seeing Rove and following him up to make an appearance on the show,'' the Token Management spokeswoman said. ``In terms of fitting in an overseas visit to his schedule, next week was the only opportunity he had because there is no show next Sunday.''

She said The Tonight Show was the only TV appearance McManus was booked to do, but that he would also be attending several business meetings in Los Angeles.

While fans will be able to watch the Leno-McManus gag fest on the Comedy Channel on Wednesday, the small-screen funny fella will be jetting back into Oz in time to make a play for his fourth gold Logie at TV's night of night's.

Very interesting!