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Articles
CHARTBUSTING 80s GOES GOLD!
JOSIE FEATURED IN THE MOONEE VALLEY COMMUNITY NEWS!
 July 24, 2007 11:00 AM By Charmaine Camilleri Show queen: Essendon's Josie Parrelli celebrates her ARIA honour. Picture: Joe Mastroianni AFTER seven years, Essendon's Josie Parrelli has been formally recognised for her cult-leading music variety show, now the highest-rated program on Melbourne community television. Parrelli is the creator, presenter and producer behind Channel 31's live one-hour show Chartbusting '80s, which features 1980s music, clips, live performances and interviews with legendary singers, such as Cyndi Lauper, Brian Mannix and Martha Davis. Last month, Parrelli was honoured with a Gold Disc from the Australian Recording Industry Association for achieving gold sales for the show's first DVD. ''I just wanted people to love the '80s like I did and everything else that has come has been a surprise and a bonus,'' the 30-year-old says. ''The hardest challenge was trying to convince them [Channel 31] that an '80s show would work.'' Soon after, the first ratings for the show came in with 19,500 viewers, Chartbusting '80s became the most-viewed program on Channel 31 and quickly reached wider audiences. ''The station hadn't had a response to a show like this before,'' says Parrelli, who grew up in Perth. ''I don't think there was ever a bad time in the '80s, from the fashion to the music to the bands. You'd see people in the street with big hair and ripped denim. Everyone had a place in the '80s.'' The show, which has more than 150,000 Melbourne viewers tuning in each week, is also broadcast in Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane and New Zealand. Over the years, its style and format has changed with Parrelli's ever-changing extreme dress sense and on-air antics with sidekick, Jeff Jenkins. The show's first DVD was released in 2005, featuring music clips and interviews with artists. It broke the ARIA Charts, debuting at No.28 and peaking at No.15, a feat never before achieved by a music show. Until two years ago, Parrelli worked as a hairdresser in Moonee Ponds and Essendon to support the show, which is now largely funded by sponsorship and fund-raisers. ''There's always the struggle there [with money] but you wouldn't have it any other way because you're giving joy to people.''
ONLY WAY IS UP, BABY
 The Age, Melbourne She is a loud, lycra-loving dag and Josie Parrelli won't go changing, writes Bridget McManus. She's too "vulgar" for commercial television and "not ethnic enough" for SBS. She's been called fat and ugly by viewers, and told by a network executive to shut up and let her male offsider do the talking. People are always asking her why, after seven years hosting a tacky 1980s music show on public television, she won't move on. But Josie Parrelli, the big-haired, lycra-loving, daggy-dancing star of one of Channel 31's longest-running programs, Chartbusting 80s, is doing what she loves. And if she can ride the '80s revival wave long enough, she might just wash up on mainstream TV. Former station-mates Rove McManus, Hamish and Andy, and new SBS gardening guru Vasili Kanidiadis made the crossover, so why not a brash, Wham!-worshipping, hairdresser from Perth with southern Italian roots? "I'm seeing how far the wings of the show can carry me," says a toned-down version of "Queen Josie", lounging at Loop bar in the city, where her fourth compilation DVD was launched. "A large production house associated with the ABC loved the concept, but when they gave me the contract they wanted 100 per cent ownership and 'Ms Perelli' - surname spelt wrong - could stay on in a consultancy role. They said, 'We can't understand why you're turning this down'." Queen Josie may be a shambolic megalomaniac, who lambasts her cowering co-host Jeff Jenkins, lewdly introduces best-forgotten clips from the likes of the Chantoozies and Nick Kershaw, and flings herself at the audience during signature horror-karaoke segments, but her creator is no fool. Recognising a niche market, Parrelli first approached Channel 31 in 2000 at the age of 22, with the idea of running a clip show. When spare air-time demanded a presenter, she rose to the occasion, adding Jenkins to the mix when he introduced her to her idol, Molly Meldrum, whose biography Jenkins is writing. The odd couple - who Parrelli describes as "like George and Mildred" - and the show, have come a long way since the station's primitive early days of second-hand pneumatic tapes and transmission glitches. Back then the pair had to "pull riff-raff off the street" to make up a dismal studio audience. Now they turn people away from their weekly live show which has a new following of retro-mad teenagers. With an average weekly audience of more than 150,000 in Melbourne (Chartbusting 80s is also broadcast on public stations in Sydney and New Zealand), they are one of C31's top-performing shows. Parrelli has quit hairdressing to work the MC circuit, and this year made her fifth appearance on the Logies red carpet. With public television facing the frightening prospect of being left behind by the digital revolution, the only way may be up (to paraphrase an '80s chartbuster) for C31 personalities such as Parrelli. According to the chairman of the C31 board, Peter Lane, if the Federal Government does not accommodate public stations in its "digital action plan", C31 will remain in analog territory, which is being vacated as households upgrade their televisions to digital. No money was allocated in the recent federal budget for public TV's conversion to digital, while commercial and national networks have been given a double helping of broadcasting spectrum to enable them to run analog and digital services in parallel. Analog services are expected to be switched off entirely in Australia by 2012. "We're holding strong on our audience figures for the last 12 months and even went up last month, which indicates that we're getting an increasing slice of the diminishing analog audience. Undoubtedly, if we had digital, we'd be growing," says Lane, who notes C31 Melbourne had an audience of 1.395 million viewers in April. C31, which exists on advertising sales and sponsorship, is lobbying the government for a fixed share of the digital spectrum. Parrelli is the first to acknowledge that her outlandish character would need taming to fit the mainstream ideal of the female presenter. "I've had meetings with commercial station executives and they've said to me: 'Shut up, sit down, don't wave yourself around, Josie. Let Jeff do the talking and then you'll get picked up. "When I was growing up, the men on TV always seemed so dominant. You had Daryl Somers being really rude to Jackie McDonald (on Hey, Hey, it's Saturday!). I remember thinking, 'I don't like that the girls just stand there being submissive.' So I wanted Chartbusting 80s to be the reverse." Network bigwigs are not the only ones offended by Parrelli's style, or lack thereof. A few years back, a Green Guide critic penned an open letter to her, begging her to stop dancing. On her show, she reads out hate mail criticising everything from her thighs to her teeth to her racial origins. One night, she faced the camera Dixie Chicks-style, scantily clad with slurs written across her body. As well as reliving the '80s ("such a positive time"), Parrelli wants to revive what she sees as the dying art of music television, and a music industry that has "lost its soul". "In the '70s and '80s, artists had been working up to the point when they released a song. Their passion was there and we felt it. Whereas people from Australian Idol are going the opposite way. They're told they're talented and loved and then six months down the track, they have to do the hard work and they don't understand. They're over the songs they have to sing and so we're over it, too. "Gone are the days when people would release two hit albums that would have seven songs that had charted in the top 10. Now, on the merit of one hit that's been downloaded by teenagers onto mobile phones, they're doing a promotional tour. "Music in Australia is suffering without a show like Countdown. JTV's good because it offers alternative music. But generally speaking, unless a band gets picked up by Rove, or they do a guest program at 3am on Rage, no one knows who they are. Video Hits has kids presenting who have come off reality shows. They have no interest in the artists." Perhaps such new talent should be cutting its teeth the old-fashioned way, on public television? "C31 is a station now, like every other station. I've had crew who left the show say to me, 'Josie, you're still doing that caper, you're still on C31'. Yes, I am, but I'm doing something I love. "It would be awful to think that if C31 doesn't get a digital licence that all these shows finish. People need an alternative. There's only so much reality TV we can be insulted by." Chartbusting 80s airs live on Thursdays at 9pm (repeated Saturdays at 10.30pm) on Channel 31. www.myspace.com/chartbusting80stv
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