Salubrious

A grand and intoxicating innocence

  • She/Her 🏳️‍⚧️

Hey, don't ask me my opinion -- I'm nobody. Just pretend I'm not here.

I mostly just post about things tangentially related to The Simpsons, or Morrowind or The X-COM Files.

29 | 🇦🇺 | ⬅️⬅️


I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if you're reading this it's unlikely you've ever heard of the Hooley Dooleys and if you have the you probably forgot about them long ago. They were a children's music act here in Australia in the late 90's early 00's, like The Wiggles except they weren't y'know, The Wiggles. When I was but a strange young boy~ of 6 or 7 I witnessed them on TV and rather than any of the emotions they intended for their audience to feel, I felt sadness. A profound and heavy sadness that has stayed with me these last 20 or so years.

I was going to go into a breakdown of the 5 free to air channels I watched as a kid and what I watched on them in my usual fashion of going through a strange diversion before getting to the point, but I wrote it and it bored me so let's just cut to the chase.

So the Hooley Dooleys began in the late 90's on ABC, our national broadcaster but at some point they changed hands. Where they ended up if memory serves me right (and memory is the only point of reference I have, there is no information that I can find online about where they were broadcast after ABC and belive me I have looked) was Channel 7 / Prime. At least as far as my experience goes, Prime was the bottom of the barrel.
You had ABC which was ad-free for well reported news, locally produced shows and imported british shows when we ran out of local production. Then there was SBS, also government funded, for international broadcasting and softcore porn. Channel 10 had The Simpsons and other american stuff. 9 / NBN had a mix of the american stuff nobody wanted to watch and the local stuff the government didn't want to fund. Then there was Prime, which was like the runoff from NBN. Nobody1 I knew watched Prime and to me it felt like where the death throes of attention go to evaporate into nothingness.

I knew of the Hooley Dooleys. They weren't new to me, but I'd never really witnessed them. One bored afternoon I was over at my aunt's house1, where critical thought was off limits and if you're watching something you had better enjoy it. The Hooley Dooleys came on and they sang We are the Hooley Dooleys and how do you do and what I saw wasn't childrens entertainers. I saw 3 grown men putting on a happy face who desperately wanted to be The Wiggles but just weren't. One of them was wearing a fuckin' soccer ball skullcap for gods sake. I felt embarassed for them, and I felt what I thought was how they must have felt, which was god awful desperate shame. In my mind these men knew what they were (that is to say, what I thought they were), which was an act scraped from the bottom of the barrel who were themselves trying to scrape success from the bottom of another barrel in the abortive hope that they could be The Wiggles.
I felt just awful for them, I wanted to tell them that it's okay if they quit and that it would be less of an indignity than if they persisted. For some strange reason which I'm maybe only coming to put meaning to more than 20 years later while writing this, I pitied those Hooley Doolies.

Other than searching up a youtube video of the song We are the Hooley Dooleys to link in this post, I don't think I've witnessed them since but that memory and that feeling sure has stayed with me. I'll never know exactly how these people felt about that stage of their careers, but for myself as an adult looking back at their childhood that moment is the earliest point I can think of where a fear of failure, or a fear of not living up to one's hopes or expectations came up, and it was projected at these three men, the Hooliest of Dooleys. That same fear has been where so many thoughts or dreams ended for me, things that I never started or tried because I was worried I wouldn't be good enough or wouldn't equal whichever monolithic figure I was subconsciously comparing myself to like so many Wiggles. You know, as an adult I feel sort of ashamed for projecting those feelings onto the Hooley Dooleys because however they might have compared to The Wiggles or whatever they might have felt about their careers and themselves, they sure as hell tried. Whether it was a heartfelt dream to be childrens entertainers, or an attempted cash-in by being a close approximation to something successful they fuckin' put some of - if not their whole - ass into it.

So as I've run out of thoughts or things to add to this I'll say one last thing and is: Fuck yeah, to those Hooley Dooleys. Whatever success - or failures - you might have had, fuck yeah to you and may I and others have even a fraction of what it took for you to put yourselves out there.


  1. My aunt's house was the one place where I ever witnessed Prime by anything other than accident.


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in reply to @Salubrious's post:

remember when we actually made tv and film? nowadays it's just suburban white people dramas and uplifting family films about dogs. it's like the film output of francoist spain except instead of authoritarian morality it's just a bunch of institutions lead by fundamentally incurious peoole.

It's a real sad state our local media is in. While I was writing the older version of this chost and going over what I used to watch in he early 00's it made me really nostalgic and also massively bummed me out. I was going through old TV guides online (trying to find any mention of the Hooley Dooleys so I could confirm which channel they were on) and I remembered so many locally produced shows that I'd forgotten.

I haven't watched actual television for going on 10 years now, but the impression I get is that we don't make much anymore and what we do make is the safest, least creative bare minimum achievable.