This is an insult! I’m a professional.’ Halfway through day one of week 15 of the third season of Australia’s biggest sketch-comedy show, and the A-list comedienne had had enough. She was tired of crappy roles and crappy scripts. Now here she was at the door of the writers room, giving us hell. She was a goodish writer herself, but none of her stuff—loose, aleatoric in the Melbourne cabaret style—was being used any more. She had a right to be angry and the only thing that took the edge off her protest was that she was dressed as a giant rotisserie chicken. Even as she was denouncing us, I was admiring the skill of our costume department, who had rendered oily skin and white meat with a bit of chintz and kapok.

The sketch was some piece of suburban bollocks by the gun stand-up and morning FM radio star Dave O’Neil, the most relentlessly suburban writer among us, and who was at that stage in a fast-food phase, working through the different brands sketch by sketch (a process that culminated in the Australian cult classic movie Take Away). Earlier we’d watched them filming ‘Rotisserie Chicken’ on the writers-room monitor, which played the feed directly from studio cameras. Three much loved Australian actors rotated slowly on metal-painted wooden poles their costumes strapped them to, singing about how great it was to be a roasted chicken.