Call us delusional, but when Radio National called a while before Chrissie and asked whether we wanted to do a seven-week stint on a Friday morning, saying silly and irreverent things about the week's news, we saw dollar signs!
No, not the meagre appearance money offered by RN to cover the cost of getting over to Toowong for the live-to-air gig, but the lucrative contracts, product endorsements and babes that would flow naturally from a brand-new career as radio personalities.
So in mid-December, we sat in front of presenter Gerald Tooth and for a few minutes, regaled the station's national listener with a fairly lame impersonation of Clarke and Dawe doing Roy and HG.
The boys and girls in the production booth thought we'd done okay, so we repeated the dose a week later. Still fine, but by the time we got back to the Bug office, there was the same disappointment that not one cashed-up commercial radio station had left a message, pleading with us to co-host a daily program on a salary that would make Jamie Dunn blanch.
Our third gig was on the Friday after the Boxing Day tsunami, and the production people seemed unperturbed when we announced we'd have to do something on the Asian disaster, seeing it had dominated the week's news.
Asked for a sound check before going on air, one Bugger announced: "And I'll be doing wave after wave of tasteless tsunami jokes at about this level." Everyone laughed and no one seemed worried. We were delayed going on air by the need to fit in one RN's regular conservative commentators ponitificating on something from a southern capital.
But then we started - and stopped after a somewhat truncated segment.
Roll the tapes forward a few hours, to when the show's producer called to say she'd be "suspending for the time being" our holiday season stint. We took that to mean the gig was over. We'd been axed! Ouch!
She said we were "too edgy" for the Radio National listener.
So back to the segment and did we overstep the bounds of sensibility and decorum in the wake of such a shocking and horrible disaster?
Obviously we hope so. But there was nothing in the segment that poked fun in any way, shape or form at the people who suffered such a calamity and lost everything.
We made fun of the materialistic nature of Australian society in that on a day when countless people are losing their lives, Aussies still had enough money in their pockets post Christmas to fight over bargains on the retail sales tables. We also took an almighty swipe at the Australian and US governments' disgracefully meagre initial offers of aid for Asia. We still wonder if that was our greatest sin.
While the segment apparently provoked an undisclosed number of complaints, they weren't the grounds for the axeing. Which raises another issue.
Since winning the election, it seems almost offensive to criticise the Howard government for any reason. If our segment was axed through a mixture of misplaced political correctness and a fear of offending the government, heaven help the supposedly independent ABC. For if Auntie doesn't take the fight to Howard and stand up for itself, especially when the government gets Senate control mid this year, then some of their own ABC careers might be as short-lived as our own.
