There’s no business like show business … The Tivoli circuit’s best vaudeville, variety and review artists and all the behind-the-scenes drama, starting with Sydney in 1892, up until the Tiv’s demise with the arrival of television in the late Fifties; includes ‘An Interval with Barry Humphries’ (pp.206-207), whose mother insisted the Tiv was ‘an appalling den of iniquity’, featuring ‘very common shows – the sort of shows they like in Sydney’. Regardless, in 1956, Melbourne housewife Edna Everage debuted in the first television transmission of Channel 7, broadcast from the stage of the Melbourne Tivoli. Soon after the Tiv burnt down ‘and a great tradition of proletarian entertainment perished with it’; foreword by Bert Newton; photographs, reproductions of posters; includes a sixty-minute CD collection of rare archival recordings; inscribed by the author to Barry Humphries in the year of publication; a wonderful, historic association.
