I love it when someone demonstrates a sense of the absurd.

Several years ago Melbourne radio station Nova FM ran a TV ad for the Hughesy Kate and Dave breakfast show. It featured Dave Hughes in a wheelie bin being trundled into the path of an oncoming tram. Hughesy’s reaction when he realised where he was? What else would anyone do but yell at the tram driver, “Go round… go round!”

The absurdity of a tram leaving its rails to navigate around an errant wheelie bin made me crack up, no matter how many times I saw the ad… and it still has the same effect, years later. It’s the first in this series of four starring the breakfast trio (Dave Hughes, Kate Langbroek and Dave O’Neil):

Postscript: Around the time the ad was showing, I was filling my car’s fuel tank at one of our local service stations. Two four-wheel drive vehicles covered in mud pulled in to refuel, and several early-twenties guys emerged. Now, as someone who cares about the bush I’m not all that impressed with “Toorak tractors” [1] or their drivers at the best of times, and even less impressed when city-dwellers take to the bush. The amount of mud on these vehicles, and the fact that it almost completely covered them, seemed to shout that they’d been driven fast and hard on bush tracks – a practice that cuts up the tracks and spoils the bush experience for those who follow. But I had to laugh when one of the vehicles obstructed the other’s path, and one of its occupants yelled to the other driver, “Go round… go round!”

[1] Toorak tractors: a disparaging reference to expensive 4x4s that are driven in an urban environment as a status symbol, typically for the school run, and rarely or never leave suburbia; Toorak is one of Melbourne’s wealthiest and most expensive suburbs.