Undeterred by not being on the guest list, Crikey and Crullers turned up to Crown Casino for the post-Logies celebrations and joined dozens of autograph hunters in the hope of pressing the flesh with their heroes.

Despite lack of media accreditation and being on just about every network’s hitlist for one reason or another, Crikey rocked up to the Crown Entertainment Death Star with loyal understudy Crullers in tow to get the dirt on the whole shebang – and to take a few celebrity snaps along the way.

As the photos below will testify, Crikey and Crullers weren’t exactly dressed to the nines, so there was no way even these two silver-tongues were going to sweet-talk their way into an official shindig.

So we settled for the next best thing, hovered at the base of a set of escalators that led from the function room and waited for the galaxy of stars to shoot through the buzzing horde.

First to head our way was Uncle Doug Mulray, accompanied we presume by Mrs Uncle Doug, who stopped for a chat with manager extraordinaire Glenn Wheatley and his wife, Ivy Nightclub impresario, Gaynor.

As the group split, Crullers pounced on Uncle Doug, thrust out the hand and said “Doug, I love Beauty and the Beast, and you’re far more witty and intelligent than your predecessor, but could you liven the show up a bit and be a bit more antagonistic?”

Now admittedly that little bit of flattery about Dougie being wittier and more intelligent than Stan Zemanek probably doesn’t mean a heck of a lot, but Doug’s response was out of all proportion – “thanks. Look, I’d love to talk, but f*** you!”

Doug said it with his trademark impish grin, so it was hard to tell whether he was saying it in jest or not, but not to worry – we got ourselves our first quote of the night.

Sadly, Doug’s predecessor as Beast and Crikey favourite, Chairman Stanislaw, was nowhere to be seen.

After the Uncle Doug encounter, we had a chat with Crikey Sole Subscriber Blackers and his lovely wife Cecilia. Blackers had nothing but kind words to say about the whole do.

We then conducted extensive exit polling and the overwhelming opinion from those in the rarified atmosphere of the Crown ballroom – and remember, most of them are three quarters tanked – was that host Wendy Harmer was not a hit with the crowd.

From what we saw on the box, we tended to agree.

The true barometer was talkback radio the next day, where Pricey gave it to Wendy with guns a blazing, suggesting that Bert Newton should get the gig again.

No arguments from us here.

Pricey kicked off Monday’s show on the 2UE breakfast slot and right from the start was bagging Harmer’s performance – Pricey having seen about the first ten minutes and turning off the idiot box in disgust. That was as much as Crullers could bear of Harmer’s performance, so he has no hesitation in seconding Pricey’s call to give Harmer the flick from future Logies duties.

Occasional Pricey talkback caller Anthony from Chippendale opined “what has the Australian viewing public done to deserve that?” and suggested that he would be sending his condolences to the Harmer family after Wendy died a dozen times on stage at the Logies.

So who should get the gig next year?

Sadly, Andrew Denton won’t come back for an encore performance, so he appears lost to the Logies, at least in a hosting capacity. Shaun Micallef was pretty good in our book last year so he would be a more than adequate host, but the Logies are screaming out for the return of Moonface.

We saw a poll in one of the suburban freebie papers during the week asking whether Bert was better than Rove McManus. Are you kidding?!

Rove can’t make a one hour weekly show interesting despite snaffling every two bit local and international “celebrity”.

Bert puts on a two hour gag-fest every morning. The cattle he’s forced to work with (and this is said with the utmost respect) is limited to Belvedere’s and his lame limericks, John Foreman’s “have you been reading the personals” daily gag, a daily cooking section and an hour and a half of Moira and Ed’s infomercials.

Bert stole the show yet again, although he did give the gutter humour and much bigger run than he usually does on GMA given his licence in the later timeslot.

Overall, our extensive surveying after the event seems to have come up with a consensus that it was a pretty dull night inside.

Interestingly, one of our many sources from inside the event tells us there was nary a station owner in sight – no Packers (except the recently re-branded “Jodhi”), no Stokes (although little Kerry’s son was there), no-one from Canwest… and no-one from the Government.

Cathy Freeman – OUR Cathy – was kept waiting in the queue with the great unwashed outside the Channel 9 after-party. Channel 9 had a mortgage on the Entertainment Battlestar and basically told the other networks to P-off out of there and go stage their own parties elsewhere.

Heat nightclub, where Elton John was going, was THE place to be. The sloppily attired Crikey and Crullers didn’t even bother trying to wangle their way into that one.

Your two intrepid reporters spent a lot of time at the bottom of a set of escalators waiting for the megastars of the Australian television industry to emerge. Gee it was exciting as pair after pair of legs appeared from atop the escalators and you waited anxiously for what seemed like an eternity to see if the body attached to that pair of pins belonged to one of our heroes or just some soapy star(let) whose name we had to glean from the chattering throng.

The good thing about the night was the legends who Crikey and Crullers pounced on were ignored by all of the tracky-dacked punters – the likes of SBS’s newsreader Lee Ling Chin, Dateline’s Logie-winning Mark Davis, ABC World at Noon / Sydney evening news reader Tony Eastley, and legendary long-serving Four Corners EP Peter Manning.

We had a great time feigning huge excitement at seeing someone from Aunty whilst all the Fox FM types and soapie junkies just looked on bemused.

Whilst this website is a vanity publication for Crikey, we’ve actually never run a photo of the editor in 27 months but that is all changing today:

Here’s Crullers with SBS newsreader Lee Ling Chin:

And what about Crikey with multiple award winning SBS journo Mark Davis who picked up a Logie for his marvellous East Timor reporting:

But the majority of fans hanging around along with Crikey and Crullers certainly belonged to a different demographic. For some reason the crowd went nuts when this Ali G type slid down the side of the escalator (albeit somewhat clumsily) so Crullers just had to get his photo with him and give the Crikey logo a fair old plug. Crullers will award himself 7 Eddies out of 10 for this gratuitous cross promotion with this bloke who appears on some Pizza show on SBS and turned up at the start of the night with his own cheer squad:

Crikey and Crullers – men of the people that they are – took plenty of photos with the punters to give Sole Subscribers a feel for the type of person that hangs around Crown on Logies night to do a bit of celebrity spotting.

Here’s Crikey himself lining up a few more Sole Subscribers, the “Dandy Boys”:

In case you’re confused, a couple of definitions might be handy to put this photo into context:

Dandy – N; 1. A man unduly devoted to style, smartness, and fashion in dress and appearance. [The New Oxford Dictionary]

Dandy Boys – N; Young men hailing from the outer Melbourne suburb of Dandenong. Definitely not to be confused with “dandy” above.

And the best dressed bloke of the night was definitely this chap who had a marvellous pair of tracky pants on and got incredibly excited with his camera when confronted by every two-bit soapie star:

(Before you go on, Herald Sun editor Peter Blunden has plucked this photo of me with the stupid smile taking the piss out of this nuff nuff and run it in the Herald Sun’s gossip column today without explaining the context and trying to pretend his paper doesn’t ban Crikey. But poor old Pete has once again perpetuated the ban by failing to name the website.)

A young lady who’d won a ticket via a Fox FM promotion was nice enough to empty the contents of her TV Week showbag on the floor so we could take a happy snap.

You can probably just make out the showpiece of the showbag, the Logie-shaped chocolate bar.

And here’s Crullers with a couple of prospective Sole Subscribers, one of whom asked Crullers whether he’d seen Shakira yet, to which Crullers naturally responded “Shakira who?”

Highlight of the night for Crullers was getting his photo taken with the delightful Jessica Rowe, Channel 10 newsreader extraordinaire.

Jessica is every bit as charming and glamourous in person as she is behind the news desk and was gracious enough to tolerate the tired and emotional Crullers as he pestered her with a string of questions about how he can get “Tim for Tea” around at Chez Crullers and what it was like working with Ronny Wilson and Tim Webster.

Crullers, Jess and Crikey were knocking back a few with the equally lovely Rebecca Wilson and her cohorts from The Fat, Dr Turf and Peter “Wilko” Wilkins, when who should rock up but the follicularly unmodified former Test cricketer of the year, “Colin” Funky Miller. Funky just happened to be out with an ex-girlfriend at 2 in the morning and this photo of the lad with big drinking Wilko and Crullers is a real 2am special:

Soon after telling us that he’ll be lunching with Pricey in Sydney later today, Turfy was almost involved in a jobbing incident with a seedy looking Crown Casino patron (excuse the tautology) magnificently attired in white suit and white leather shoes with black toe caps. Turfy diffused the potentially volatile situation with aplomb.

After all that excitement, it was well and truly time for Crikey and Crullers to hit the road and crank up the Logies post mortems.