‘It’s different’: Robert Irwin’s razzle-dazzle gets big thumbs up from Sam Pang

Sam Pang has won the Gold Logie for the most popular person on Australian television. And in a showstopping surprise that capped an uncommonly entertaining ceremony, he was presented with the award by a tattered and torn Sharon Strzelecki – Magda Szubanski in her first public appearance since her prolonged cancer battle – dressed in Australia Zoo fatigues and looking for all the world like she’d just emerged from a tussle with a crocodile.

“I grew up watching television at the feet of my parents – they wouldn’t let me on the couch,” Pang joked in his acceptance speech. “But when you’re watching television in this country, you never think you’re going to be on it.”

Speaking in the media room backstage, he said it was a particular honour to receive the top award on a night when Deborah Mailman and Andrew Denton were being inducted into the Logie Awards Hall of Fame.

“I’ve become close with [Denton] over the last few years, and then for Sharon to be there, it was all surreal,” said Pang.

In a world that sometimes feels hopelessly shrouded in gloom and conflict, the 66th TV Week Logie Awards landed as something as welcome as it was unexpected – a warm embrace that did its very best to encompass Australia in all its breadth, strangeness and diversity. And Pang’s win, which makes him the second non-white person to take home the top gong, provided its perfect end.

This is the 70th year of television in this country, and while there are those who’d happily write its obituary, Sunday night’s ceremony showed there’s life in the old dog yet, and a good deal of love for it, too.

The choice of Robert Irwin as host was inspired. Groomed almost since birth to perform in the spotlight, he shouldered the unenviable task of fronting Australian TV’s favourite piñata – everyone loves to take a swing – with grace, humour, and a tight-fitting single-lapel tuxedo whose buttons seemed designed to pop open at the merest ripple of a well-honed torso. Wardrobe malfunction? Only if the fasteners didn’t pop as planned.

He danced, he joked, he shed his tux for the more familiar khaki bushwear, he draped an enormous snake around the tensed neck and shoulders of the never not-tense Luke McGregor, he did the worm on stage with Peking Duk. Yes, Pang was a tough act to follow, but with his distinctive style of enviro-showbiz razzle-dazzle, Irwin made this show his own.

He stamped his mark from the beginning, with a pre-recorded skit that incorporated Russell Coight, Glenn Robbin’s caricature of an Irwinesque figure. Then, as the ceremony proper kicked off, Irwin delivered a heartfelt acknowledgement to country, almost certainly the first-ever acknowledgement of that sort to grace a Logies. On a night on which Mailman basked in a standing ovation and the palpable love in the room, Goolagong won best miniseries, its star Lila McGuire was voted most popular newcomer, and so many other nominees were First Nations people, it was more than fitting.

Before the bleaters at Sky, now known as News24, start crowing about cultural elites, take note that this Logies made space for everyone.