WIL AND TESTAMENT

Y2K? It's a joke, isn't it? Comedian Wil Anderson certainly thinks so, writes STEPHEN DUNNE Melbourne comic Wil Anderson is talking about the end of the world and our current obsession with an arbitary numerical changeover. "I think it's a load of crap. It's absolutely ridiculous that people get excited over a date which actually wrong anyway," he says. Wil is bringing his show Wilennium (as heard on JJJ Breakfast) to the Globe. It deals with, among other things what to do on the big NYE 1999 - especially if the doomsdayers and milennium buggers are right and our whole technological infrastructure collapses. "Well, we won't notice in Victoria, because our machines don't work anyway," says Anderson. As widely known, our current calendar, based on the birth of that famed Galilean hippie, is wrong by a number of years: "It's anywhere from four to seven years out. So chances are the milennium happened in '93 or '97 anyway, and was only celebrated by Meatloaf re-releasing I Would Do Anything For Love, But I Won't Do That!," he says. Anderson has no time for clever people who insist (correctly) that 2000 is merely the last year of the 20th century, yet his solution to this temporal conflict is appealing: "Let's face it, we're pretty happy to party and it doesn't matter what for, 'Oh we've won the World Cup, let's have a few days off,' Oh, i got free fries at McDonald's, let's go and get pissed'. We don't really need much of a reason, so I just say let's take the whole year off." Anderson is also happy to take the long-term perspective: "The point is we're measuring 2,000 years of a Christian calendar in a world that's been around for like a billion! Even if you have an elementary understanding of time - you've bought a couple of Dannii Minogue calendars and you've watched Back To The Future a couple of times - you've got to understand that measuring 2,000 years on that big spectrum is like building a road from Melbourne to Sydney and putting the direction signs at Newcastle. It doesn't make any sense. It's like making a pair of pants for Mal Colston and only measuring his wrist." And you thought the end of the world was scary... Taken from Daily Telegraph, Metro Friday 16 July p15.