See, we’re still only little. We’re really just Juniors ourselves – three isn’t a very big number. But it’s a big achievement for us.

So, we’d like to say a big thank you to all of you who have helped us get this far – those of you who have done more than others, you know who you are. We’ve sent you all baskets and hampers and copious bottles of alcohol. They’ll come in the mail soon, we promise. We really couldn’t have done it without you all. xo!

If you had been subscribed to our mailing list by last Monday, you would have noticed our competition to win one of two double passes to the Art & Copy screening we’re hosting on April 26. The entry details were simple: send us your best “I can’t afford tickets to film screenings because I need to eat in order to survive” recipes.

Thank-you to everyone who entered — we love you unconditionally. Although you all steal way too much food from flatmates, housemates, parents and others in general, you pack of rotten thieves — we’ll never live with you.

The two winning entries were chosen for their usefulness and detail. Not to mention these guys are funny. Get cookin’ y’all!

Recipe One: STIR FRY, by Janneke.

No matter how broke you are, no matter how empty or mouldy your fridge, or rat-invested your pantry, always keep a few of those 2-minute noodles tucked away somewhere. I’m not talking about Maggi noodles from the pasta section of Woolies, I’m talking about those Asian ones with Chinese writing that you can buy for 49c each at the mini-mart down the road.

Boil up those noodles – maybe 2 packets, cos that’s the bulk of your carb fix. Then comes the fun bit. Finding leftovers for the fry. The end of the broccoli? YES! Is that stinky ham? YES, it won’t kill you if it’s cooked! Half an onion? OK! One stray spring onion? Clove of garlic? Half a capsicum? All good!

Turn the heat up in the fry pan, heat with oil. Throw all ya bits ‘n’ bobs in and cook until everything is soft and steamy so all bacteria is history. Toss in the noodles. And for the finishing touch add some sauce action, mix in Oyster sauce, soy sauce, and some chilli paste for extra pang.

Bon appétit!

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

Recipe Two: MACARONI CHEESE, by Josh Gardiner.

I’ve been skint many a time. There is no better ‘feelgood’ meal than macaroni cheese.

It’s cheap, it’s easy and it’ll keep you full for two days.

Loose list of ingreds:

- Some plain white flour – weevils optional.

- Some butter, salted. Homebrand costs about $1.29. That’s pretty cheap when you consider a cow’s teat has been pulled for it. Poor thing.

- Some milk. Full cream, you pussy. Again, think about the cow. Would she want you to dilute her mother’s milk?

- A block of mature cheddar. The sharper the better.

- Some macaroni ­ little elbows not those rigatoni, broadband-cable like ones.

- Some of your flatmate’s seeded mustard.

Method:

Do you know how to make a white sauce? I can come around and help if you want. But I’ll try and let you know with words.

1. Get a saucepan, medium size.

2. Melt a large knob of butter in there on a very low heat.

3. Sift in some flour to this, mixing all the while, to make a relatively thick paste. Lots of butter is good to start with so that you can do this.

4. You’ll need to start adding milk slowly while stirring this paste, do it slowly as you want to control the consistency of the sauce. Keep it thick as long as you can and SLOWLY stretch it out.

5. As it thickens keep adding a little more milk until you have a good amount of sauce and at the thickness you want to submerge the pasta in
later. You can add more flour as you go to make more sauce if it’s gotten really thin and it’s still not enough quantity of it. Just be sure to sift
it when you add it and stir constantly so you don’t get lumps. Really, the best thing to do is make sure you’ve got a fair bit of paste at the
beginning. P.S. Add away, but remember, too much flour will taste, well, like flour.

6. When you’re happy with it, grate the shit out of that block of cheese and put it all in the your white sauce. (Actually, save a little bit of that cheese… More on that later.) Melt it down and turn off for now.

7.  Boil some water in a pot and cook the macaroni. You shouldn’t need help for that so I won’t say more.

8. Combine the macaroni with the sauce in whatever pot is easiest, adding a hearty dollop of seeded mustard and pepper and a touch of salt if you need.

9. Turn on the oven grill, put your creamy cheesy meal in a baking tray and sprinkle that remaining cheese on top and toast the top up. Shit yeah.

Writing these intros can be such a bitch. Trying to think of something witty and original is super ghey, plus you get that added extra of thinking no one will laugh at your jokes. So seeing as we’re awesome journalists now, we decided to consult the almanac of Awesome Journalism 2009: Wikipediac.

“William James (Wil) Anderson (born 31 January, 1974) is an Australian comedian, performing stand-up, as well as on television and radio.”

That pretty much sums it up. Funny dude, funny name, famous enough to need a Wikipedia entry… Basically, Wil is a pretty rad dude and funny as balls. How funny? Check this out! These are the names of his stand-up shows since 1998:

“Wilosophy (2009); BeWILdered (2008); Wil of God (2007); Wil Communication (2006); Kill Wil (2005); Licence to Wil (2004); Jagged Little Wil (2003); Wil By Mouth (2002); Wil Of Fortune (2001); Who Wants To Be A Wilionaire (2000); Willenium, Terra Wilius (1999); and I am the Wilrus (1998).”

Ok, enough of that. We asked him all the questions us juniors might want to know about figuring out life, parents, being creative, the ‘process’, and other such in depth conversation. Read on and find the meaning of life.*

Jr: When was the first time you realised you could make people laugh?

Wil: I can’t remember when I first realised I could. That part of it still comes as a bit of a mystery to me. But I certainly remember when I realised I wanted to.

When I was about fourteen I lived on my parents’ farm in the country, and we only had two TV channels. Yes, that’s right kids, two. (And we used to eat nothing but pebbles and were grateful.)

We had Southern Cross, and the ABC. My two favourite shows were the Ted Robinson produced Big Gig and Andrew Denton’s Money or the Gun. I loved those shows because I finally saw people who seemed to look at the world the way I did.

I found the notion that interesting ideas, and counter-culture thoughts, could be presented through humor immensely appealing.

I could never have imagined back then that twenty years later I would have been lucky enough to work with both Ted (on The Glass House) and Andrew (on The Gruen Transfer).

Jr: And when did you then decide you wanted to be a comedian?

W: I can remember the exact moment. My appetite for comedy had been growing for a few years, and for my seventeenth birthday my Mum took me to see Billy Connolly live. Now I guess going on a date with your Mum on your birthday isn’t that cool, but I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen.

I saw this man talk for three hours in a row, swearing his head off, and have three thousand people aged ten to eighty piss themselves. (In the case of the older ones sometimes literally.) I knew that moment it was what I wanted to do for a job.

Jr: Yes! A lot of us can definitely relate to that feeling. But were you parents supportive?

W: I don’t think my parents were rapt when I told them I was going to give up being a journalist to tell dick jokes for cash.

But my Dad always said the secret of life was to find something you liked to do, work hard, and you would find a way to get people to pay you to do it. And comedy was what I wanted to do.

But secretly I don’t think it was until I bought a house they finally realised it was a proper career. They figured if someone would loan me cash based on knob gags and Shannon Noll material it must be a real job.

Jr: Ha! Yes! Do you think you got your humour from them or are they completely unfunny?

W: My Dad is a farmer and has a dry sense of humor. My Mum is the really funny one. I remember after I had got in trouble for saying something, a journo rang my Mum and asked: “Are you embarrassed by your son?”

Mum simply replied: “When he was one I took him to the local shopping mall and he did poo on my face, nothing he has done since then has embarrassed me as much!”

Jr: When you were starting out did you have a ‘plan b’ – we heard you studied Journalism?

W: I had a teacher at school- let’s just call her “Mrs Brown”- who I told I was thinking about becoming a comedian. She told me I wasn’t funny, and wouldn’t make a living doing it, and I should get a proper job…

It deflated me. So I ended up studying journalism.

When we started doing The Glass House I always wanted to call it Stick It Up Your Arse Mrs Brown, so she would have to see every week she was wrong.

As soon as I started comedy I quit all my other work. I didn’t want a plan b. I saw an episode of Oprah where she was interviewing Roseanne and she said: “The problem with back-up plans is you fall back on them.”

Jr: Totally. Do you think though that having that background helps you be a comedian now?

W: It got me used to producing something to a deadline. Being a comedian isn’t about being funny, it’s about being funny on demand.

Roy and HG told me they often get approached in the pub by people telling them they had friends who were funnier than them. Their only response is: “Yeah, we are just able to be funny when the red light comes on.”

Jr: When it comes to writing new material; does it come naturally while you’re doing your daily thing or do you have to sit down and consciously work at it?

W: The one thing I have learned is that it is all these things… and sometimes none of them.

Sometimes something funny happens and I just note it down (that’s why I have to take my notebook to the pub or I come home with notes all over me like Guy Pearce in Memento.)

Sometimes I have a set assignment (ie. Write something about mother’s day for a column, or I want to write something about gay marriage for my stand-up act) and sometimes it just comes out magically fully-formed on stage.

Sometimes it’s a combination of all of it. Sometimes none of it works. Sometimes the trick is to stop staring at the page, walk to the shops to grab the paper, and in your head something clicks.

Russell Brand says his life is a series of embarrassing incidents strung together by telling people about those embarrassing incidents, but my life isn’t that interesting so I have to work at it.

Jr: OK, so we’ve sent you these questions and you said you’d answer them on the plane. Obviously you’re on your way overseas to do some shows… How well does comedy translate across continents? Do you find you have to change your approach?

W: People tend to laugh at the same things. Language is normally the thing you have to be wary of. For example I was doing a gig in New York a couple of years ago when I said: “I don’t mean to hang shit on George Bush!”

Of course they don’t have that expression there. So everyone stared at me like I literally wanted to “hang shit” on George Bush. Like I was some sort of defecation decorator, think Brown Eye For The Bush Guy.

Jr: You’ve done TV, radio, penned columns, authored a book and of course done stand-up shows, but sometimes all at once… Is this all part of being a great entertainer? Or if you had it your way would just concentrate on one area?

W: I tend to get sacked a lot, so I tend to do a lot of things because I have a hideous mortgage and no other skills.

Seriously though, having more than one string to your bow certainly makes you more employable, but you do run the risk of being jack of all trades, master of none.

In the last few years I have been trying to pick fewer projects (ie. Doing ten weeks of Gruen rather than 42 weeks of Glass House) and try to do them better.

I guess ideally I would love to get to a point where I could do stand-up full-time and just dabble in the other things.

But then again, while I don’t love TV, radio, writing etc in the same way I love stand-up, there are things about each of them that I really enjoy and I am certainly glad I have had the opportunity to try them all.

And like anything, no matter how much fun, you can get bored and that is the death of creativity. So after a long stand-up tour it’s great to forget about it for a month and go and work on some tele or write a book.

Jr: Tell us about The Gruen Transfer – How did you find yourself working with Andrew Denton on a show about ads?

W: I have a general theory that you should try to work with people who inspire you, or people you admire, and the idea will work itself out.

Andrew came to me and said he wanted to do a show that “gave people the tools to understand advertising, using humor, like Frontline did with current affairs”.

At that stage, that’s all the idea was. But I think if someone like Andrew wants to work with you, you take his hand, close your eyes, and jump off a cliff.

Jr: So is hosting shows like The Gruen Transfer and The Glasshouse the ‘top job’ to you? Or do you have other aspirations?

W: To be perfectly honest, as much as I love both of those shows, hosting television is about the least fun of all my jobs.

In fact, it’s the one that feels most like a “job”. I think the best way to put it is, I don’t think tele is fun to make, it’s fun to look back on something you have made.

(I also find writing a little like this. I don’t love to write, I love to have written.)

I certainly have some other aspirations, big and small, but if I could still be working in comedy at age 65 and never had to get another job, I would consider myself a success.

Jr: And lastly, any advice for young wannabe comedians?

W: Don’t do it… I’m not that good and I certainly don’t need competition for jobs from young, ambitious and talented people.

And only do it if you “need” to do it. If you need to, then nothing will stop you. If you are just doing it for money, or fame, there are much easier ways to get those things… like advertising.

* Ha! Got you. No meaning of life here!

Oh Junior! What a great thing you are. You bring us people to have a drinky with and make us look cooler than we really are. What a debt we have to pay! You are our master. Bid us what ‘ye shall…

Oh? What was that dear leader? More drinking you say?! Then drinking it shall be! On the second Wednesday of every month, of course without fail. We shall continue to take your wayfaring creatives, who wander in alone and confused, but leave drunk and slightly less confused but still pretty confused. For that is the way of the junior creative.

To see their gleeful wayfaring faces, click Read More, and you shall know what it was like to be one of us last Wednesday night.

Yo kids. We thought we’d post up some pics of the last Junior event. Look at all the cool and fun people who come! You too could be one of these. Mel Peters was the guest speaker. You’ll know her from LoveBento and she’s the current Creative Director at Citrus. She had some great tips about being a junior, finding inspiration and how to get the best out of digital. We’ll try and get her slides up here if you missed it. We also raised $80.20 for the bushfire appeal. Thanks to everyone who donated. We were super impressed with your skills of giving.

Tomorrow night is the March Junior event. Yes we know, so soon! It’s going to be a hoot. Plus we’ve got the Creative Director of an up-and-coming Melbourne advertising agency coming along to speak. Get your drink on and hang out with us! Get there circa 6pm so you can see the speaker at 7pm. Woo-ee!

Want to know how to have a good night out slap-bang in the middle of the week? The kids who came along to our second Junior event at Sweatshop in Melbourne will be able to tell you. Matt Kamen from The Guild of Commercial Filmmakers served up some handy tips for young creative production-virgins. Be sure to pop down February 11 for our first event of 2009. It’s sure to be a big one.

Dear loyal Junior reader,

This week we are sans interview. Which means a big blue block of interlude. I know, I know. Lame. But don’t fret young reader! As your eyes scan this page and compete with the angular background lines, we are in the final steps of launching new aspects to the site. We’re not saying anything just yet, so you’ll have to sit and wait. But trust us, they will be fun.

Next week is our second Junior event. If you didn’t come last time because you were unsure about the whole shebang, have a look at the photos from our last event. See those lovely faces? They’ll be your friend. They may even lend you $5 for a Coopers. Wouldn’t that be nice!

The details are over there at your left. (Or in some browsers, somewhere else entirely. Sorry about that.) It’s next Wednesday, the 10th of December at Sweatshop, 113 Lonsdale St in the Melbourne CBD. Get there around 6. We’re going to have a speaker at 7, so make sure you get there on time.

And with that we conclude this big blue block of interlude. Next week we’ll be back with another big interview with big ideas for little people.

Yours truly,

Junior

Last Wednesday we held our very first Junior drinks. Seeing everyone there made us realise the true reason Junior exists: Drinking! Oh, and having a really good time. Because life’s too short to be lame and boring. And we’re not into that sort of thing.

Special thanks to our guest speaker Jeremy Wortsman from The Jacky Winter Group. You were hilarious and entertaining. And if you missed out, don’t stress. We’re holding the next event at Sweatshop (again) on December 10. For those who came, your new facebook photos are posted behind the link that says ‘read more’.

We know you’ve all been asking, ‘WTF? Junior? This better be good, or else I’m going to leave horrible comments on your blog under anonymous.’ Well grab a glass of water and take a few breaths people, we’re about to explain.

Junior is a blog-like website full of interviews. It’s also a night out full of alcohol. We’re interviewing successful creative people from several creative industries worldwide to ask all the questions every young creative wants to know. Questions like: “Why can’t I get a job?”, “What do I need to do to get your attention?” or, “How can I fake a sickie without getting busted on facebook?”.

Whether you’re the unpaid work experience kid at an ad agency, or the photography studio floor cleaner, we’re right there with you. We’ll even meet you in a bar for a drink to trade stories. That’s where the alcohol comes in. In fact, think of Junior as a kind of ironic AA group: like-minded people sharing stories, drawing inspiration, crying and clapping at one another. Of course, there will be alcohol. But there won’t be clapping. Thank-god.

Subscribe to the RSS feed and you won’t fail.

Yours truly,

Junior.

P.S. In case you’re wondering, the very first interview is posted this Wednesday, 29th of October, 10 am sharp.