With the return of Hey, Hey, It's Saturday to our screens the night before last with unbelievable ratings, and Jimmy Barnes and John Farnham back on stage at the AFL grand final, I've had a thought that the good old days weren't so bad after all.
Louise is still trying to come to grips with Vera Lynn's song Til We Meet Again, recorded in September 1939, hitting the top of the charts in Britain a couple of weeks ago.
On radio, Alan Jones is going strong in his late 60s, and Bob Rogers, the old '60s rocker , is still big. And Burt Bacharach, now close to 81, is about to tour again to sell-out audiences.
So what's wrong with being old, I thought, if you've still got all your marbles?
Charlie has got all this research that says the oldies are still the ones with all the money and the time to spend it. They've been through everything that life can throw at them and know how to cope.
But why am I saying this? Regular readers of this column know what is going on in the world. Louise reckons that it's only the readers of the other morning paper that haven't got a clue.
So I thought, why did Ron Walker, the chairman of Fairfax, toss it in just because he turned 70? He looks fit enough and swims every day, but perish the thought of him in a pair of budgie smugglers. Perhaps it was the budgie smugglers, not his age, that a couple of fund managers objected to.
I got those clever people at Goldman Sachs to run the numbers of Walker's time at Fairfax, and it all looks good. Over the four years from fiscal 05 to fiscal 09 (that's stockmarket talk), sales grew from $1.89 billion to $2.6 billion, and profit (EBITDA) from $502 million to $605 million. Debt went up a bit, but interest was still well covered, 2.8 times over.
The really big change though is that the revenue mix went from 3 per cent digital (ie. the new world) to 10 per cent. Media watchers estimate News Corp's revenue share from online is only a smidgin more, so Fairfax is not so sleepy after all.
So good news for Burt Bacharach and Ron Walker and all the other old guys. It seems they still know how to make the room sing.
I hope Roger Corbett makes it to be the new chairman. Wait till they find out that he was born in 1942. Nothing wrong with that I hope - so was I.
1942 was a good year for some, but not others. The great Australian, Weary Dunlop, was in the depths of peril in a prisoner of war camp. He was a great leader and I still like his line, as good today as it was then, "lead, follow or get out of the way".
