"CEPT" AND ITS ATTRIBUTES

IN Australia in 1983, fame was still relatively democratic. That year, one of the most popular TV shows in the country  starred a craggy former painter turned comedian. In the same 12 months a locally made movie called BMX Bandits made a star of a gangly young girl with frizzy ginger curls, freckles and crooked teeth. The Paul Hogan and Nicole Kidman of that time  are hardly recognisable as the celebrities they are in the 21st century. But at that moment, there was far less of a cookie-cutter predictability  to Australian fame. Even the opening of a significant landmark in May 1983, the launch of the Sydney Entertainment Centre, played to that. The event featured another unlikely Australian star: the camp, balding maraca-shaker Peter Allen. And so on the second evening of the Westfield Ultra, when Channel Ten news ran a story on the race, particularly its scrawny, aesthetically challenged oldest participant, Cliff Young, oddballs might just have bee