The clip is from 2000, but it’s 1990s Australia at heart. The man and woman on screen have a shared vibe of “primary-school music teacher who once came uncomfortably close to joining a cult”. Both foreheads are hung with puffy fringes. His shirt is acrylic cobalt panelled with faux-tribal patterns, her lavender is offset by a loosely knotted gauze scarf. Their singing barely crests a monotone, their dancing never exceeds the self-conscious white Australian sway.

“Go you good thing,” is their refrain in unison, with the conviction of a trainee waiter recommending wet sawdust as a main. “Go, and go in hard. Go you good thing, go.”

Then the line that became iconic: “Go you good thing. Put a gap in ’em. Go you good thing, go.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest John Farnham on The Dream

The singers are prerecorded, their image superimposed on a live feed from a Channel 7 studio. In that studio stands a choir. And … John Farnham? Yes. He’s singing the same song but Farnsy is giving it the big ones, conducting the choir with sprints and hand claps and euphoric spirit fingers galore.

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This was how Roy and HG signed off the Sydney Olympics and their late-night show, The Dream. They had run a contest called Hearts of Gold, a public appeal for a new Olympic anthem. In Roy and HG style, it was impossible to tell which songs were artfully mediocre kitsch and which were genuinely terrible.

The 2000 Sydney Olympics had created years of preparatory anxiety, and plenty of people were sick of the subject before the event began. But when preparations gave way to a fortnight of shared success, with local athletes raking in medals and visitors extending their acclaim, most hitherto cynics couldn’t resist the joy.

The Dream was an even bigger surprise hit. Late each evening, an exhausting day of Channel 7 jingoism gave way to a different tone. Bruce McAvaney and company revered the Games; Roy Slaven and HG Nelson skewered them. The latter were fictional sports broadcasters played for years by John Doyle and Greig Pickhaver. Their style: largely deadpan, occasional ranting, a fondness for robust euphemism, centring Australiana in content and language to extract its inherent comedy while also satirising it. “Put a gap in ’em” was right in their hitting zone.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Roy Slaven and HG Nelson with their invented mascot, Fatso the Fat-Arsed Wombat, on The Dream. Photograph: Supplied by Channel Seven

They were a niche product. They had tried TV without great success. Their main outlet was their Sunday afternoon show This Sporting Life on youth radio station Triple J. The listenership wasn’t huge but it honed their act. The structure was regular: for three hours between chunks of music the pair would stitch together the sport stories of the week into a tale of performative absurdism. Characters overlapped, facts were invented, increasingly random ideas were thrown in and reprised. You ended each show feeling included in a massive in-joke.

As the Sydney Olympics approached, the stitching got ornate. Over a couple of years, with the news filled with Olympic squabbles, the jokes began to connect week to week as the cast offered depth and development. Central were local officials like John Coates and Kevan Gosper, who were also lanced on John Clarke’s show The Games, most memorably via a 100m track that was 94m long. A raft of Olympian athletes offered variety. Add Gosper’s unfortunate daughter Sophie, the perfectly named doping boss Dick Pound, the gutturally rolled IOC man Jacques Rogge, and champion eventing horse Kibah Tic Toc. By the time the Games rolled around, Roy and HG had built a whole alternate reality.

They launched into their television fortnight with gusto. Their opening sequence parodied the network’s dramatic athlete montage. They were cheerfully unrepentant in dubbing Atlanta “The Toilet” when mentioning past Games, and rebranding Sydney’s official mascots as Olly, Millie and Dickhead, before The Dream introduced its rival mascot in the form of Fatso the Fat-Arsed Wombat. There were moments that a show might no longer get away with, and there was the ongoing pleasure of sailing close to the wind.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fatso the Fat-Arsed Wombat, the unofficial mascot of the Sydney Olympic Games. Photograph: Saberwyn

They dubbed their own commentary, taking the piss out of weightlifting, synchronised swimming, Greco-Roman wrestling, taekwondo, water polo, archery and fencing. But one sport made the show a sensation. “Now, The Dream cameras are once again at the Superdome for the men’s gymnastics floor routine. Roy, it’s a wonderful night of pure strength. Alexei Bondarenko with the lucky socks on, and he knows how to party. He really knows how to have a good time.”

Word of mouth went wild. Within a few days swimmer Michael Klim was holding Fatso while receiving a gold medal

Their invented terms for various moves were gleefully anatomical. Gymnasts landing front-first on the ground did a Battered Sav, which if rotating on their hands would become Spinning Off the Flute. Doing the splits was the Flat Bag. Opening one’s legs in the air was a Hello Boys which, if rotating, might become a Spinning Date, a Crazy Date or a Party Date. Finish off with a Close the Door or a Dutch Wink, and back to one’s feet for an I’m Home.

It was simple but expertly done. Before internet virality this had some parallels: the show was after 11pm each night and could easily have vanished, but those watching wanted others to share it. Word of mouth went wild. Within a few days swimmer Michael Klim was holding Fatso while receiving a gold medal for the freestyle relay, while his teammates held boring yellow kangaroos. Bigger names agreed to interviews, or requested them. Athletes spoke of compromising their events because they had wanted to stay up late and watch.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Roy Slaven and HG Nelson prepare the crowd for the commencement of the closing ceremony for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. Photograph: Hamish Blair/Getty Images

The hosts rode the wave. Recurring gags built momentum: the nightly cry of “Hello Bolivia!” callbacks to the Antwerp Games, using “showcase” and “gauntlet” as often as possible, cutting to Herb Elliott locked in the Olympic village in the style of Big Brother. The Dream was heavily responsible for the celebration of Eric the Eel Moussambani, the swimmer from Equatorial Guinea who could barely stay afloat, gasping to the finish of his 100m heat all alone in a beautifully slow time because his rivals had been disqualified. Roy and HG commentated his heat that night and the story grew from there.

There were the one-liners, like Roy describing a bad dive as “a cup of hot fat with a hair in it”. There were the tirades, about Americans en masse, or the sanctity of home advantage, or after real life echoed Clarke’s parody with officials setting a gymnastics vault five centimetres too low. “They should be named, and they should be forced to stand outside Stadium Australia with a sign, saying: ‘Idiot.’ Then a further sign: ‘Ask me about it.’”

By the end of the second week Ian Thorpe was a guest, Farnham was singing and ratings were booming. The network handed over its entire diving-pool rig to film a bomb contest for the mascots. Olly, Millie and Dickhead had IOC-badged name tiles on screen for their plunges off the 10m board before Fatso stepped up for his finale, a huge splash and straight to the bottom of the pool. The dear departed Drew Morphett commentated it: “Well done to Fatso, the bomb king of Sydney.”

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This was the joy of The Dream. It was a cleansing draught of bicarb soda to offset the saccharine stodge of the Olympic diet; the daily dose that made enjoying the rest possible. It came out of nowhere, but from a couple of practitioners who were in prime condition for the gig. It was bold and interesting programming from a network that usually shirks that. It made dagginess a centrepiece. Don’t doubt the power of anything that made people want to hear Go You Good Thing twice.

And it contained wisdom as well as wit. “Believe you me, Roy,” said HG after commentating Eric the Eel’s epic swim. “You will remember that long after you have forgotten everything else about the Sydney Olympics.” If he was talking about the show that broadcast it, then 20 years later, he’s exactly right.