Ian Cover of the Coodabeen Champions. Credit:Craig Sillitoe CSZ "They roll through dirty Richmond / on to Westgarth station / and they talk of other things to hide their grief / and mostly the discussion turns / on everybody's chief concern / how to get a better set of teeth". I came late to the radio show that could only have been created in Melbourne. The Coodabeen Champions have been broadcasting from 1981, but I was away up north, out of range of the ABC from Victoria, for most of those years.

Visiting Victoria on irregular weekends brought the strange show to the speakers of my car every now and again and I really didn't know what to make of it. You couldn't begin to imagine a rugby league radio show from Sydney or Brisbane or Canberra delving into any of the weird and hilarious territory inhabited by the Coodabeens. Coodabeen Champions Greg Champion, Tony Leonard, Ian Cover and Jeff Richardson. That these blokes chortling and singing and telling tall tales knew their footy was evident. But they were taking the mickey and reshaping the great game into a form of comedy that only a Victorian audience, sophisticated about sport, knowing by instinct that football was more than a game, could appreciate. The songs with lyrics and ideas sent in by listeners and given voice and guitar accompaniment by Greg Champion were often brilliant in their observation of not only coaches, players and clubs, but put them often into physical, cultural and social settings that quite transcended any other form of football commentary anywhere else.

It's a long way to Geelong was to an AC/DC tune and spoke of frustrations instantly familiar to every Melbourne driver: "Hit the Princes Highway / cross the Westgate / roadworks at Laverton / now we're sure to be late / would be quicker / on the bus". Yes, and the songwriters took delight defining the social standing of various clubs' fans, particularly those of Adelaide's two teams: "Oh, it is the biggest mix-up that you have ever known / Me father is a Power man, me mother she's a Crow / Oh my Daddy is blue collar, from Ethelton came he / my mother is a Beaumont girl she went to MLC". Two clubs in the same town, in short, were as distant from each other as the Orange and the Green in Belfast. In the Coodabeens' hands, I learned Melbourne couldn't get a crowd when the snow at Buller was falling and the private chalets beckoned, that too much had changed at the MCG ("I want to watch a game from where Bay Thirteen used to be / Or go back to what used to be behind the Punt Road goals / and buy some sushi where they sold hot dogs and chiko rolls") and, to the tune of Springsteen's Born to Run, that the Members of the MCC were a blessed breed ("by day we sit in the boardrooms of our Daddies' companies / at night we drive down Balwyn Road in our four-wheel-drive machines / raised on Melway map 59"). And so, when I moved back to Victoria a few years ago, I made it my business to be driving in the Victorian countryside between 10am and midday on winter Saturdays, the Coodabeens turned up loud, teaching me about the state I was living in and the game that was born in it. I still do. Those fake talkback callers to Torch McGee – Lance from Lara, Cayden from Caroline Springs, Pearl from the Peninsula, Wayne from Wantirna and all the rest – do more than amuse: they offer context about the state's cultural tribes and their burning need to get things off their chests.

The Guru is plain weird, his convoluted wisdom somehow making sense through no sense at all. "It says in The Bible, Book of Shane 3, 11 – it is harder to win a Premiership than it is to put a needle into the eye of a camel." The Coodabeens' regular chats with country football characters offer insights into the smallest Victorian communities, where everything – except CFA business during an emergency or the mere rumour of a visit by Daniel Andrews – is set aside for Saturday footy. And they remember forgotten champions, winners of the Gardiner Medal which was last awarded in 1999, unearthing wonderful stories about what happens to once-shining football players when they hang up the boots. Quite a few seem to have bought pubs. I have never met any of the Coodabeens: Greg Champion, Torch McGee, Billy Baxter, Jeff Richardson or Ian Cover. They exist for me in the air – an uncommon part of Victoria's cultural landscape; a small bunch of fellows who grant us the gift of laughter each week. This weekend, the show celebrates its 1000th episode.

Thirty-five years. Even the ABC radio series Blue Hills ran for only 27 years, and it didn't serve up too many laughs.