Celebrity parking spot petulance is my favourite type of celebrity petulance. When Frank Ocean won a Grammy last month, fellow nominee Chris Brown refused to join the standing ovation, seething over a parking bay punch-on in the lot of a West Hollywood recording studio just two weeks previously.

Famously, Clint Eastwood faced court in 1991 for allegedly using his pickup to push a parking interloper out of his spot at Burbank Studios. The space invader was a mere project assistant for an animation company. Her car was a crummy Nissan Maxima. Eastwood won the court case and the studio stumped up for the damages bill.

This week, parking politics played out in the lower key world of AFL football, when star forward Travis Cloke was initially fined $1000 for repeatedly parking in Collingwood CEO Gary Pert’s allocated bay. To most observers, it seemed an over-the-top punishment. Certainly, in the parking wasteland that is Olympic Boulevard, spots are hard won, but in a week in which Eddie McGuire fantasised about fining the club’s best midfielder $20,000 for what is known in AFL circles as “doing a McGuire” — the Cloke follow-up gave the impression of a fine-happy management and an unhappy playing group.

Pert, belatedly realising that he hasn’t looked like this big a tool since he was stood on by Gary Ablett for mark of the century, relented on the fine in exchange for Cloke performing community service.

Cloke, playing the mea culpa card, admitted mea coupé: “As a senior player, I have to set an example. I recognise that and while I thought this was an in-house issue, it’s blown up in the public and I want to put it all to bed.” It says something for either his tremendous stupidity or the size of his cohones that he repeatedly pinched the CEO’s car space while simultaneously bending him over at the contract table.

A personal parking spot packs a proprietary punch. This piece in Vulture outlines the politics of Hollywood parking. Veteran actor Stephen Tobolowsky describes ‘Glee’ parking as a caste system, where ‘you had the cast parking in three different parking areas depending on how cool they were’. Will Smith, aware that too good a spot creates feelings of jealousy, asks for his to go unnamed. Harrison Ford, for the same reason, parks with the grips and the caterers in the general lot.

Turn the celebrity temperature down a few thousand degrees and you have the most famous example of an Australian parkocracy — the (now deceased) spaces just behind the gatehouse at Channel 9s former Bendigo Street studio.

‘Until you made it there,’ says veteran voice announcer Pete Smith, ‘you hadn’t made it. To get a position was a real accomplishment. I finally made it after 45 years. I just outlasted them.’

Printed signs were part of the Bendigo Street rigmarole. When Smith was awarded his Medal of the Order of Australia for services to back announcing and Copperart, his parking designator was touched up to reflect ‘Mr Peter Smith OAM’. Parking status was something people talked about. ‘John Blackman couldn’t get a spot,’ Smith laughs, ‘and joked constantly about changing his name by deed poll to ‘Visitor’. Graham Kennedy and Bert Newton would have had high ranking spaces, but they had even more special parking arrangements next to their personal caravans.’

Tony Martin was part of The Late Show team that did nearly a year’s worth of pilots for Channel 9 before the show became a smash on the ABC. ‘At Bendigo Street, you often knew you’d been sacked because your parking place was gone. That’s how we found out Channel 9 were not taking The Late Show. We turned up one day and attempted to park our cars and the spaces were marked ‘reserved for cast of Family and Friends’.’

A veteran Australian comedy writer remembers his favourite moment in the Channel 9 car park: ‘It was 2003, Eddie (McGuire) was the undisputed network star, and six or seven production staff were camped at the end of his allocated space, just staring forlornly at the strange vehicle that had materialised there. Eddie wasn’t at work yet, but you could tell he was coming. And you could tell by the blank stares and the chin scratching that this was a fucking disaster.’

When I wrote Players, with Tickets Thompson as the bad boy star of TV3’s Leather and Lace football show, the much storeyed politics of Bendigo Street parking got a run. This is the relevant chapter. It relates to Tickets being summoned to TV3  following his assualt of a homeless man during his controversial street talking segment, ‘Tickets and Dickheads’.

Players: Ch3 by Tony Wilson