With his bone-dry wit, he has turned a three-minute spot on national TV
into one of Australia’s most potent soapboxes. Just don’t ask John Clarke to talk about himself. By Larry Schwartz.
“John Clarke, thanks for agreeing to this interview at such short notice.”
“It’s a pleasure. I was on the golf course when I got the message that you wanted to talk. The 17th hole. I ran. You have no idea how much I enjoy talking to the press.”
“Yes. We appreciate it. I notice you’re a little out of breath, sweat on the brow …”
“I rushed straight back. I was worried that you might change your mind. It’s been months and months since I was last approached and you can’t let these opportunities go by.”
“I was hoping to make this a little more personal. About your life. I hope you won’t find it too intrusive.”
“Not a chance. Let’s face it, I’m hardly going to say anything I’d later regret …”
JOHN CLARKE will cringe when he reads this story. He will dislike it intensely. Not because there is anything in it that is necessarily unpleasant. He will simply disapprove that a story has been written at all.
The truth is that the actor-performer did not rush off a golf course. And though we did meet and speak for more than two hours at an inner-suburban coffee shop and had several lengthy telephone conversations, he declined to give an interview.
He had no special insight to impart, he said, no new project to promote. He hardly needs a forum for his views. His three-minute mock interviews on ‘A Current Affair’ provide opportunity aplenty for potent, political exposure of absurdities in national affairs.
Sneaking in on a commercial network, his idiosyncratic humor resonates with
a far broader audience than he might otherwise reach.
It might seem unusual to talk with little restraint to a journalist you hope will not write about you. But it’s not out of character. Clarke delights in interaction. Artist Michael Leunig remembers running into him in Carlton once. Clarke suggested a coffee. Four-and-a-half hours later, they got up to go. “He loves to talk,” the artist says. “It’s what he loves to do.”
Our meeting took place on a weekday morning. What followed was a Clayton’s interview, a shadow-boxing of sorts with a master conversationalist.
Measuring response to question and comment, he seemed to be less comic than academic in dark green jacket, cream woollen pullover and khaki trousers. We drank our cups of coffee. As if on cue, a waitress placed wine glasses and a bottle of chilled water before us. Still we rambled on.
Not just monologue. He was open to observation from across the table. “Those bright eyes of his,” says Gerry Connolly, comic alter ego of Her Majesty and Sir Joh. “You know he’s not missing a trick.”
Blue eyes and a blue tongue, another friend has said. But there was no evidence of that.
Conversation froze when a woman paused to gawk at him. It was clearly no pleasure to be recognised.
TV comic and writer Bryan Dawe, friend and foil on the ‘A Current Affair’ interviews, points to Clarke’s celebrity in the 1970s in his native New Zealand, where his caricature character, Fred Dagg, made him at least as popular as Paul Hogan once was here. Driven perhaps by that fierce attention, Clarke migrated here in 1977.
“He went away from all that,” Dawe says. “The last thing he’s going to do is come here and embrace that sort of stuff.”
The trademark dry, deadpan humor is there in not-so-public moments too. He regularly changes his recorded message to amuse callers and, no doubt, himself. “Hello, unfortunately you have rung the world’s worst answering machine. Have a listen to this …”
But humor can be a decoy. Somewhere beyond the joke is an uneasiness with having a public profile, an unease that is something more than the predictable distaste for empty celebrity.
“He’s not the least bit interested in being famous,” says close friend and occasional collaborator Andrew Knight, Steve Vizard’s partner at Artist Services. “Sharing the cover of ‘TV Week’ with Kimberley Davies doesn’t enter his consciousness.”
Certainly. You wouldn’t expect it to. But you sense that he wants to perform his various projects without being noticed at all, as though the privilege might be withdrawn if someone cottoned on to the lurk.
And, as he once cautioned Bryan Dawe: “Publicity never made you funnier.”
In a sense, he’s the most invisible of public figures. You see him on TV or film, read the books, hear the radio promotions he does for the Brotherhood of St Laurence. But it’s as though some sacred self is safeguarded, as though he is not really there at all.
He talks without talking, as in our off-the-record encounter, and is seen without being seen. So much so, in his mock interviews he can become others without the slightest gesture at disguise or camouflage.
The radio host and television columnist, Phillip Adams, discovered Clarke while “trawling” Earl’s Court, London, in the early 1970s in search of people who could at the very least pretend to be Australians in the first Barry McKenzie film. “Oddly enough, very few people have tackled him because he’s so hard to write about, isn’t he? He doesn’t have a funny nose or any of the accoutrements …”
In the McKenzie movie, Clarke had a now famous bit part that Adams says inspired him to perform after his return to his native New Zealand. Barry Humphries has recalled that during the screening of rushes, director Bruce Beresford slowed down the film.
“It was an ingenuous scene of carousing Australians bidding goodbye to the hero. One of the actors wearing a sleepy and impassive expression continued to drain his glass merely raising an index finger in peremptory farewell. Beresford froze the frame. ‘Watch this chap,’ he said. It was John Clarke”.
Max Gillies rates Clarke “a comic genius”. Barry Humphries has described him as “an isolated and courageous figure”. Radio host Ross Stevenson, says he is “in a distinct class of his own as an Australian humorist. A class of one”.
And Michael Leunig regards him as “just one of nature’s oddities and delights”.
Often, he is the invisible man, nudging others towards fulfilling their potential. “He’s done a lot of work behind the scenes,” says Gillies, “encouraging people and oiling the wheels where he can to get somebody up.”
ACTOR Geoffrey Rush, for whom he tweaked the dialogue of the 2400 year-old classic by Aristophanes, `The Frogs’ (Clarke giggling, delighted at the subversiveness of the original text), describes him as “the artistic mentor every right- minded person
would want to have”.
Gerry Connolly has benefitted from his insight intermittently since they met after Connolly’s first routine at the Last Laugh 10 years ago. It was Clarke, for example, who suggested tracing a particular hand through a series of films in a skit on midday buff, Bill Collins, famous for his fascination with trivia.
Knight says: “You constantly find yourself stealing material from him. You don’t even do it intentionally. It’s the way he talks and his manner. It just registers in your head.”
He’s an adult in an industry of big kids with fragile egos, willing to give and give, even when some take and take and, unlike Knight, fail to acknowledge their debt.
“Like that other great Oceanian artist, Michael Leunig, he is crudely and shamelessly plagiarised,” Humphries has written. Leunig himself recalls a discussion where Clarke likened his predicament to one who had spent years fiddling with a lock on a door in the hope of getting in.
“Finally, finally, you do open the door and just as it opens the great crowd rushes through , trampling you down and they slam the door shut and they’ve got in and you’re still out there. . . .”
WHAT passes for humor is often thinly disguised censure. “We were always taught at school that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit,” says Gillies. “John . . . takes it to sublime heights.
” Gerry Connolly tells of a visit to the sturdy old house in Greensborough, where the Clarke family lived before moving to inner Melbourne. They spent an evening listening to maudlin, Irish music. Clarke read some of his favorite literature.
Then a storm came up. They switched off the lights and looked out at the night.
Connolly sees in the man’s humor something of the crackle of an electric storm “that comes through and cleanses the air”. His approach was to push at the logic of a flawed premise to expose absurdity.
He sees Clarke as a “a very good hater”, who will pay out in humor on a friend’s behalf.
There is something wonderfully subversive in his approach.
“I think it is breath-taking to realise what he has brought off at Channel Nine in the context of a fairly tabloid public affairs program,” Phillip Adams says. “To educate people to a completely new way of dealing with humor. No joke voices, no cozzies. This is an astonishing thing to persuade people to accept.”
While heading a comedy program for ABC radio in the mid- 1980s, Bryan Dawe persuaded Clarke to return to the broadcaster.
He had the bitter experience years earlier of being forced to quit after a three-year stint as Fred Dagg.
It was there that Clarke first experimented with the interviews.
Later, they managed to introduce the format on television with the approval of a TV producer but, Dawe says, no formal meetings with network executives.
He remembers Clarke remarking that they had “committed a guerrilla raid on the place and got under the wire late at night”.
Michael Leunig sees Clarke as strong, stoic, isolated. “I sense in John a great kind of ferocity too. Maybe if he lived in a different century, he might be some kind of warrior.”
Leunig wonders if there is not “a great, fiery, fury about what he sees in the world about him”. He adds: “Sometimes his eyes just burn with a kind of anger.
“He’s got this social conscience but then we get the dry, kind of droll thing. I think there’s a gap between the origin and the expression which fascinates me. . .
“To be with John and to know John is to speculate about the origin of all this. You can’t help but wonder what happened back there in New Zealand. What happened to that little boy.
What sort of child he was.”
JOHN Morrison Clarke recently celebrated his 48th birthday.
It is years since he made the `Guinness Book of Records’ as part of a four-man shearing team. Now, he’s in `Who’s Who’.
He was born in the farming town of Palmerston North, once home also to the young Fred Hollows. The town is an educational centre with as many as six high schools and a university specialising in agriculture and veterinary science.
Palmerston North has a population of more than 50,000. Fertile soils make it ideal for dairy, cropping, sheep and beef farming.
The town sprawls out, with most residents living on quarter- acre blocks. This is earthquake territory and most buildings are single-storey. “New Zealand is a funny joint,” says Adams, who watched Clarke perform there before his migration here. “It looks like England with soft, comfortable hills. But it’s got this underground trembling. The skin breaks and out comes eruptions of lava and steam. (It) produces very, very strange people.
When you get a non-conformist in New Zealand, they are quite spectacularly noticeable.”
Dunedin-born Moira Rayner remembers Palmerston North as “a tiny, little hick town with some nice bluestone public buildings . . . A typical New Zealand, conservative town. And, of course, that sort of environment drives them out. We had a long talk about this once.
“The world is full of nostalgic New Zealanders who wouldn’t dream of going back to live there again.”
Just a few months younger than Clarke, the former Commissioner for Equal Opportunity who heads the Financial Planning Association’s Complaints Resolution Scheme, looks back at the 1950s of their youth there as golden years: a time of social security,
free milk, little racial tension when an egalitarian message was conveyed at school.
Rose-tinted or not, it might explain a frustration with the failings of society that informs his humor. “It was just wonderful,” Rayner says. “The world was going to be terrific.
There was a perpetual sense of optimism and, perhaps, a querulous disbelief that it didn’t happen.”
Legend has it that soon after he obtained a driver’s licence in his late teens, Clarke found himself approaching an intersection, slowing for another car even though he had right of way. He would have stopped to avoid collision, so the story goes, but recognised the other driver: a teacher who had given him a torrid time.
“He can’t stand bullies and idiots,” Rayner says. “He’s got a social conscience like you wouldn’t believe.” She describes Clarke as “an intuitive socialist (who) just can’t bear seeing avoidable misery”.
With every clever kid in primary school doing impersonations of Bluebottle and Eccles, the Goon Show on radio, he once said, was “the beacon on the hill of my childhood”. Television arrived a few years later than in Australia. For a while, only the affluent had sets. “There’d be three or four hundred people in their lounge room watching it,” Clarke once said.
“I thought the medium was interesting and the programs were complete shit.”
IN 1967, his first year at university, he saw the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore series and searched the comedy bins at record stores for their albums. `Not Only But Also’ made him realise that TV “wasn’t just a visual magnet, it was also capable of being brilliant”.
“It really mattered to see Cook and Moore,” he told Murray Bramwell, co-author of a book of interviews with Australian comic artists. “I’d be less good at what I do now if I hadn’t seen them.”
Adams detects in Clarke a similar erudition, a “dazzling refinement. The precision of words”.
In trademark black singlet and gumboots, Fred Dagg emerged from the Clarke imagination in 1973.
Others had tried the farming stereotype but none struck a chord as he did. Until his departure four years later, Clarke’s star blazed. Dagg (Dip. Fencing. Hons, PhD in Cattle. Oxen) has been described as “an Everybloke who had a touch of rock ‘n’ roll about him as well.”
But as Dagg became a household name, Clarke would seem to have felt hemmed in, too visible. He resented the inevitable pressure to go on the road and “do things that looked, sounded and smelt like mainstream entertainment”.
“I found it very lonely and non-collaborative, unstimulating, unimaginative,” he told Bramwell.
So he upped and left. Moria Rayner recalls: “In New Zealand, he was a national hero and when he flew out, it was a betrayal.
” Fred Dagg was a hit here too. For three years, he provided a distinctive mix of comedy and social criticism on ABC Radio.
Clarke quit in March 1981 after the corporation told him it could no longer afford to pay him to create six radio segments a week.
Bryan Dawe detects a whiff of political interference, an unease at the targets as much as the comic spin he puts on the cosmic ball.
He branched into writing for TV. He created `The Fast Lane’ (1983 and 1985) with Andrew Knight, `The Gillies Report’ (1985 and 1986), `A Matter of Convenience’ (1987). The stage show, `A Royal Commission into the Australian Economy’ (1991), was later televised. Clarke has written for and acted in several films, notably with close friend Sam Neill in `Death in Brunswick’ (1990).
While running a film production company in partnership with Kerry Packer, Adams engaged Clarke to “goose up” an otherwise dour script by Paul Cox back in 1980. But Adams could not persuade him to take the lead role in `Lonely Hearts’.
It was there that he first worked with Andrew Knight. “We’d disappear and throw frisbees at each other,” he recalls.
Over the years, Knight has found Clarke to be remarkably perceptive on a range of topics, from the Dark Ages to World War I. “He immediately understands the structure, form and content of just about everything,” he says. “He generally goes to the essence of things.”
Between work, Knight and Clarke would head off to the local baths. “We’d swim a mile a day and he’d always end up doing aerobatics on the high diving board. Somersaults.”
He witnessed the start of a “new addiction”, the game of golf. They used the same clubs at first. Knight says he completed nine holes in 60, never improved much, then injured his back. Clarke, on the other hand, was now down to a near- pro, four handicap.
“Something he likes, he’s just into utterly,” he says.
“It can be an idea. It can be people. He will absolutely commit to it.” He had introduced the satirist to Celtic music. Soon, “we used to call his car Connemara on wheels”.
He gained a strong interest in tracing the evolution of his family. While living in Ireland for a time, Knight would receive faxes from Clarke asking him to call on people he took to be his cousins.
CLARKE’S lampooned, late 1980s `Complete Book of Australian Verse’, updated a few years back, betrays a real affection for poetry.
When Knight first met him, Clarke was reading `New Yorker’ writers, James Thurber, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker and Stephen Leacock. He read Irish literature with a passion, be it Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, W.B. Yeats or Flann O’Brien, a particular favorite.
“He’ll work a vein and then he’ll move on to another thing, ” Knight says.
Barry Humphries has written: “John Clarke sees skeletons in our closets and I am amazed he has not grown very rich on offshore hush money. Fortunately for (him) he can always be dismissed by his victims as a harmless wag, an amusing ratbag and an anodyne parodist.”
“If he told us what he sees and what he knows about Australian society in any other but his jester’s guise he would, long ago, have met with a very nasty accident.”
Phillip Adams, on the other hand, believes he might well discard the jester’s garb. “I think he’ll continue to surprise us. He’s capable of anything. He could be a very fine straight actor, for example. I suspect that he could be an excellent novelist.” Whatever he tackles will be achieved without too much attention, no doubt. Like a conjurer’s sleight of hand that gives nothing much away. Now you see him; now you don’t.
The Sunday Age, 25-Aug-1996
Larry Schwartz Writer