by Tom Scott
This was before Barry Crump’s comic novel A Good Keen Man hit the country like a thunderclap in 1960. Along with everyone else, I delighted in the novelty of the rollicking slapstick, the vivid, visceral accounts of life in rugged bush country and the sound of the Kiwi vernacular coming off the page, but there was a darkness and nihilism in there as well—especially in his unsympathetic depiction of women. Men didn’t divorce wives or go to marriage guidance to mend relationships—they simply ‘shot through’. Years later it emerged that, when intoxicated, Crump could be an abusive and angry husband and father to his wives and children. He may well also have been sexually conflicted. The outrageously camp Auckland actor Peter Varley loved recounting how he was once locked in intimate union with the famous author and star of the brilliant Toyota Hilux television commercials and, being exceptionally well endowed, leaned over the great man’s broad shoulders and enquired solicitously, ‘I’m not hurting you, am I, Barry?’ The reply came from damp lips dangling a roll-your-own, ‘Nah, she’s beaut, mate.’
Later, Puckoon by Spike Milligan and Catch-22 by Joseph Heller would also reduce me to helpless laughter. I daydreamed fancifully about doing something vaguely similar one day. On a long bike ride with my brother Michael, sniffing out dead sheep to pluck and checking out orchards to raid, I found something in a long-abandoned Makino schoolhouse that would push me in that direction. The building was in ruins. All the windows were smashed, desks were upended, parts of the ceiling had caved in and the floor was strewn with sheep droppings. In a corner, hidden under a pile of sacking, was a soggy copy of a controversial magazine that had been banned by the Feilding mayor. On the full-colour cover was a well-drawn cartoon of a man dying of thirst in a burning desert with a mirage of a beer tanker shimmering just out of his reach. It was a Massey Agricultural College capping publication—Masskerade 59.
Ten years later I would edit Masskerade 69 and be threatened with prosecution for blasphemous libel. This edition did not mock religion directly but there were more than enough risqué jokes and filthy cartoons to give any man of the cloth conniptions. To borrow from another comedy hero of mine, Frank Muir, my flabbers were absolutely gasted. I knew intuitively I had struck gold. I tucked it inside my singlet and hid it when I got home.
Feilding Ag was quite enlightened for its time. Pupils had their own self-government. Every class had a representative on the school council, which met regularly in beautiful council chambers and did radical things like abolish caps. Having power of veto, the staff would immediately make them compulsory again. Half the school prefects were appointed by the staff, the other half were elected by school houses. My whānau, Rangitikei House, elected me.
The boy prefects and the girl prefects enjoyed separate common rooms in the lovely old school building, sadly long gone. Without ever revealing my mother lode, I told an endless stream of filthy jokes, which offended a huge boy called Warren who was deeply religious. Unable to stomach my obscenity any longer, he dragged me out the door and threw me down a flight of stone steps. Weak with laughter from a freshly delivered and, if I say so myself, perfectly timed punchline I was unable to offer any resistance. It didn’t matter. I was so full of dopamine—a byproduct of sex, which didn’t apply in this instance, and laughter, which did—that I felt no pain. In seconds I had bounded back through the door to tell a joke about a gorilla sodomising some nuns. Warren gave up.
In the seventh form, out of the blue, some classmates asked me if I wanted to come with them to see a capping revue in Palmerston North’s wonderful old Opera House, again sadly gone, making way for a shopping complex. (I am totally opposed to the death penalty—I think it is barbaric—except for property developers, town planners and architects.) The show was amazing and wonderfully funny. A tall, thin, ginger man, an Antipodean John Cleese called Tony Rimmer, stole the show. At one point he came dashing out in front of the curtain, wringing his hands in panic, to ask if there was a doctor in the house. A plant rose and said he was. ‘Enjoying the show?’ asked Rimmer. ‘Very much so’ was the reply, and the auditorium erupted in relieved laughter.
In the car on the way back to Feilding we were still bubbling with excitement. One of the girls—it might have been Christine Wilson—said quietly, ‘You will write one of those shows one day, Tommy.’ The others swiftly agreed. I sat in the back dazed and amazed at this vote of confidence.
They dropped me off where I had left my push-bike at the entrance to the school grounds and I cycled home mulling this over. Could something that wonderful ever happen to me? To Egghead?
CHAPTER SEVEN
DREAMING SPIRES
IN 2002, MASSEY UNIVERSITY AWARDED me an honorary doctorate in literature. The capping ceremony, held in Palmerston North’s beautifully restored Regent Theatre, was surprisingly moving. I got to wear billowing robes and a floppy velvet cap modelled on those worn by courtiers attending Tudor monarchs. I imagined I bore a vague resemblance to Paul Scofield, who played Sir Thomas More in one of my favourite films, A Man For All Seasons. I got to give the graduation address and afterwards lead a stately procession of gowned graduates through the streets of a city to which I had just been given a key. Awaiting us in the square was a marquee with champagne and canapés. Pushing through the crowd towards me was a middle-aged man whom I didn’t recognise. I hadn’t seen him in over 40 years. It was Keith, a childhood friend from Kimbolton Road. Along with others we had played war games together up and down the willowed banks of the Makino Stream. His mother was a lovely woman and very kind to Mum.
My one-man play about my father, The Daylight Atheist, starring Grant Tilly, had just finished a successful season at the Regent Theatre:
By turns gloriously funny and gut-wrenchingly moving, Daylight Atheist is a triumph not only for Scott, Tilly and Mulheron, but for fathers everywhere. Daylight Atheist is a truly international story and one that deserves the widest audience.
— DON KAVANAGH, MANAWATU EVENING STANDARD, 29 MAY 2002
Keith was itching to tell me that his mum had seen the play and thought I had told whopping fibs and exaggerations—apparently our life was nothing like how I had dramatised it. I should have let it go and passed on my very best wishes to his mum and dad, but I didn’t. My hackles rose and I responded acidly:
‘Thanks, Keith—you have just solved a mystery that has been gnawing away at me for years. I always wondered who that woman was in the corner of our lounge—squatting there silently, saying nothing, just taking notes. For the life of me I could never place her! Now I know! It was your mum!’
There’s more of my father in me than I care to admit. Poor Keith reeled away, blinking rapidly. Apart from this terse exchange it was a marvellous day. I started thinking wistfully that Mum would have loved it, especially the medieval pageantry.
In case you are wondering, I want to dispel any impression created here that Mum was dead at this juncture. She was alive and well and living in her granny flat under our home in Wellington, having a hissy fit. Since guest seating was at a premium I couldn’t invite all of my family to the ceremony, so I didn’t. My sister Jane rang me testily to complain when she discovered that my brother Michael had been invited and she hadn’t. I explained that when news of my honorary doctorate was announced, Michael had rung to congratulate me.
‘Oh, so that’s the rule now, is it?’ she snapped. ‘If we don’t kiss your arse we don’t get invited!’
Jane is very quick. There’s a lot of our father in Jane as well. But she was right. That’s exactly what I was saying. I had no comeback.
On the big day, Mum said she really wanted to come but couldn’t out of loyalty to Jane. There was no changing her mind. We drove away with her doubled over on her front steps sobbing her heart out.
There’s a lot of our mother in Mum, but she is nothing if not consistent. Four years later, in 2006, when in the New Year Honours I was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services as a cartoonist, journalist and illustrator, Mum told me that all
this recognition wasn’t fair on my brothers and sisters. It would mean a lot to her if just once I came a ‘gutser’.
It’s not an uncommon phenomenon. When Prime Minister Rob Muldoon got an honorary doctorate in laws from the University of Seoul while on a state visit to South Korea, lots of MPs, including members of his own party, wore curdled expressions for days afterwards.
I worked in the Parliamentary Press Gallery at the time and my good friend, the comedian John Clarke, rang me with a brilliant idea. I duly arranged for Labour backbencher Russell Marshall to place a question on the order paper, and it played out like this:
‘Question number three stands in the name of Russell Marshall.’
‘Mr Speaker!’
‘Mr Marshall!’
‘Mr Speaker, my question is to the Prime Minister and asks, “Can he confirm that on his recent trip to Korea he received an honorary doctorate in laws from the University of Seoul, and does he see this as an honour not only for him but an honour for New Zealand as a whole?”’
Muldoon, surprised but delighted nonetheless to get such a flattering, patsy question from a man he frequently dismissed as the ‘Red Reverend’, got to his feet beaming with pride.
‘Mr Speaker!’
‘Prime Minister!’
‘Mr Speaker, I can confirm that I did receive an honorary doctorate in laws from the University of Seoul and I see it as both an honour for me personally and the nation as a whole.’
‘Supplementary question, Mr Speaker!’
‘Supplementary question, Mr Marshall.’
‘Mr Speaker, can the Prime Minister tell the House, will he be using the title “Doctor” full-time as in Goebbels or part-time as in Jekyll?’
No one dared make fun of Muldoon like this. The Opposition benches erupted in shocked, rapturous laughter—a long drought of sorts had been broken. It was a moment not unlike those famous Life magazine shots taken by Brian Brake of Indian villagers delirious with joy at the first drops of monsoon rain running down their uplifted faces like diamonds. Government MPs struggled frantically to suppress their mirth lest their leader look around and catch them being disloyal. It’s probably fair to say the Prime Minister and Red Reverend were both stunned by the whole exercise.
JUST AS I WAS TYPING this story, I got a phone call from Radio New Zealand informing me that John Clarke had died while on a bush walk in the beautiful Grampians National Park west of Melbourne. Scores of laudatory and richly deserved tributes were paid on both sides of the Tasman to this strikingly original talent, my own inarticulate speech of the heart amongst them. Four days passed before I could return to my computer and resume work on this book—four days filled with swirling disbelief, exhausting sadness and the swapping of outrageous yarns about John with friends over the phone. We are of an age when this is going to happen more and more. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for our fathers’ generation during the war who regularly lost three people they loved before lunch.
I had heard of John Clarke long before I met him. It was five years out from him becoming Fred Dagg, comedy icon and national treasure. I was a third-year vet student at Massey in Palmerston North and he was a second-year arts student at Victoria in Wellington, 160 kilometres to the south—which might just as well have been the dark side of the moon to me in those days without a car or driver’s licence. Such were his stellar comic gifts, word of John’s existence spread north. The beautiful Bieder twins, Penny and Jill, whose parents lived near our thumping music crash-pad, studied at Vic and returned home in the holidays as his most faithful disciples. Penny, for whom I had an unrequited love, told me that I would adore John—he was so funny and so creative, and I reminded her a wee bit of him. I didn’t need to hear this. I assumed they were an item and secretly resented him even more.
Of course I too fell under his spell when we met. Long before Jeremy Clarkson made it unfashionable, John was a double-denim man, shirt and jeans, with elastic-sided riding boots and receding hair with a shoulder-length mullet. Speaking as your friendly neighbourhood cartoonist now, his eyebrows were almost always permanently arched and his eyes bulged in their sockets like a poor man’s Marty Feldman, which meant they always caught the light, and as a consequence they did indeed sparkle. He had the same amused curl to his top lip as John Lennon and his prominent central incisors coupled with prominent canine teeth resulted in a wicked smile, as if savouring a private joke that, if you were very lucky, he would let you in on. And when he did, you felt more than lucky—you felt chosen.
I was in the early stages of becoming a second-eleven celebrity as a political columnist on the Listener and had promised the Massey University Students’ Association that I would edit one final Masskerade. At a loose end until his beloved Helen shifted to Wellington, John offered to help. His contributions were beautifully observed, economically written, except when a baroque flourish was required, and they kept coming and coming. He read them out to me over the phone and had me on the floor in fits of laughter.
Like this ad for a used-car yard:
L.M.V.D. RATBAG MOTORS
Ron Ratbag Dave Bastard
57 HOLDEN—Fashionable cinnamon. Very tidy and smart. Extras: heater, four on the floor (they fell off). Also 1959 Bedford truck, 14 tons with 17 head of cattle. Bring a crowbar if you only want the truck. $8795.
52 MORRIS POXFORD—Touch of rust on this one. One previous owner (no flowers please). 2 speed box. Extras: heater, steering wheel, roof, engine. A steal at $4875 + nominal charge for ½ pound oranges in universal.
It wasn’t filthy enough for Massey students though, and thousands remained unsold in my garage. If you can find a copy, grab it and read it. It still stands up today.
Along with the usual suspects—Milligan, Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse and Flann O’Brien—John was a big fan of The Harvard Lampoon and the writing of P. J. O’Rourke. When the Indecent Publications Tribunal banned a batch of issues, John got me to drive to Gordon and Gotch’s warehouse on Wellington’s Adelaide Road where, with me trailing nervously in his wake, he swept past a security guard in a glass booth with a casual nod and an authoritative ‘Story!’ and strode into the body of the warehouse itself. Magazines were stacked floor to ceiling on shelves and on pallets in long rows. Identifying the offending issues he tucked them under his arm, handed me the overflow, and briskly retraced his steps. With another casual nod and ‘Story!’ to the puzzled security guard we were safely out on the pavement with our spoils.
This cool, almost detached, nonchalant courage infused the best of his writing and performing. Provided that he wasn’t shot by firing squad for rank insubordination by his own side first, you could see that John had all the ingredients needed to be a war hero in any conflict (apart from Bomber Command or as a Battle of Britain Spitfire pilot—he had a terrible fear of flying).
In 1974 the state broadcaster, BCNZ, had a flagship current-affairs show called Nationwide that provided extensive coverage of the major political parties’ annual conferences, which included nightly panel discussions with political scientists with moustache-less beards chaired by broadcasting’s young rising star, Ian Fraser. We had to make our own fun back then. It was also a time when they used a still of the Freyberg boat harbour as a station break.
In March of that year the Prime Minister, Norman Kirk, was not a well man. In fact, he was dying. His absence cast a pall over proceedings at Labour’s bun-fight in Wellington’s old Town Hall. In a gallant but unwise effort to liven things up, Ian hired me and a relatively unknown revue actor, John Clarke, to make fun of the remits.
The remit book ran to 40 pages, many of them stone-cold loopy—one demanded the government set up a Workers Tobacco Company to provide the proletariat with cheaper cigarettes. Ian recalls that I wrote half of the material with him, which was then filmed in his flat, with John giving brilliant, one-take performances straight to camera—his great strength right from the outset.
John always said the role of the satirist was to find hole
s in the veneer through which fun could be poked—but this fun cut to the bone. After John’s evisceration the party faithful struggled bravely to appear amused, but were unable to keep up the pretence—embers of resentment were fanned into flames by Federation of Labour boss Tom Skinner in a speech castigating Nationwide. Not realising their microphones were live and could be heard by the press benches, on stage party bosses and senior cabinet ministers argued bitterly over whether Nationwide should be evicted from the conference. The chairman of the Broadcasting Council, Sir Alister McIntosh, rang Ian demanding he apologise the next night on air—which he did, somewhat tardily. When a shockingly frail Norm Kirk shuffled on stage with the aid of a carved Māori walking stick and whispered additional condemnation, the conflagration became a firestorm. One incensed delegate adopted a kungfu stance in front of a very pale Ian Fraser, screaming, ‘You’re dicing with death!’
Terribly excited by this response, I bounded into the Nationwide offices the following week, showering saliva like a spaniel, asking when we were doing it again. No one knew where to look. The producer, Bill Earle, walked me back down the stairs to the street explaining gently that, yes, they would be doing more, but John wanted to do them on his own from now on. John could have told me first. For a moment, I had an inkling of how Pete Best must have felt when Ringo replaced him in The Beatles.
As history attests, John was quite right. He didn’t need me. Ten years later I got to put words into his mouth again when he played Wal in the animated feature film Footrot Flats that I co-wrote with Murray Ball, the cartoon strip’s warm and brilliant creator. In a terrible confluence of events, after a long, slow descent into dementia, Murray died just a few weeks before John. While terribly sad, Murray’s death was also a release that everyone who loved him was fully prepared for. John’s departure was altogether more shocking and cruel for being so unexpected and so premature. Two countries united in grief feel equally robbed.
