The Years Before My Death

by David McPhail

  Chapter 9

  A TOE IN THE POND OF COMEDY

  Early in 1969 my life took another slight lurch. An organisation responsible to the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation for religious programmes invited the Anglican vicar of Fendalton, Bob Lowe, to make two 15-minute shows. Bob was tired of boring sermons and pious homilies, so he and his producer, Peter Muxlow, approached me. They wanted sketches in the programmes and asked me to write and appear in some of them. This was a considerable breakthrough. To the best of my knowledge the NZBC had never commissioned a comedy show before.

  I started work on As I See It. The programmes consisted of Bob giving an informal address interspersed with short comic sketches. Or ‘skits’ as they were called then. Bob was a unique cleric with his rumbling voice, genial smile and quicksilver wit. He was entertaining company; however, the process was slow. I had never written humorous sketches before. Anything I produced on Town and Around that could be generously called funny, I’d scribbled down on a piece of paper. My only experience was watching other, mainly British, comedians performing television sketches.

  This was dangerous because there was a great temptation to simply mimic what they’d done. Not copy their sketches, but imitate the style and delivery. Most of my early sketches I hurled in the rubbish bin. I began to think I didn’t have the natural flair I’d always believed in.

  I finished yet another sketch, read it to Bob and this time he laughed. It involved a nervous young vicar who was giving pre-marital advice to a couple. The vicar was flustered and embarrassed and when he turned to conjugal rights his anxiety went off the scale. He gave ambiguous answers, employed unintelligible metaphors and finally gave up. He threw the couple a pile of pamphlets and hurriedly excused himself. Outside the vestry the man and his fiancée left the church grounds pushing a pram. She turned to him and asked, ‘What was that all about?’

  We finished the two programmes and that’s when the trouble really started. A body called the Churches Television Commission didn’t like my sketch and it was removed. The commission became agitated about a second sketch. This featured a firebrand preacher railing against modern fashions; in particular what he called ‘unisex’ clothing. ‘Soon,’ he thundered, ‘men will be wearing dresses.’ Then, he stormed off in his cassock and surplice.

  Looking back it is hard to understand why the commission was so upset but you have to remember over 40 years ago there was very little comedy in New Zealand, and that which did exist was chaste by today’s standards. The things you couldn’t make jokes about outnumbered the things you could by a hundred to one. If you used the word ‘bugger’ in public you were asking to be sent from the room.

  Before being screened, the two programmes were shown to an audience comprising clerics and lay people associated with churches. In one sketch, a young Anglican minister was talking to a woman. ‘I’m pretty sure you’re not of my faith,’ he told her.

  The shot then cut to the woman who was surrounded by over 20 of her children. ‘What makes you think I’m not an Anglican?’ she asked. The loudest laugh came from the editor of the Catholic newspaper, The Tablet.

  The first As I See It was screened and the reaction was muted but favourable. However, not to the NZBC. The second programme was banned. I know ‘banned’ is an emotive word but there was no other way to describe the corporation’s action. It was curious that, while no reason was given, I knew it was not the religious sketches that offended the senior executives. It was the sketches that lampooned the organisation itself. And their action proved how near-sighted and narrow-minded were the men who controlled our television. They banned a programme that contained a sketch of a news reader dissolving into shrieks of hysterical laughter at a denial of censorship by the NZBC. The upper floors of the corporation were irony-free zones.

  As 1969 ended I started feeling uneasy. The future of Town and Around was doubtful and, even if it did continue, I suspected two years was enough. My options were limited. I could return to the newsroom as a reporter but that would be a step back and I wasn’t altogether sure the newsroom wanted me.

  To become a television producer in the seventies you applied to join what was called a production course. If you were lucky enough to be accepted you then had to pass the course. The chief producer, a red-headed bear of a man, Roy Melford, made it quite clear that only half of those attending would pass. In fact, he took genuine pleasure in reminding us of the failure rate. We assembled in Wellington. Among the hopefuls were a cameraman, a reporter, two presentation officers — the title given to those who put nightly television programmes on air — and me. I was surprised to be there. I had shown no particular aptitude for producing or directing and, although I was a journalist, my imaginative writing was limited to long, wretched and generally unintelligible poems imitating Allen Ginsberg.

  It became clear that the course would not be easy. We were required to complete endless exercises at night, many of which seemed to exist simply for Roy Melford’s amusement. One began with the riddle. Gleefully adjusting his bow-tie Melford, in his mellifluous voice, proposed the following: a man walks into a chemist shop and complains of a problem. The chemist reaches under the counter and presents a revolver. The man thanks the chemist and walks out cured. What was the man’s complaint?

  The answer was hiccups and the sight of the revolver frightened him to silence. I’m sure Melford would have agreed that on a ranking of drollness this particular tale would not have rated highly. But, that was not the point. We were instructed to plot the movement and choose the lenses of three cameras to cover with a degree of visual coherence the chemist shop scene. I was still fiddling with angles at 3 am. Ultimately, I completed what I thought was an efficient, if somewhat unexciting, coverage of the event. The following morning no mention was made of the exercise. We had been dismissed for the day when I approached Melford with my hopeful scribbles.

  He was smiling broadly when he thanked me and then dropped them in a rubbish bin. ‘It was just to keep your mind ticking over,’ he said.

  The course ended with what was grandly described as the major exercise. We were to write, cast, rehearse and direct a 25-minute television show. We could choose any topic or any type of programme from a drama to a cooking show. The exercise was to be staged and recorded in a small studio in Waring Taylor Street. We were given a microscopic budget and four hours to complete the programme. For some reason I chose to restage the Wairau Massacre of 1843. This event, which has since been called an ‘Incident’ and finally an ‘Affray’, involved a hot-headed and most ill-advised attempt by white settlers to arrest Te Rauparaha. There were 60 settlers and well over 90 Maori. I was attempting to reconstruct this violent confrontation with six actors and one front man in a studio the size of a large living room. Roy Melford thought I’d gone mad and I must have been in a distressed state because the man I chose to host the programme had never appeared on television before.

  I’d constructed a relief model of the Wairau Plain to help the viewer understand the geography of the fight, but I became distinctly aware of my limitations when, as we started to record, my host had models of the foolhardy settlers marching not towards Te Rauparaha, but away from him towards the sea. Things got worse when I began to restage the fight. I directed my settlers to hide behind clumps of flax I’d managed to borrow from a helpful, if somewhat mystified, nursery owner. When the settlers hid, their shadows were obvious on the wall behind them. Things did not improve when I turned my attention to Te Rauparaha and his warriors. I was trying to create the impression of a war party of 100 with only three Maori actors.

  This required them to gesture menacingly at a camera and then run around behind it. As they did so they discarded their costumes, grabbed another, picked up a musket or a taiaha or even a bowler hat and leapt in front of the camera again. This went on for several minutes. Unconvinced by the authenticity of my re-enactment, I now ordered my settlers to run around another camera discarding items of clothing as they did so. I hoped th
at, in this visual confusion, the viewers would experience the sharp horror of a heated battlefield. Unfortunately, it only confirmed they were watching six men running around behind cameras changing clothes.

  I am pleased to say that George Henare’s gracious and energetic appearance in this chaotic exercise did no harm to his future career. To my surprise, I passed the course. I suspect Roy Melford thought anyone light-headed enough to stage a bloodthirsty battle in a studio the size of a living room with only six actors should be given a second chance. Perhaps he had this thought in mind when he then assigned me to Dunedin.

  Anne and I flew back to Christchurch in an ailing aircraft with the unfortunate name Fokker Friendship. As we sat on the aircraft, we were contemplating a dilemma. I had passed the celebrated production course. We were free from Wellington and three months of me struggling to become a television producer. But, I had received a telephone call from Bernard McLaughlin. He was an amiable journalist with whom I’d worked briefly. Bernard had a proposition. He was developing a regional current affairs programme in Auckland. Would I consider co-hosting the show? This was unnerving. What Bernard McLaughlin was suggesting represented a classic fork in the road of life. I had achieved my immediate ambition and could call myself a producer. I didn’t know what I was going to produce. I hoped, foolishly as it turned out, it would be drama and I would do it in Christchurch. Bernard was offering me the chance to appear on a television show in the country’s largest city. My future was really unplanned whereas the future Bernard was proposing was clear and potentially exciting. I struggled with the offer for some days and finally declined it.

  But, in recent years I’ve sometimes thought how my life might have developed had I accepted the offer. Judy Bailey and John Hawkesby went on to host the show. I had worked with Judy in my newsroom days and I liked her immensely. She had appeared, unpaid, in the pilot of my first excursion in topical satire. I knew her husband Chris, a tall, easy-going man who went on to become an accomplished television director. Later, Chris directed a number of episodes of Letter to Blanchy with great comic flair. Had I accepted the offer, a couple of things which now seem to me to be distasteful, and which I now regret, would not have happened. For some years John Gadsby, AK Grant and I wrote cutting and sometimes brutal impersonations of Judy as a news reader. They were superbly performed by Rima Te Wiata but at times the words were cruel. Then, as television critic, I attacked one of Chris’s productions with a prolonged ferocity that still surprises and alarms me.

  However, Anne and I had something else to contemplate on the Fokker Friendship. This was the time when you could smoke freely on aeroplanes. On this flight I was sitting opposite an expansive American couple. She was smoking a Camel, he was puffing a large cigar. We had discoursed a little about their holiday, the talents of his family, the infallibility of the Republican Party and the semi-tropical climate of Southern California. I was trying not to fall asleep. Then, he touched my arm. ‘Pardon me,’ he said. ‘But my wife’s cigarette has just fallen down that little grill on the floor.’ I was suddenly awake.

  ‘What little grill?’

  He was remarkably composed and waved his cigar towards his wife. ‘That one,’ he said.

  I looked at three slots in the floor. ‘Do you mean the one the smoke’s coming out of?’

  He nodded. ‘Yep, that could be the one.’

  I was suddenly rigid with panic. I wanted to shout at him, ‘Don’t you realise the plane is going to blow up?’ As his wife was lighting another Camel I hammered the call button above my head. My American friend thought this was very funny. A flight attendant, or, as I knew them, a hostess, arrived. I attempted to explain, as calmly as possible, that the aircraft was about to explode in a fiery thunderbolt with the catastrophic loss of everyone on board. She nodded affectionately and reminded me to make sure my seatbelt was tight when we came in to land.

  Minutes later the co-pilot crashed out of the cockpit waving a fire extinguisher. My American friend pulled thoughtfully on his cigar. The young pilot sprayed foam in all directions. Some hit the American’s wife which gave her blue hair a suggestion of Yuletide. The young air hostess blasted the small grills in the floor with such passion that my American friend left his seat muttering about the Marines. By the time we landed I had forgotten all about the production course and Bernard’s offer.

  In 1970 Anne and I found ourselves driving to Dunedin. In the back of the car were our belongings: in the pit of our stomachs our future. I was to start work as a television producer and director and the city had not been my choice. Neither was the assignment. I wanted to direct drama in Wellington. My superiors decided I would produce an afternoon magazine show designed for housewives.

  Neither Anne nor I could be described as being in high spirits. We played a game as we drove towards Mount Cargill. ‘What happens if we drive over the hill and there’s nothing there?’ Then, we could swing around, drive back and forget the existence of a mythical place called Dunedin. It didn’t happen. The city’s suburbs started to appear on the gorse-covered hillsides. We should have known there was no escape when we turned onto the motorway. The sign said ‘Motorway’. And then added, ‘Two-laner.’ The motorway into Dunedin was a normal road but, because of civic pride, it was awarded the name ‘motorway’.

  This didn’t make much sense to Japanese tourists. Apparently they thought they were driving on a four-lane highway and promptly crashed into the front of on-coming logging trucks. So, it was necessary to add the notice, ‘Two-laner’. They would be searching through their phrase books, and look up to see a Mack truck about to pile them, and their hired car, into the back seat of beyond.

  Anne and I arrived in Dunedin on a Sunday afternoon. It was raining, a confounding mist that drenched not only your clothes, but your spirit. The city was empty. We drove down George Street, looking for people. There were none. I imagined we were in an apocalyptic science fiction film, where a fearful plague had destroyed every living person. We arrived at the Law Courts Hotel and it was confirmed we had a room.

  There are moments in your life when you are completely and utterly perplexed. I sat on the chenille bedspread and stared at my hands. Anne unpacked the bags, organised the toothbrushes, rearranged the pillows and faced me calmly with the words, ‘Right, let’s have something to eat.’

  Chapter 10

  TOTTERING TOWARDS LAUGHTER

  New Zealand television comedy was almost as mythical as a unicorn around this time. Several years later, John Clarke, Cathy Downes, John Banas and Elizabeth Crutchley proved the creature did exist fleetingly in a situation comedy called Buck House, and John Clarke was barn-storming across screens around the country as Fred Dagg.

  There was an ambitious and, unfortunately, serious attempt at sketch comedy in the series In View of the Circumstances. It contained some genuinely amusing performances but there were too few to excite an audience. Although, one off-the-wall sketch remains with me. An aircraft was about to crash but, rather than attempting to calm the passengers, the crew invited them to join in a game. They handed out paper bags and instructed the passengers to place them over their heads. The crew then led the unsuspecting passengers in a rousing version of ‘We’re Riding Along on the Crest of a Wave’. While this was happening the crew all donned parachutes and jumped out of the aircraft.

  It was a curious coincidence that the man who made In View of the Circumstances was posted to Dunedin while I was serving my time there. Terry Bryan: a lean, elegant player of the Spanish guitar, was sophisticated and his delicate gait suggested he was always avoiding something nasty on the floor.

  Terry had somehow acquired the scripts of the British comedy sensation Beyond the Fringe. This remarkable show, the precursor of so many frail imitations, was performed by Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathon Miller. Terry proposed we should present our version at the Playhouse Theatre in Albany Street, a theatre that was administered by a mysterious character called Alastair Douglas. We performed the s
how and to our great delight the audience didn’t leave until we’d finished. The actor I liked most was Derek Payne.

  The success of our version of Beyond the Fringe prompted us to think grandiosely. We decided to perform the show in Invercargill. While that might not seem inspirational it was an ambitious move because none of us had toured a stage show before. We booked the Town Hall and Civic Theatre and contacted the legendary Invercargill showman, Frank Stapp, to set up the advertising. Frank was an entertainment hero who ran the theatre. He was a personal friend of many of the great rock and roll acts that toured New Zealand in the fifties and sixties. When we arrived at the venue I asked Frank why there were hardly any posters in the city. He replied, ‘Master, I’ll explain.’ (Frank called everyone ‘master’.) He had gone out one night on his bicycle with a bucket of glue hanging on the handle bars and a roll of posters under his arm. Unfortunately, the front wheel got caught in a gutter and Frank, the posters and the glue went flying into the night. A passing patrol car stopped and two constables helped Frank back onto his feet. He was all ready to scoop up the glue and continue but the police officers suggested it might be better if he went home. ‘And I hadn’t touched a drop, Master,’ Frank concluded defiantly.

  We rehearsed the show and Frank watched silently from the wings. Then he scurried off to open the booking office, pack ice creams in a refrigerator and fill a large tea urn. Frank sold the tickets, was in charge of what was called the Nibble Nook, selling ice creams, sweets and the cups of tea, and also acted as the stage manager.

  Earlier, the woman who was stacking tubs of ice cream had offered to take on another responsibility. Anne was travelling as our wardrobe mistress and with her was our new baby, Anna. Anne was making preparations to take Anna into the theatre but the woman would have none of it. ‘You go in there and enjoy yourself, dear. I’ll look after the baby.’ So during the rehearsal Anna slept contentedly under the counter of the Nibble Nook.