The Years Before My Death

by David McPhail

  I was waiting nervously back stage when suddenly Frank reappeared. He told me we had a good-sized audience. When I asked how many he replied a little hastily there were about 300. The Town Hall and Civic Theatre could seat over a thousand. Then, he said, ‘Right, let’s go’ and started dimming the lights in the auditorium. Frank was swinging on the rope about to raise the curtain when he turned to us again. ‘Have a good night, Masters.’ Then, there was a final piece of advice. ‘Oh, and I’d cut out the smutty bits. They don’t go for smut down here.’ I had no time to ask what smut he was referring to, because suddenly the curtain went up.

  Later that night at our motel Frank congratulated us on the show. We had, he said, ‘pulled it off, somehow.’ Before he left he tucked a silver coin in Anna’s tiny hand. ‘For luck.’ I still consider myself to be a lucky person to have met the remarkable Frank Stapp.

  Our friendship with Derek Payne continued to strengthen. Before he moved in to live with us he had a flat in High Street, not far from where we lived and I passed it every morning on the bus. The trip down the hill to the city was a solemn affair that took place under an equally sombre sky. I noticed quickly that the passengers always sat in the same seats and made a point of not speaking to each other. One morning a tiny ray of watery sunshine was struggling through grey clouds and I turned to the man sitting next to me who was holding a packet of perfect, geometrically cut sandwiches. ‘It looks as though we’re going to have a good day,’ I observed breezily.

  He didn’t look at me when he replied, ‘We’ll pay for it.’

  Terry Bryan was in charge of a small group of producers who produced not a great deal. I was dreaming up impossible pilot shows in a futile attempt to get out of Dunedin. My friend, Gene Packwood, a large, bluff Canadian, made a short, intelligent gardening show called Green Fingers. It gave you thoughtful advice, a number of gardening hints and a balanced plan for creating a fruitful and colourful garden. It was a gentle success.

  But I had wilder ideas. I made a rock music show at Larnach Castle on the Otago Peninsula. I had thrash-metal New Zealand cover bands strutting and thrusting around an Edwardian garden while little horse-drawn carriages rolled past in the background. Alastair Douglas was the host. He opened the huge doors of Larnach Castle dressed as a butler. In the late afternoon, my technical producer asked me what exactly was going on. The technical producer controlled the lights, the cameras and every electronic component in the show. We balanced each other. I had the idea. He had the skill to make it work. As the sun sank on Larnach Castle, I said, ‘Pull the plug.’ He did.

  My other major television failure was also in Dunedin. I was sitting in the small, squat house from which we were soon to be ejected. Anne was holding the slim threads of our family together when I decided to make a show called Salmagundi. Derek Payne played a wizard who lived in a tower — so far so good. With him was a mad opera singer named Gloria Flagstaff who burst into Wagnerian arias at inappropriate times. We’re losing the thread a bit now. There was also a small creature named Neb who, for some reason, gave weather reports all the time. When they saw it in Auckland, they thought there was something toxic in the Dunedin water supply.

  Our time in Dunedin was not without sudden dramas. Anne and I were shivering in our cold water Williams Street flat on the wrong side of Mornington. It had been an uninspiring day. We were pleased to have lived through the morning and if we could just survive the afternoon it would be time for bed. The telephone rang. It was the silky voice of Margo Sutherland. We had not seen her since we arrived in Dunedin a year before, although I had heard that her life had taken a spectacular lurch. She was still editing film in Christchurch but she had also fulfilled a potent ambition to become a member of a motorcycle gang. I was told the initiation required a candidate to throw a brick through a police car windscreen.

  She was ringing from Invercargill and was hoping to visit Anne and me on her way back to Christchurch. I welcomed her and nearly didn’t notice that just before the conversation ended Margo mentioned she had ‘some of the boys’ with her. I was not immediately alarmed but when I heard the motorcycles pull up outside and saw the ‘boys’ dismounting, a cold uneasiness came over me. Five members of the Epitaph Riders followed Margo up the path to our flat. Anne immediately rushed to the telephone and implored our friends Bruce and Sally to pay us a hasty visit.

  What Margo had failed to tell me was that her group was bringing a member back from the Invercargill borstal and he was a psychopath. They all entered our living room and suddenly it seemed very small. The former borstal inmate sat on the floor occasionally slamming a fist into his hand. Margo talked cheerfully but I noticed one member stared fixedly at Anne and me.

  He had introduced himself as Alfred E and was obviously the leader. What concerned me more was that he was clearly intelligent. Alfred E immediately summed up the tension in the room and was taking a malign pleasure in our discomfort. He even asked directly if we were frightened. I assured him with a slightly high-pitched laugh that nothing was further from my mind. I was trying to gauge whether Margo had any authority over these unpredictable men, when thankfully Bruce and Sally arrived. At least we had reinforcements.

  Anne asked if they would like a cup of tea. No, Alfred E replied, not at the moment, because they were going for a ‘gang-bang’. Anne then asked, rather incautiously I thought, how long this might take, and Margo answered about five minutes each. They would be back within the hour for a cup of tea, she said.

  As they left, I couldn’t help noticing Margo’s demeanour. They could have said they were going out for a game of darts. We continued a rather strained conversation with Margo. She was enjoying the gang experience and did not feel any anxiety about her fellow members. Fifty minutes later Alfred E and his cohorts returned for their cups of tea. I attempted to lighten the moment by remarking on our noisy neighbours downstairs who played The Kinks’ ‘Lola’ endlessly at a thousand decibels. I should have kept my mouth shut. Margo and Alfred E announced they would be perfectly happy to go downstairs and beat the living daylights out of them right now.

  Rather hysterically, I assured them that wasn’t necessary. I was becoming increasingly edgy about our predicament. Anne told me in the kitchen that if anything went wrong she would escape through the bedroom window. In desperation I was about to ask, as casually as possible, how long the journey to Christchurch would take, when Alfred E stood up and announced they were leaving. He gave me a curious smile as he left as if to say ‘you were lucky this time, but not the next.’ We watched them go with immense relief. It was then I noticed one of them lowered his trousers and left an unpleasant calling card on the garden path. I didn’t tell Anne. Anyway, she was in the kitchen with Sally, scalding all the tea cups.

  My friendship with Derek and our shared sense of humour meant we often talked about television ideas. These discussions and, indirectly, the show we’d grandly toured to Invercargill laid the groundwork for a new project. It was a television show that would ultimately be called Something To Look Forward To. But that was a year away. When I wasn’t making unsuccessful pilots I was producing an afternoon magazine show for ‘housewives’. When I was first directed to go south I thought there’d been some mistake and pointed out my affection for drama. My superiors acknowledged they had considered my dramatic skills and that was why I was in charge of a magazine show in Dunedin.

  The afternoon show, On Camera, was presented by Eileen Cook, a languid, elegant woman. She had a simmering sensuality that must have confused the housewives of South Dunedin, for whom simmering meant cooking lamb slowly, and sensuality was something you sprayed around the bathroom. When I first met Eileen Cook I was confused. She had a direct gaze that caught me unprepared. Every time I suspected the hint of a connection, her eyes would become impenetrable. She simply endured me at the beginning.

  I was, after all, a totally inexperienced producer on his first assignment. She was established as a stylish presenter with a sharp mind and a cool command o
f the camera. Later, our working relationship became more amiable, but at first my inexperience continued to shine through.

  I hired a Swiss chef, Hans Gefler, to brighten up the cooking segments. I was tired of healthy family casseroles. Hans was an inventive and imaginative Swiss who had bravely opened a restaurant in the culinary desert of Dunedin. He seemed a perfect choice. In my eagerness I forgot that Hans’s English was still expanding. His enthusiasm could not be denied, but his instructions were sometimes difficult to follow. ‘Teek the leever, slyce eet theenly and dust it with fleur. Edd the garlic, erbs and spices and in a theen pan edd a splash of soy serce, some erl and fry queekly.’ The cooking segment always ended with hasty captions suggesting that should anyone want more details about the recipe — in other words an English translation — they could write to the programme.

  I made lots of inserts (the title given to short sequences that could be injected in times of desperation) with a man named Kevin Mills. A radio announcer, he had a broad, exaggerated face and a pulsating voice. His personality had been shaped by the city in which he lived. Kevin was well-known in Otago and his ornate individuality was always welcomed if not always admired. He was prepared to throw himself into any task from preparing a dish of freshwater crayfish to singing loudly and tunelessly. Kevin’s interviews were delightfully circular. The topic never mattered because within minutes Kevin would be regaling his subject on a variety of topics, none of which were related to the interview. I loved his gusto and his generosity.

  Kevin and his wife June were very generous to Anne and me in our early months in Dunedin and I valued his friendship. He was famous in Maori Hill, unrecognised in Remuera and dead long before his time.

  Anne and I fell directly between two major social groups in Dunedin. We were too old to be part of the university crowd and much too new and under-funded to be embraced by established Dunedin people of our own age. That was why we were fortunate to meet Derek. He was the host of a nightly local television show and I recall watching him perform a stunning comic trick in and around the Octagon. He was filmed walking an imaginary dog on a leash. The phantom dog clearly didn’t respond to its master’s commands and yanked Derek off in increasingly complicated gyrations. The skill of his miming and the robust energy he threw into the trick was astonishing. People actually looked for the dog and were genuinely puzzled when they couldn’t see it. So Derek and I continued to explore what might be done with our similar and slightly bizarre senses of humour.

  We had found one outlet for our work with Terry Bryan that we opened at the Playhouse Theatre. This small theatre had been the base for a formidable theatrical duo: Bernard Esqualent and Bill Menlove formed the Southern Comedy Players in the fifties and defiantly produced dramas and comedies to the utter surprise of South Island audiences. In the variegated history of New Zealand theatre, these two — named by their colleagues and enemies as Bill and Ben the Flower Pot Men — have been sadly forgotten. Bernard Esqualent was a resounding Falstaff and Bill Menlove, when persuaded not to play Ophelia, was a handsome Hamlet.

  At the time Derek and I were working there, and to our astonishment people were laughing, the theatre was managed by Alastair Douglas. I’d met him when he was organising a Crown and Anchor evening to raise money for the beleaguered theatre. Public gambling of this sort was forbidden in the seventies. The police and the public thought losing money on racehorses was an acceptable pastime, but anything involving cards or the pernicious twirl of a roulette wheel was a fatal sin. Alastair covered himself by employing an elderly supporter of the theatre to take the tickets. The supporter was instructed to push a button if any uniformed police arrived. The evening began. I lost about two dollars and then all hell broke loose. The police turned up. The old retainer knew one of the constables. When asked, ‘Where’s the illegal gambling game?’ he cheerfully replied, ‘Upstairs.’ We all rushed for the fire-escape at the back of the building.

  Alastair Douglas was something of an enigma. He was robust, florid and spectacularly loquacious. His wife Rose was a fragile petal from the flower-power of the late sixties. One Sunday afternoon Alastair, Rose and small children came to our fortress flat on the cold slopes of Mornington. There was much drinking. In those days this amounted to three-quarters of a bottle of wine. Alastair decided it was time for his family to go home so someone telephoned for a taxi. This was an extravagance. There seemed to be only 20 taxis in Dunedin at the time and their fares were calculated individually and excessively. Finally, one taxi appeared in front of the house. Alastair and his family entered the car and bid elaborate farewells, and the receding tail light disappeared into the night. That was not the end of it. Alastair didn’t have any money and, as the taxi crawled towards North East Valley, he was obliged to create a new universe.

  The taxi-driver remarked, without irony, that it was a bit late for little people to be up. Alastair agreed but excused himself by revealing he was a brain surgeon attached to the Otago Medical School. He’d just completed a number of complicated lobotomies and was looking forward to a good night’s sleep.

  Alastair was so convincing that, when Rose and the children had left the taxi, he avoided paying the fare by offering to examine the driver’s head for any medical abnormalities. Later, he was cast in a Jim Beam whisky advertisement with the moribund Hercules hit-man, Kevin Sorbo — the actor who could make wood look good. Alastair played a nasty, unshaven Mexican barman. He did it so well that he took the money and ran to Britain.

  These recollections may give the impression that my time in Dunedin was a collection of badly orchestrated catastrophes. That is partially true. But, I did produce some shows that were seen — and quickly forgotten — on national television. I made these in the company of Kate Grant. She was my secretary and together we formed an alliance that defended us from what we saw as the staid silliness of a broadcasting system still administered like a government department. The rules that applied to broadcasters also applied to employees of the Ministry of Works. It was like making entertainment programmes to the music of concrete mixers. Kate was deliriously eccentric and occasionally confused, but we shared a delight in music which we played loudly to the annoyance of our colleagues. And, like so many people who have stayed with me during my life, we shared a sense of humour that seemed impenetrable to most people around us. After 40 years Kate is one of our closest friends. In all those years she’s hardly changed at all.

  My confidence was boosted by Kate and I became associated with Capping reviews in Dunedin. Marc Shaw was the director. He had a passion for theatre and was a tall, bearded medical student with a wild sense of humour. He wanted to know if I would write some sketches because some of the material he’d received was a little thin. I asked how much.

  Without any hesitation, he replied, ‘Oh, about an hour and a half’s worth.’

  I was flabbergasted. ‘But that must be nearly the whole show,’ I said.

  ‘No, no,’ Marc went on airily. ‘That’s just the first half.’

  I agreed I would give it a try and then Marc said, ‘Oh, one other thing. Can you do it by the end of next week?’

  I finished the sketches, but I have no memory of what they were like. I vaguely recall a version of Swan Lake in wheelchairs but that is something I should really forget.

  One of my most satisfying memories of Dunedin was performing idiotic sketches on the wide stage of The Regent with Marc, Derek and Alastair. I particularly remember one moment with Alastair. We were dressed as two old ladies. On the first night, I seemed to be getting all the jokes. However, on the second night this was reversed and the audience was howling at everything Alastair said. I was standing slightly downstage from him and couldn’t understand what was going on until I turned around. Alastair was carefully removing a string of sausages from his handbag and examining them with what could only be described as indelicate interest.

  Chapter 11

  NOW WE ARE FOUR

  It is Dunedin, 39 years ago. Anne and I had surviv
ed the grey ghosts of uncertainty, snow, threats of eviction, biker gangs, Derek firing a shotgun into the vegetable garden, motorcyclists downstairs who played ‘Lola’ 15 hours a day, the man next door who raised Mexican walking fish, the cement-like frost that sent me skidding down High Street with the wheels of the car fully locked and the couple from the back flat who squatted on the lawn every full moon, with a picnic, and silently performed odd movements. We had overcome many things that might have broken a marriage. On 1 February at 6.10 pm an event happened that would bind us even more closely together. Our daughter was born.

  When Anne told me she was pregnant, I was delighted, overwhelmed and slightly frightened. So, when it was obvious there was a baby with arms and small thumping feet inside Anne, she looked at my constantly astonished face with a patient smile that seemed to say: ‘Do you not actually understand how this happened?’

  So, I thought it was time to pull myself together. Like millions of men before me I lay in bed, and when Anne was asleep, looked at her rising belly, felt for the nudge of a hand or a foot through my wife’s skin and rolled back in confusion thinking, ‘My God, there are three of us in bed.’ Often a faint thud and the tiny ripple of a readjustment would start me giggling and I struggled to suppress my laughter — forgetting that the reason for my joy couldn’t hear me.

  Anne was a registered nurse with a forthright view of human anatomy. We had talked about the birth and agreed that I should be there. This was an age when fathers were regarded by the medical profession as irritating accessories to the production of children.