The Years Before My Death

by David McPhail

  Gabriel: He’s dead set on it mate. Got this idea of a land flowing with milk and honey, creatures in His own image …

  Michael: Creatures in His own image? How are we going to know which one is Him?

  THE ANGELS CONTINUE TO MOAN ABOUT THE TASK BEFORE THEM UNTIL MICHAEL DECIDES TO BE FORCEFUL.

  Michael: Look, I won’t be pushed around. I mean who does He think He is?

  Gabriel: He’s God, mate!

  Michael: Well, yeah, but that’s no excuse for exploiting the workers. I’ve got a good mind to down tools, march right up to that celestial throne, and give Him a piece of my mind!

  Gabriel: Aw, yeah? What would you say?

  Michael: I would say to Him …

  SUDDENLY GOD’S VOICE IS HEARD

  God’s Voice: Good morning, Michael.

  BOTH ANGELS MEEKLY START CHANTING

  Angels: Holy, holy, holy …

  Michael (an aside to Gabriel): You didn’t tell me He was here!

  Gabriel (whispers): He’s everywhere, mate!

  The furore caused by the religious programme continued to grow. Prayers were said for Jon and me at one Christian service and the abusive telephone calls to Television New Zealand increased. I was asked, and it was suggested pointedly by one manager, that I should agree to appear on a programme with an Anglican clergyman to defend the show. Jon, Alan and I argued we had nothing to defend. Most of the sketches were light-hearted and funny and any form of comedy was likely to offend overly sensitive people. Further, I felt that if any devout Christians knew David McPhail and Jon Gadsby were producing a comedy programme about religion, they’d make certain they didn’t watch it. But, it was obvious a section of the audience we’d cultivated during A Week of It was either profoundly angered or deeply disappointed with our new direction. Even people who were loyal to us questioned why we had departed so dramatically from a popular formula.

  Although I was unnerved by the savageness of some responses, I still felt confident we would regain our momentum if the quality of the writing remained high. But, I was slightly uneasy. The next show dealt with sex. Consider that for a moment, 48 minutes of television sketches all about sex.

  SCENE: A STARK MOTEL ROOM. A DIRECTOR AND HIS ASSISTANT ARE PREPARING TO SHOOT A VIDEO.

  Director: Right, we start in here with Nude Schoolgirl Frolics and then once we’ve knocked that off — if you’ll pardon the expression — we re-set in Unit Four for Confessions of a Hot Housewife.

  The assistant was responsible for casting the videos. He informed the director that Kurt Thrust was unavailable and Randy Lunge was already booked. Dick Troy was keen, but as the assistant explained:

  Assistant: Dick’s developed a limp.

  Director (aghast): Has he?

  Assistant: Yeah, can’t walk straight.

  Director (relieved): Oh. So, who is our walking love machine today then?

  Assistant: Well, the only actor I could get was … Sir Basil Parkes.

  Director: What? Not the Sir Basil Parkes?

  Assistant: Yeah.

  Director: But he’s a Shakespearian actor. How’d you get him to play the lead in Nude Schoolgirl Frolics?

  Assistant: Well, it was quite easy, really.

  Director: What did you do?

  Assistant: I lied to him.

  Director: You lied to him? I suppose you told him this was bloody Twelfth Night?

  Assistant: Aw, don’t be silly. I told him it was Hamlet.

  At this point I entered as Sir Basil wearing underpants, a suspender belt, stockings, high heeled-shoes, a wig and glasses. (Is it any wonder there were days when my children were reluctant to go to school?) Sir Basil explained that he couldn’t find his dagger. The director rolled his eyes and said something like, ‘Don’t worry. She’ll find it for you.’ Sir Basil proceeded to rehearse. ‘To be or not to be, that is question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune …’ At this moment, the director, played by Jon, interrupted.

  Director: My assistant probably neglected to mention … that this is a modern version of the play … and we’ve found it necessary to make a few changes to that speech.

  Sir Basil: Oh … what have you done?

  Director: Er … we’ve cut it.

  Sir Basil: Cut it? But that’s the most famous soliloquy in the work!

  Director: True … but in our version, instead of all the ‘to be or not to be’ rubbish, you now just say … ‘Oh, it’s so hot.’

  Sir Basil: I beg your pardon?

  Director: Oh, it’s so hot.

  Sir Basil: Is that all?

  Director: No, then you take your clothes off.

  Sir Basil: ‘Oh, it’s so hot’ … and then I disrobe?

  Director: Yeah, you’ve got the hang of it. Let’s get started.

  Sir Basil (still very perplexed): Right. I must say I am pleased to get the work.

  In the sketch, Sir Basil performed very well, but only because Jon’s assistant had difficulty finding a female lead and was forced to employ Dame Sybil Ashcroft, a contemporary of Sir Basil’s who’d held a torch for him for many years and manipulated it with great aplomb in Nude Schoolgirl Frolics.

  Oddly, the sex show calmed the audience down. We had steered away from obvious vulgarity with oblique sketches like Sir Basil’s porno debut. The clamour raised by the religion show didn’t disappear, but our audience was now watching to be amused, not offended.

  Jon, Alan and I ended 1980 somewhat dazed. We’d fired some of our best shots at the television audience and they’d responded by aceing a lot of them back. We knew the hour-long format was asking too much of both the writers and the audience. The idea of single-subject shows was utterly doomed. There were only so many topics we could cover. Certainly, we hadn’t done marriage, children, pets, paranormal activity, UFOs or bowel problems, but the comic possibilities were pretty limited.

  We reconsidered and decided we’d aim for two things. The show would be shorter and we would edge back towards topical satire. So, in 1981 we started again.

  I am dressed as a flamboyant facsimile of David Hartnell. David who? Hartnell was a gushy gossip columnist who revealed the secrets of B-grade stars before every women’s magazine grabbed the rights and left Hartnell a little lonely on the outside. In his hey-day he was a major player.

  He did it well with all the simpering excitement of someone who knew everyone but was always just out of the photograph. It’s a credit to his prominence that Alan, Jon and I wrote a series of sketches called Hartnell’s Parliament and everyone knew who we were talking about.

  Hi, Matahari Hartnell here — the spy who came in from the cold cream … I dipped into Education Minister Merv Wellington’s moving autobiography, Education Are My Business, but the book was long and tedious, with a very weak spine … but that’s Merv for you … Fun-loving Aussie Malcolm says he wants a vasectomy. I was shocked until a friend told me Aussie thinks it’s a type of Japanese car. I said, ‘Don’t you mean a Mitsubishi?’, but Aussie said, ‘No — the wife is still hoping for a boy.’

  A few programmes later, the Hartnell character reported:

  Hi, undercover David Hartnell here, Agent 007, the James Bondage of the Beehive. I asked the Clint Eastwood of Labour Party politics, Ann Hercus, what she’d be putting in her Christmas stocking. ‘My leg,’ she replied tartly.

  The names mean little now, but they were wide and fair targets and now, in an age when it is both desirable and necessary to fire darts into the raw hide of New Zealand politics, I’m saddened that no one knows where to find the gun.

  Alan, Jon and I wrote most of McPhail and Gadsby in Jon’s small apartment in a place called Tonbridge Mews. Although it was often suggested we could have our own office at Television New Zealand, I preferred to be separate. I suspected there would be an irresistible temptation for people to poke their heads through the door and ask, ‘How’s it going?’ But the distance meant I had to keep in frequent telephone contact with our produce
r, the unflappable John Lye. His voice would not change as I outlined a new sketch that required an operating theatre with real surgical equipment, an adjacent room with two beds and a hospital corridor. He’d simply reply, ‘How much surgical equipment exactly?’ The scripts were written on an ancient typewriter, supplied reluctantly by the television company, on paper we bought ourselves. We would begin at 10 am.

  There would be a brief survey of The Press newspaper, a look at the notes we’d made and then we’d start. There were sketches we’d written or recorded beforehand, but this was a blank page. Usually, Jon would type while Alan and I sat looking hopefully into the middle distance. We learned one trick very quickly. If there was an idea we couldn’t complete within ten minutes — biff it. There was no time to fiddle with sketches. We had to fill a television programme with 24 minutes of comedy to a short schedule that allowed the designers, the builders, the wardrobe mistresses, the lighting designer, the sound engineer and the studio crew enough time to prepare. They never missed the mark.

  That is why, in later years, I became so angry when, through attrition and short-sightedness, this talented group was slowly and firmly dismembered and finally dispersed. I had assembled one of the fastest and finest television production units in Australasia. From the drudgery of a public service television system we made programmes that were bold, innovative and at times ingenious.

  John Lye produced and directed most of McPhail and Gadsby over a period of eight years. He was the only person I fully trusted with transforming a script into a finished sketch. John had a meticulous eye for detail and an overwhelming desire for precision. I sometimes wondered if it really was necessary to reshoot a sketch because there was no light on the pot plants at the back, but I had complete faith in John’s judgement. If the plants needed light, then let there be light and if John said a sketch wasn’t working, we knew it wasn’t working.

  Graham Johnson was our technical producer and lighting director. The show made extreme demands on Graham and his crew, but he never said, ‘No.’ Although occasionally he asked, ‘Why?’

  Mark White and Ross Mackenzie designed and supervised building the sets. They had three days to create anything from Hitler’s bunker to a quiet bedroom or manufacture a wide space and roll in four large and freshly cleaned front-end loaders.

  In some shows Jon and I played as many as 15 parts each. Regardless of any comic ability we may have possessed, the various characters had to be obvious and, in the case of impersonations, accurate reproductions of the people we were mimicking. Our makeup team, headed by Elle Stephenson and Lenore Stewart, constantly devised new ways of streamlining character makeup so it could be applied at great speed. They made an enormous contribution to the show with their inventive ideas and enthusiastic loyalty. Lenore Stewart later became the closest thing Jon and I ever had to a personal makeup artist. I would stare at the mirror with increasing surprise as she deftly transformed my face from Rob Muldoon into Tina Turner. Or pause with admiration when she rushed into the studio seconds before a recording to comb a particular lock of hair she’d seen and didn’t like.

  The wardrobe department was under constant pressure particularly when sketches called for bizarre costumes or unlikely outfits, but as for everyone who worked on the programme there was a commitment to make it work and, I hoped, pride when it succeeded.

  One example of the drive that propelled the programme was the work of our principal graphic artist, Dave Johnstone. McPhail and Gadsby was produced at a time when sophisticated electronic wizardry was only just appearing. For several series Dave painted many of the graphics used in the show and drew and hand-lettered the closing credits. These were highly creative drawings that only appeared on screen for a few seconds.

  With the shift back to more topical sketches my impersonation of the prime minister re-emerged. One of his first appearances found him in a large library perusing a book. Three volumes of his memoirs — Muldoon by Muldoon, The Rise and Fall of a Young Turk and My Way — were placed prominently on a table. The prime minister turns and speaks, or, more precisely, growls.

  Oh, hello. I was just thumbing through my vast collection of Heron books, titles like Oliver Copperfield by Charles Darwin, War and Peace by Leo Sayer and, of course, my favourite, Huckleberry Finn by Mark Finn. (He’s in Split Enz, you know.) But I’m not here to talk to you about the great works of the past. I’m here to offer a unique opportunity for you and your family to share in the great works of the present, in the Robert Muldoon Book of the Month Club. You’ll gasp at the colourful fiction of Muldoon by Muldoon. You’ll weep at the glaring falsehoods of The Rise and Fall of a Young Turk. And you’ll be astounded by the grammatical errors and breathtaking megalomania of My Way. There is no obligation to buy … yet. However, the RD Muldoon Literary Heritage (Emergency Purchase) Bill will soon change all that. Certainly a busy man like the prime minister can’t toss off a novel overnight — it takes me at least two — so I have taken the liberty of making certain slight changes and improvements to some of our neglected classics. Now your children can thrill to the excitement of such masterworks as Dickens’s A Tale of Two Muldoons, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Muldoons, Wuthering Muldoon by Jane Eyre and the perennial The Muldoon Also Rises— a favourite of my wife.

  The last line was somewhat daring because Muldoon was fiercely protective of his private life and particularly of his wife. He was quoted as saying anyone could make any comment about him but his family was off-limits. Later, he became enraged when Jon and I screened a sketch parodying This Is Your Life. We made the prime minister the subject of the spoof and the front man asked him if he could identify a voice. We then played a tape of a woman saying, ‘Hello dear. I’ve just put the roast in the oven and I’m so looking forward to you coming home.’

  The front man then asked, ‘Prime Minister, who is that?’

  As Muldoon, I paused, thought for a moment and then replied, ‘Colin Meads?’ The front man was a little flabbergasted. ‘No, it’s a woman. This is your wife.’ I growled moodily. ‘You’ve got that all wrong. Do your homework, you ninny. The programme’s called ‘This Is Your Life’ not ‘This Is Your Wife!’

  I was informed the prime minister was deeply displeased with the sketch and there was an implied warning that any further references to his wife would be met with an angry response. Needless to say, we ignored the warning.

  To reduce the strain of writing and producing a topical, satirical show in under a week, Alan, Jon and I developed a number of regular sketches. This had two distinct advantages. First, we would begin the writing week knowing we had approximately a third of the programme already planned. While we did not know precisely what we would write, the production team already had the sets for these inserts thus reducing the time needed for design and construction.

  The major requirement was a sketch into which we could throw up-to-date material. Alan and Jon pointed out the usefulness of the pub sketch in A Week of It and while I was at first reluctant to go back to a previous formula, they convinced me that two average New Zealand males discussing the week around a pool table or a bar would allow us to comment on recent events. So, we invented Denny and Ron. Their discourses were frequently complicated by Denny’s frail grasp of logic and his irritating insistence that he was witty and always right.

  Denny: I take it, Ron, you do not subscribe to the belief there is a great and glorious afterlife?

  Ron: Do you mean angels and harps and haloes and all that? No, if you ask me, when you’re dead, you’re dead.

  Denny: Ah, ‘when you’re dead, you’re dead.’ The gospel according to Ron. How then, O Great Visionary, do you explain the phenomenon of … ghosts?

  Ron: Ghosts?

  Denny: Indeed, Ron — shades, spectres, phantoms, things that walk in the night.

  Ron: You mean like you when you’ve been hitting the golden sherry?

  Denny: I’d thank you to leave my personal life out of this, Ron. The fact that I enjoy the occasional g
lass of the sparkling grape, coupled with a bladder weakened by a distressing childhood illness, has little relevance to our current discourse upon matters pertaining to the other side.

  Ron: What?

  Denny: Ghosts, Ron. Do you believe in them?

  Ron: No, they don’t exist.

  Denny: How can you be sure?

  Ron: Well, have you ever seen a ghost?

  Denny: I have not been so privileged.

  Ron: Well, how do you know they exist?

  Denny: Have you ever seen the Queen’s bottom?

  Ron: No!

  Denny: Well, how do you know it exists?

  Ron: Well, it must.

  Denny: Precisely. And the same is true of ghosts.

  Ron: What’s the Queen’s bottom got to do with it?

  Denny: Nothing, Ron, except that it exists but is rarely seen.

  Another regular sketch featured our friend and A Week of It colleague, Stuart Devenie. He played a frequently tetchy interviewer named Fraser Dick and the show he hosted was called ‘Dick of the Week’. This gave Jon, Alan and I the opportunity to put direct questions to public figures who’d been prominent or particularly ridiculous during the previous few days. Invariably, their answers irritated Fraser and a large proportion of the sketch’s appeal arose from Stuart’s sharp portrayal of an interviewer becoming increasingly incensed by the inanity of the replies he received.

  As McPhail and Gadsby developed we made a feature of satirical songs. Jon was and is a skilful musician and Alan was particularly adept at creating clever and occasionally excruciating rhymes. There are dangers with song parodies. Much of their fun arises because the audience hears fresh words set to a recognisable melody. But replacing the lyrics of an existing tune with something new is a breach of copyright. Early in the life of A Week of It, I learnt this was a hazardous area when a song parody came to the attention of the estate of Cole Porter. The executors said they viewed the parody as a careless oversight, but hinted darkly that should there be a repeat, such imprudence would attract a fee. This, they suggested, could start at a million American dollars.