‘The legislative and taxing front fell off.’ The 94 metre 100 metre track…
Standing ovation, on the 18th wedding anniversary, for a man who tickled our funny bones at Norton cinema
“‘Hello’ is the main thrust of my argument,” we overhear him saying in a characteristic answering machine message to his daughter. “You can unpackage the complexity of that and consider it in due time.”
Directed by: His adoring daughter, Lorin Clarke
Starring: John Clarke, Lorin Clarke, Jana Wendt, Bryan Dawe, Sam Neill, Ben Elton, Andrew Denton, Wendy Harmer, Anne Edmonds and many more …
Two hundred boxes of memoirs and hundreds of hours of television material have been condensed into a compelling documentary, But Also John Clarke, which is an insight into the great man.
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In February 1989, with the support of host Jana Wendt, Clarke and Dawe made its television debut as part of A Current Affair on the Nine Network, where the program would continue to air for eight years, until 1996.One of their episodes from this period, The Front Fell Off, featuring Clarke as Australian politician Bob Collins on the topic of a 1991 oil spill off the Australian coast, garnered widespread attention years later, when the video was circulated by some on the internet as real, eventually prompting fact-checkingwebsite Snopes to debunk it.
Interestingly, the film reveals that Clarke had attracted a lot of writing work in Australia. The first job he acquired was as screenplay writer for a Paul Cox feature film, much to Cox’s initial chagrin. He also wrote for Graham Kennedy’s TV show and Bette Midler and Peter Allen, while those artists were touring Australia. Clarke wrote a poetry book, scribed for several newspapers and of course delivered the Fred Dagg books.
Each of the guests in this film speak so lovingly of the larrikin Clarke and none more so than his close friend Sam Neill, who says in closing, “I never knew anyone quite like John. He was utterly unique. He thought differently, he looked different. He behaved differently. He was he was immensely funny in a different way than anyone had ever seen before. He’s unforgettable. Unforgettable. On every possible level.”
The last words however, are left to his daughter Lorin, who created this heartfelt tribute to her dad and reminds us of a phrase Clarke used to say to her…
“Life would be pretty boring if we didn’t make it funny.”
John Morrison Clarke (29 July 1948 – 9 April 2017) was a New Zealand comedian, writer and satirist who lived and worked in Australia from the late 1970s. He was a highly regarded actor and writer whose work appeared on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in both radio and television and also in print. He is principally known for his character Fred Dagg and his long-running collaboration with fellow satirist Bryan Dawe, which lasted from 1989 to his death in 2017, as well as for his success as a comic actor in Australian and New Zealand film and television.
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John Clarke spent a life trying to work things out, and we were the beneficiaries
JANA Wendt remembers the man who beguiled her with tales of birds, and more ideas than most people have in a lifetime: John Clarke.
AS I prodded him for memories of his New Zealand childhood, John Clarke once told me he remembered being an otter. He couldn’t recall how, or with whom, he had been swimming in a lake as a boy, but “that lovely feeling of the elements looking after you” came back to him often.
“I kind of knew who I was that day,” he said. John was a self-proclaimed “wonderer”, who tried to fathom the workings of the world. Birds, in whose company he died last weekend, were a case in point.
He took pleasure in photographing godwits, marvelling at how one in particular had flown from Alaska to New Zealand without rest. How did godwits sleep on their great migrations?
The smart money was on microsleeps. In attempting to work things out, John tried his hand at, among other things, stage acting, books, radio, TV and film, mostly with a view to making people laugh. His co-conspirators were a pale face whose expression could shift from blank to bonkers in a second, and eyes that were glancing wells of mischief.
In all his endeavours, John’s marvellous egg-shaped head spilt forth more ideas than any single person had a right to dream up in a lifetime.
We met in TV in the late 1980s when he and Bryan Dawe collaborated on mock political interviews that occupied the last segment of each Friday’s A Current Affair, which I hosted.
The effect of Clarke’s interviews, in which he made not the slightest attempt to change his appearance to resemble any politician, was to strip the people’s representatives of everything but their instinct for self-preservation.
Only a couple of times did John break his rule on costume: when his rampaging new Victorian premier Jeff Kennett appeared with an arrow stuck in his head.
Later, John decided a metre-high cone-shaped wig on top of his own head would make it clear the evening’s subject was Bronwyn Bishop.
In more recent years, John’s unmistakeable nasal tones on the phone would announce an hour or so of beguiling talk on whatever subject John was wondering about at the time.
“I don’t talk in order to say what I think. I talk in order to find out what I think,” John once told me.
I picture him now gliding through water like an otter with God — and godwits — looking