{"id":135753,"date":"2025-08-11T01:33:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-11T01:33:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/135753\/"},"modified":"2025-08-11T01:33:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-11T01:33:09","slug":"a-kick-in-the-head-we-all-needed-beloved-satirist-john-clarke-celebrated-in-new-film-by-his-daughter-australian-film","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/135753\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018A kick in the head we all needed\u2019: beloved satirist John Clarke celebrated in new film by his daughter | Australian film"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a career that spanned close to 40 years, the late satirist and comedian John Clarke played thousands of people. In his native New Zealand he was Fred Dagg, sheep farmer and gumboot philosopher<\/a>. In Australia he was best known as one half of Clarke and Dawe<\/a> \u2013 the voice of an endless parade of risible politicians, shonky businessmen and overconfident idiots.<\/p>\n

His magic trick was to play them all as himself. His eldest daughter, Lorin Clarke, explains it in her father\u2019s own words. \u201cHe used to say to me, \u2018If you ask some actors to play Hamlet, they will become a Danish prince, and they will research Danish princes. If you ask me to play Hamlet, Hamlet comes from Palmerston North.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

In Lorin\u2019s new documentary about her father, But Also John Clarke<\/a>, his old friend and fellow New Zealander Sam Neill puts it this way: \u201cJohn was a polymath. He could write, he could perform, he could knock up a poem for you, but there was always that John Clarke thing in the middle of it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Clarke died suddenly in 2017<\/a> aged 68, after suffering a heart attack on a bushwalk in the Grampians, Victoria. He had been birdwatching, a beloved pastime. The then Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, said Clarke\u2019s satire \u2013 of which he was a frequent target \u2013 \u201cserved a noble purpose. It spoke truth to power. It made our democracy richer and stronger.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not all who felt the blade of Clarke\u2019s wit were so generous. In the film the British comedian Ben Elton tells Lorin that \u201csometimes, when John skewered a target, they didn\u2019t even know they were dead until the following day\u201d. In the late 70s Clarke was all but run out of New Zealand<\/a>, where Dagg had become a cultural phenomenon, and annoying gadfly.<\/p>\n

Originally, the film\u2019s title was Not Only Fred Dagg But Also John Clarke. At the last minute, it was shortened, with a compromise: in New Zealand, it screens as Not Only Fred Dagg (after Clarke\u2019s death, Dagg\u2019s uniform of bucket hat, shearer\u2019s singlet, shorts and gumboots went on display at Te Papa Museum in Wellington).<\/p>\n

The shortening of the title annoyed Lorin. \u201cDon\u2019t write that eye-roll into your piece!\u201d she says laughing, immediately after rolling her eyes on our Zoom call. \u201cI love the title, I think it\u2019s funny and playful, and it\u2019s a slight nod to Peter Cook and Dudley Moore\u2019s Not Only \u2026 But Also<\/a>. But, you know, shorter titles work better in things like listings and so on.\u201d<\/p>\n

The majority of the film is given over to the stultifying forces that created Dagg. In this guise Clarke was, in the actor and director Oscar Kightley\u2019s words, \u201cthe godfather of New Zealand comedy\u201d \u2013 the dustbowl-dry, ultra-deadpan wit that runs through the films of Taika Waititi<\/a> and the work of Flight of the Conchords.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Rhys Darby, who played the Conchords\u2019 hapless band manager, Murray<\/a>, describes Dagg\u2019s character as \u201ca kick in the head with a gumboot we all kind of needed\u201d. At the time of Dagg\u2019s first appearance on NZBC in the early 70s (then New Zealand\u2019s only television broadcaster, now known as TVNZ 1), broadcasters still spoke in perfectly rounded British accents.<\/p>\n

Dagg punctured such pretensions. His was a comedy of the familiar: for the first time, a New Zealander was holding up a mirror to the country. Clarke picked a national archetype \u2013 a sheep farmer \u2013 and turned him into a fool with seven sons, all named Trevor<\/a>, but also a relatable, laconic everyman. A newspaper headline described him as the thinking man\u2019s Paul Hogan.<\/p>\n

In a small country, Dagg\u2019s success was overwhelming. Fred Dagg\u2019s Greatest Hits<\/a>, a novelty album made in four hours, is claimed to have been the biggest-selling debut by a New Zealand artist until it was topped by Lorde\u2019s Pure Heroine. But Dagg also made enemies \u2013 as Neill notes, New Zealanders lop tall poppies even quicker than Australians.<\/p>\n

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Lorin Clarke interviews Australian comedian Shaun Micallef <\/p>\n

Clarke moved to Australia in 1977. By then a new father, he laid low \u2013 waiting, watching and listening. He was learning a new vernacular. The Dagg character was becoming a prison: \u201cTo him [moving to Australia] felt like a chance for reinvention,\u201d Lorin says. For a few years Clarke avoided performing, concentrating on writing.<\/p>\n

He re-emerged on The Gillies Report, calling the fictitious sport of Farnarkeling<\/a>, perhaps the most extreme showcase for Clarke\u2019s love of language: the game was<\/a> \u201cengaged in by two teams whose purpose is to arkle, and to prevent the other team from arkeling, using a flukem to propel a gonad through sets of posts situated at random around the periphery of a grommet\u201d.<\/p>\n

Sports-mad Melbourne, especially, went into a frenzy. Letters poured in to the Age. Somewhere, Roy and HG<\/a> were taking notes. Wendy Harmer, who starred alongside Clarke on The Gillies Report, tells Lorin that by the early 80s, \u201che had us nailed\u201d; by 1987 Clarke and (Bryan) Dawe made their debut on ABC Radio.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easiest to see Clarke\u2019s influence, perhaps, on Working Dog productions: just as Dagg was a playful reflection of the New Zealand national character, The Castle poked gentle fun<\/a> at Australia\u2019s small suburban aspirations and law of the vibe<\/a>. The TV series Utopia<\/a> owes an obvious debt to the Olympic piss-take The Games<\/a>, co-written with Ross Stevenson.<\/p>\n

The debut of The Games was one occasion when Clarke expressed his frustration with his masters at the ABC. Today such a program would be given less time to find its feet. Clarke \u2013 who always regarded his audience as far smarter than his bosses \u2013 wanted to give viewers space to pick up what he called the grammar of the show so they could become fluent in it.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, they came to love and trust Clarke because, no matter who he was playing, he somehow remained himself. Jana Wendt, who hosted Clarke and Dawe on A Current Affair from 1989 to 1996, notes that it was all in Clarke\u2019s eyes \u2013 that inimitable, mischievous look to camera that invited the audience in on the joke.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was something watchful about him, even when he was pretending to be somebody else,\u201d Lorin says. \u201cThere was a layer of awareness there, and he had really protective relationship with his audience. I wanted to honour that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a career that spanned close to 40 years, the late satirist and comedian John Clarke played thousands…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":135754,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[171,53,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-135753","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115007560438880361","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135753\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/135754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}