Clarke & Dawe: in the line of political satire

AFTER 25 years on air, John Clarke and Bryan Dawe are still making politics funny.

ON a Wednesday morning in mid-November, a man picks up that day’s edition of The Age from a neighbouring table in a cafe in Melbourne’s Fitzroy. He skims the headlines and sips a flat white between turning the pages. What is he looking for? “Something I haven’t seen before,” he says. The 66-year-old is a picture of unhurried composure. To outward appearances, he’s an inner-city retiree happily fulfilling a daily routine of caffeine consumed alongside current affairs. On closer examination, however, this man is engaged in the serious, difficult business of turning news into satire, so that his work may make us laugh while also making us think.

When a girl of about three pauses by his table after spilling sultanas on the floor, John Clarke looks up and greets her with a sonorous hello. The young girl is momentarily entranced by one of the most familiar faces on Australian television. She clocks his bald dome, the unkempt patch of white hair that circles behind his ears, the slight smile and the handsome black overcoat with matching slacks topped by a black bowler hat. Most of all, though, she’s drawn in by a pair of bright blue eyes that sparkle with a tangible sense of knowingness, as if their owner lives in a state of perpetual amusement at life itself.

His task today is much the same as it has been for the past 25 years. Once a week, he writes and records a short television program that distils newsworthy issues into a satirical dialogue between two men: Bryan Dawe and himself. On camera, Clarke adopts the guise of a public figure in name alone. Dawe queries his guest in the public interest, while Clarke’s character — anyone from the prime minister or a premier, down to a lowly economic consultant — alternately answers and evades questions. The resulting 2½-minute program, Clarke & Dawe, airs nationally at 6.57pm every Thursday, immediately before the ABC’s nightly news bulletin. More often than not, it is the among the week’s sharpest commentary on up-to-the-minute matters relating to Australian politics and public life.

Pages of The Age keep turning while mid-morning traffic streams by on Gertrude Street. On today’s agenda are several competing topics, which Clarke discusses casually while continuing to take in the newsprint. Throughout the week, he says, “I take notes subconsciously, but I don’t have a piece of paper.” This is how his writing days always begin: with a blank page, as it were, but not with a blank mind. “There’s been quite a lot of that in the media [with regard to the G20]. There are some very big things being discussed. That huge China trade deal, that was a nine-year job. The complexities in that must be colossal, and it’s a bit ridiculous to have it discussed at the level of ‘my dad’s bigger than your dad’.”

With this, Clarke smiles wryly, as he so often does when he knows he has delivered a funny line. “So there’s that,” he continues. “Domestic politics hasn’t much changed lately because they’ve still not got the budget through, and aspects of that have come apart in their hands a little bit. And then the global economy is always quite interesting, because when I was a kid you could not spend more than you had. Now you can spend whatever you like. Governments have started doing that in order to create what they call growth, which has not been an unalloyed success in parts of Europe” — the corners of his mouth curl upward — “because growth can just as easily go backwards as forwards.”

These are a few of the gears that are whirring inside Clarke’s head as he works towards that moment when he steels himself to sit before a blank page. The writer’s job requires some prescience, as the program is often filmed the day before broadcast, and a day is a long time in the 24/7 news cycle. “What we do is terribly responsive,” he says. To mitigate the chances of being ensnared by the shifting sands of public dialogue, he always develops two separate ideas, both of which are recorded with Dawe. In particularly productive or newsworthy weeks, they’ll film three or four scripts.

A short walk from the cafe is Clarke’s office on Smith Street, which consists of two rooms behind a door marked “no entry”: one whose floor-to-ceiling shelves are stacked with boxes, files, books, videotapes, DVDs and CDs, and another wherein a chair sits before an uncluttered desk featuring an open laptop, a cordless telephone, some loose sticky notes and little else. This smaller space is where he writes.

Framed works by Australian cartoonist Bruce Petty line the wall. A photograph of sheep grazing before a snow-capped mountain range taken in Glenorchy, New Zealand — Clarke’s motherland — is propped against a brick chimney. A hung black coat obscures some of the warm natural light entering through a window adjacent to the desk. “You just make yourself at home,” he says at 11am. “The level of excitement here will be dangerously low for some time.” He removes his overcoat to reveal a grey short-sleeved shirt.

After donning a pair of black-rimmed eyeglasses, Clarke spends the next few hours trawling through online news outlets, seeking to sort wheat from chaff. But for chirping birds and tradesmen occasionally jackhammering nearby, it’s a silent cocoon from the outside world. Emails arrive with an urgent ping; replies are dispatched with a satisfying whoosh. His creative process includes phoning a couple of political reporters to borrow their expertise.

Lunch is a greasy cheese, tomato and spring onion toasted sandwich and another flat white from a nearby cafe, eaten at his desk, in front of the machine he refers to as a typewriter. “There’s probably some grass growing outside you can go and have a look at,” he says. “This isn’t really a spectator sport.”

By 2pm, he has worked up two scripts of a few hundred words each. He gives them a final on-screen read, then manually double-spaces the documents. He emails the attachments to his producer for approval by ABC’s classifications department, and prints two copies of each.

The text is free of punctuation; none of Dawe’s lines ends with a question mark. After paging through the printouts, he says, “Oh well. There’s a couple of things I would like to change, but I’ve already sent them the scripts.”

CLARKE and Dawe’s longstanding format of the political interview began on the page. “When I first started the idea, I wrote it as a newspaper column,” says Clarke on the walk through Fitzroy’s back streets to his car. “I was trying to adopt the form. The first one published was an interview with Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the lapsed New Zealander who was running Queensland [from 1968 to 1987]. He was being completely silly; he said things that were manifestly ridiculous, all the time. The problem with interviews with him was that he was treated ser­iously.” Clarke latched on to the idea of a reporter viewing him in a totally different light. “The first question was, ‘Sir Joh, when was it you first realised you could make other people laugh? Was it the schoolyard thing?’ I was trying to suggest that the only explanation for this guy’s ludicrous behaviour is that he’s trying to be funny; none of his arguments made sense. I thought that was an interesting idea.”

Following Clarke’s breakout success on the small screen as Fred Dagg, the knockabout Kiwi farmer, he relocated to Melbourne in 1977 and continued writing and performing on television, radio and stage for a variety of broadcasters, including the ABC. “I’d done a lot of radio there in the 1970s, and I didn’t want to do monologues,” he says, while casually steering his blue Subaru through traffic. Clarke told an ABC producer that he’d like to try the newspaper column interview format instead. “I said, ‘Would you mind reading the questions, and we’ll see if this idea works?’ He read the questions, and he was very good at it.” That man was Dawe. The year was 1987. Both men were 39.

“We did a few on radio to tease out the idea and work out how the fun could be in the writing and in the performance. It’s not just either of those, it’s both: the absurdity of saying you are somebody, and making no attempt to be them, is just a nice thing to do.” He smiles. “I thought that was a funny idea.”

Transposing the concept from radio to the small screen in 1989, on the Nine Network’s A Current Affair, was another inspired decision. “On television it’s an even sillier idea,” he says while the car idles at a red light. It was around this time that Australian politicians realised they could no longer afford to avoid talking to the media. TV, he says, “was the engine room of how you promulgated messages, and how you presented yourself. There was beginning to be a performative element about what they were doing in their public manifestation.”

The light changes colour, and he eases the car forward. “Therefore, it was a nice counterbalance if we removed anything performative, including even the appearance and sound of the person.” When the pair relocated in 1999 from their weekly spot at the end of Friday night’s ACA to closing Thursday night’s 7.30 Report on the ABC, the format remained exactly the same: two besuited men, filmed talking to each other against a blank background.

This minimalist approach to political satire struck a chord, not only with the audience, which had never seen anything like it, but with colleagues in the field, too. Fellow comic performer and Mad as Hell host Shaun Micallef was one such admirer. “When I was doing Full Frontal, it was quite a revelation to see those guys,” he says. “We’d spend hours putting make-up on someone to make them look like Paul Keating to record a sketch, and make these points in a rather lame way. Then we’d turn on The 7.30 Report and see Clarke and Dawe do it so economically, so expediently and so easily. John didn’t need to dress up as anybody or put on a false nose. It actually made the point a lot clearer.”

After parking on the street outside ABC’s Southbank studio, Clarke paces in and exchanges pleasantries with the security guard at the front desk. It seems to be his mission to brighten the day of everyone he comes across, from baristas, interns and cameramen to producers and news anchors. In his mind, all are deserving of a few kind words and a wry joke. By 3pm he’s sitting in a makeup chair, having the patch at the back of his head clipped. “Is my hair white or grey?” he wonders aloud, examining a tuft between his fingers. “Grey,” replies his hairdresser and make-up artist, Thelma Henson. “It seems to be getting whiter,” he says, looking puzzled.

Suddenly, Dawe bursts into the room, dressed head to toe in black, sporting aviator shades and wheeling a suitcase behind him. “Good lord!” exclaims Clarke. “Well done, you!”

The new arrival looks hot and bothered. “I can’t tell you how fascinating northern Dandenong is,” he says sarcastically, cigarettes on his breath. His usual 90-minute drive from south of Melbourne became a three-hour scenic detour following a chemical spill on the Monash Freeway. Dawe has spent much of the past month on the road, ferrying himself between public speaking appointments in Brisbane, Sydney and Adelaide. He often performs as a character named Sir Murray Rivers QC, a retired Supreme Court judge; another talk, A Satirist’s Journey, begins with his youthful aspirations to work as a writer, performer and lawyer — three areas his high school careers adviser suggested Dawe shouldn’t bother with, as he apparently came from the wrong background. “So I did all of them,” he says with a defiant smile. “He was my major influence.”

In an adjacent dressing-room featuring wardrobes stocked with black suits, white shirts and a rainbow of ties, Dawe says, “Early on, we used to talk on the phone and fax each other the scripts, but we’ve been doing this for a long time; we don’t need the preparation we did when we started. I know John’s writing so well, I can pretty much pick up the script and know the rhythm of what he’s trying to do.”

True to his word, he peers through his glasses at Clarke’s scripts for the first time at 3.10pm and spends about 30 seconds scanning the first before saying, “OK, got it. And who else?” he asks, turning the page before answering his own question. “Mr Abbott again.” He scans the words briefly before looking up. “John has got this ridiculous capacity to be able to spot the story that’s going to be happening in three days’ time,” he says. “It’s amazing.”

CLARKE walks in and shuts the door. “Let’s have a read,” he says. The actors slip into their familiar cadence, well honed after 25 years of weekly collaboration. The first script is in the Mastermind format, where Clarke is introduced as a senior editor on one of the major daily newspapers. His elected “special subject” is Australian politics in 2014. Their eyes are on the paper, not each other, as they run lines. There’s no laughter. They continue rehearsing both scripts while Dawe is made up by Henson, who stifles her amusement so as to not interrupt the pair. Lines are cut from both scripts to tighten the patter. Dawe scribbles with a pen to reflect these changes; Clarke’s pages remain unmarked.

On a small television near the ceiling, ABC News 24 shows Barack Obama speaking live from Beijing. “Twenty-six to 28 per cent,” says Dawe, reading the subtitles. “Pardon?” replies Clarke. “He wants 28 per cent.” They watch in silence as Obama outlines his plan — delivered alongside Chinese President Xi Jinping — to cut US carbon emissions below 2005 levels by 2025, a deal negotiated in secret between the two nations during the course of nine months. “How stupid does Abbott look?” Dawe says quietly after a few beats, shaking his head.

This announcement occurs just days before the G20 summit in Brisbane, and significantly shifts the tone of the event as far as the host country is concerned.

It also draws Clarke’s second script into sharp focus, as it concludes with Clarke-as-Abbott begrudgingly admitting that climate change will be discussed at G20 — but only after a schedule that includes “economics, trade, regional development, the importance of coal to world peace, and a putting competition”. The writer remains silent in the makeup chair, the gears in his mind whirring in response to this unexpected but not unwelcome development.

From the waist down, both men are dressed rather sloppily: their white shirts remain untucked and Dawe’s black boots would look more at home on a hiking trail than in a political interview. This is the beauty of shooting in the same format week after week, however: the home viewer only sees their torsos, faces and coloured ties. Five ABC staff members are on the studio floor as they record, while producer Cate Lapham provides direction from behind the glass. In 35 minutes, they film three attempts at each script, with both men suggesting tweaks between takes. Watching them on set, improvising lines and eliciting laughter from the floor staff, it is clear Clarke and Dawe are in their element. An observation of Micallef’s comes to mind: “I think they’re often taken for granted, to be perfectly honest,” he says. “We’ve got this lightning in a bottle that we’ve had for a long time now. Like everything that’s good, it’s easy to forget just how brilliant it is.”

THE easily digestible format of Clarke & Dawe has proved ideal for web audiences: the duo’s YouTube channel has amassed 6.4 million views in four years, and its most popular video — European Debt Crisis , a stunningly sharp piece of work that originally aired in May 2010 — has more than 500,000 views, thanks in part to an approving nod from The New York Times days after its broadcast. The YouTube videos are published on Thursday afternoon, several hours ahead of the nightly broadcast, and promoted via the Clarke & Dawe Facebook page (10,800 fans) and Clarke’s Twitter account (14,400 followers). “As far as the ABC is concerned, John is one of those pioneers that has taken us into the digital realm,” says Shane Castleman, ABC’s Victorian news editor. “He’s done it very successfully.”

After farewelling Dawe, Clarke reviews rough cuts in an editing room alongside Castleman and producer Lapham. A visual gag involving Dawe drinking from the prime minister’s glass of water, then saying everything twice, produces an explosive laugh from all in attendance. This is the most animated Clarke has been all day, momentarily doubling over in laughter at the sight of his colleague’s po-faced fumbling about. The interview ends with the line about climate change discussions following the putting competition, and Abbott confidently saying, “I’m pretty sure they don’t even bloody play golf in Russia; I could fix him up here.”

Across the next half-hour, Clarke sits with editor Kala Lampard to whittle the winning sketch down to its sharpest point. Its final running time, including introductory title card and ABC logo at the end, is two minutes, 42 seconds. He downloads the file to a thumb drive. Outside the editing room, Clarke crosses the hallway and enters an empty, darkened office. He opens his laptop and sits to watch the program one last time to check that there are no errors in the file ahead of its YouTube upload.

At 6.30pm, his workday ends as it began at 11am, with a man alone in a quiet room. Arms crossed, he leans back as Dawe appears on screen and says, “Prime Minister, thanks for your time tonight.” Clarke then sees himself filling the frame, replying with words that have been heard in lounge rooms across Australia more than 1000 times in various permutations since 1989: “It’s very good to be with you, Bryan, and good evening.”

Clarke & Dawe airs on ABC, 6.57pm, Thursdays.