Channel 10 feared losing licence over Barry Humphries’ scandalous Sir Les Patterson segment
Channel 10 presenter reveals how a crew member deliberately hid the only tape of Barry Humphries’ controversial Sir Les Patterson appearance in 1976 to prevent a Television Tribunal investigation.
South Australian television and radio veteran Jane Reilly has revealed how the Ten Network feared it would lose its Adelaide broadcast licence after a scandalous appearance by Sir Les Patterson on the ladies’ morning program Touch of Elegance in 1976.
The station, then known as SAS 10, was bombarded with a record number of complaints after Sir Les crashed the prim and proper morning show hosted by former model and deportment coach Jaye Walton.
Launched by Walton in 1968, Touch of Elegance became a runaway success with Adelaide housewives through the 1970s with its commitment to tasteful content focused on local fashion boutiques, hair salons and light celebrity interviews. Walton and her team had been led to believe that the late Barry Humphries would be appearing as a guest as himself but then got word he would be attending as Dame Edna.
But producers of the live and unedited program were helpless to act when it was instead Sir Les who arrived wearing a booze-stained powder blue suit with a large stick of the local Germanic sausage known as mettwurst stuck down the front of his trousers.
During the interview, Sir Les described Humphries as “a horse’s hoof”, made lewd remarks about the private life of then SA Premier Don Dunstan, described the Adelaide Festival as an event for “the poofter push” and told Walton that he was giving her “a warm feeling” while grappling the mettwurst in his pants.
He also claimed he had been inundated with requests to donate at the local Adelaide sperm bank and mused as to whether if you robbed a sperm bank you would be “caught white-handed”.
He went on to describe governor-general Sir John Kerr as a “wowser” who had “never had a drink before breakfast”.
Walton barely maintained her composure during the interview, with Sir Les saying at one stage: “Either these trousers are a bit tight or you’re a bit more attractive than usual Jane.”
Jane Reilly had only started working at SAS 10 the previous year and was hosting the Earlybirds program before A Touch of Elegance and was on set that day.
“It sounds like overstatement but it was almost like a September 11 or Princess Diana moment in the history of South Australian television,” Reilly told The Weekend Australian.
“Everyone was talking about it and to this day people can remember where they were when they were watching it. It really was quite appalling. I mean I loved it, and a lot of people thought it was hilarious, but we got so many complaints. We were genuinely worried that we would be hit with a fine at the very least or even get shut down by the Television Tribunal for scandalising public decency.”
Reilly said that because of the live format of the program no-one could work out what to do while Sir Les was on air.
“There were people running out of the boardroom saying how the hell has this been allowed to happen,” she said.
“Eventually they just faded to black and put up an image of the test pattern. But Sir Les didn’t leave. First he was trying to crack on to one of the Harris Scarfe models and then he went and sat with the receptionist and took phone calls from distressed viewers where he went back to being Barry and pretended to be agreeing with them about how terrible it had all been.”
Reilly revealed that after the incident there was an internal investigation at the station into how the program was aired, with station managers steeling themselves for scrutiny from the Television Tribunal.
However, an enterprising member of the Touch of Elegance crew deliberately hid the only existing tape of the program, meaning there was no evidence on which to base any investigation.
The tape remained hidden for more than 20 years and only resurfaced a few years ago in an edited form on YouTube.
“It saved our hide,” Reilly said. “I know the identity of the person who hid it but would never reveal it. It really was such an amazing moment in television. Adelaide had never seen anything like it.”
