John Clarke’s humour was a saving grace during dark days

John Clarke did not merely share the initials of Our Lord. The JC from New Zealand, like the JC of the New Testament, was something of a saviour. During many dark days John’s gentle humour was a saving grace, greatly missed during the years of Scomo.

And John’s humour was gentle. There’s often cruelty in comedy but there was none in his. A memory: Clarkie and I went to the opening night of a one-man-show by another acknowledged genius and were numbed by the savagery, the sadism of the satire. Never a hint of that in The Gillies Report or Clarke and Dawe.

We’d first met in London in 1970 when filming The Adventures of Barry McKenzie. John’s screen debut? A bit part playing one of the Australian ockers from Earl’s Court. Returning home, John devised another naïve Bazza-style character in Fred Dagg and, almost overnight, became the most celebrated New Zealander since Edmund Hillary. But John found his new-found fame oppressive and sought asylum and anonymity in Australia, where I gave him a job with Adams Packer Films.

One of our projects was Paul Cox’s feature film Lonely Hearts. Paulus Henrique Benedictus Cox was the dourest of Dutchmen and I despaired of his first draft. John’s job was to brighten it up – and when he read his rewrite aloud to us even Paul, who’d resented the enforced collaboration, roared in laughter. Whereupon he begged John to take over from Norman Kaye in the lead with Wendy Hughes. Still shunning the spotlight, John declined. Lonely Hearts went on to win the AFI’s Best Film in 1982; John became famous all over again via The Gillies Report on ABC-TV in the mid-’80s.

Now to the next film we worked on. In the early days of our film renaissance Australia had no internationally recognised big-name stars. Mel, Jack, Nicole, Cate and Judy were years away. So in the rough-and-tumble of the Cannes meat market we weren’t in the running. Hence my idea of Blockbuster, a satire on the star system. And Clarkie joined me in the putative project.

Along the lines of Mel Brooks’ The Producers, our Blockbuster would be a scam production. A young Aussie filmmaker would arrive on Cannes’ La Croisette hawking a movie starring every imaginable marquee name, living and dead. Elvis Presley. Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, Clark Gable etc etc. All present and correct – namesakes recruited from the pages of the Melbourne and Sydney phonebooks. JC and PA found VIPs by the dozen.

The fact is we were spoilt for choice. The White Pages had, for example, a couple of Elvises and three Grace Kellys. Whether it was via the christening font or the deed-poll didn’t matter to us. We could round them up, ship them over and completely confuse the paparazzi and the public on any red carpet you cared to roll out. And if not legit, all perfectly legal.

From Blockbuster to lacklustre… John and I played at movie moguls in our spare time and by the time we had a filmable script, Hollywood had not only caught up with us but zoomed past. Blanchett, Jackman, Kidman and Crowe, that fellow exile from Clarke’s New Zealand, are all Oscar-winning names in the pavement of Hollywood Boulevard; Gibson, Davis, Jackman, Robbie, Bana, Rush, Hemsworth, Weaving, Ledger and Collette have all made their mark.

I don’t even have a copy of the script anymore. I think John’s daughters do. But I tell you what. It’s the funniest film we never made.