In the first of five deep dive interviews for Nostalgia Week,
TV Tonight talks with Grahame Bond,
the man behind a ground-breaking comedy character.
The greatest thing Grahame Bond ever learned from his parents, was that nobody ever told him he couldn’t do whatever he dreamt up.
But it would be another family member, a bullying uncle he disliked intensely, who would become the inspiration for his most famous character, Aunty Jack.
Today the actor, writer, director, musician and composer (who couldn’t read music) reflects on his television career with TV Tonight.
Bond was a studying architecture in the late 1960s at Sydney University and running revues alongside a young Peter Weir, Geoffrey Atherden (Mother & Son), composer Peter Best and a young Rory O’Donoghue when they were invited by Bob Allnutt from ABC religious department and Producers Authors Composers and Talent (now PACT Centre for Emerging Artists) to stage a professional revue.
“I thought it was Busby Berkeley”
“We had full sized swimming pool on stage, a castle, the opening act was a sketch about a bank robbery which just grew and grew to the point where it was just so monumental. There were 120 people on stage including a military band, a tank, marching girls, aquafollies. I thought it was Busby Berkeley,” he recalls.
“Robert Helpmann came to see it in 1969 and said, ‘My dear boy, it’s an exceptionally different show, a bit ahead of its time, but I’m doing the Adelaide Festival. I’ve got Nureyev, Royal Shakespeare Company, Judi Dench, and we have an arts theatre, would you like to bring the show?’
Bond’s first TV appearance was the one-hour special, Man on a Green Bike.
“Philip Adams watched it and said ‘This is was the most original and exciting thing that’s come out of television all year,’” he continues.
“It was all fresh, original music, unknown cast, very surreal and it was about three visions of Christmas. Three Wise Men from three various towns. Then ABC approached Peter Weir and I because they wanted to get rid of (radio show) The Argonauts Club.”
The gruff, gravel-voiced Aunty Jack character found her sound as a result of Bond’s short temper when trying to write sketches with Peter Weir.
“These kids were driving me nuts when we were trying to write and I eventually just lost it. I turned around and I said ‘Listen you horrible little pigs. If you don’t stop doing that I’m gonna come over there and rip your body, arms off!’ And Peter said to me, ‘What was that? That’s fantastic, put it in the radio show.’ So that’s how it started, as a voice.
“The woman who ran ABC Radio said ‘This is most offensive. You cannot say to little children that you’ll rip their bloody arms off if they don’t listen to your radio show.’”
“The pantomime dames were always the funniest”
ABC producer Maurice Murphy invited Bond to create a new short sketch comedy series, The Aunty Jack Show, in which Aunty Jack became a fully-fledged cross-dressing, boxing glove wearing pantomime dame.
“I was a working class boy, and my parents would take me to the Tivoli and I used to see Tommy Trinder, George Wallace and I used to see pantomimes. The pantomime dames were always the funniest. Part of Aunty Jack was revenge,” he explains.
“I had an uncle who was brutal to me when I was a kid in the country, and his name was Uncle Jack.
“There was animosity between him and my father. They were both country people and I think he held a torch for my mother. Everything my father did was never good enough.
“The boxing glove is a homage to my mother’s father, a guy called Benny Doyle. He fought for the Australian heavyweight boxing title in 1918 at the Sydney Stadium, but he lost the Australian title on a points decision. So my use of the boxing glove was homage to him.”
“I originally wanted to call the pilot The Aunty Jack Travelling Abattoirs, but it was called The Aunty Jack Travelling Show, made by Maurice Murphy.”
When it screened in 1971 with John Derum, Rory O’Donoghue (as Thin Arthur), Sandra McGregor (Flange Desire), Aunty Jack drew huge viewer complaints.
“A thousand people rang up the ABC. I was mortified but Murphy, who’d worked in television in England, said. ‘That’s fantastic! If a thousand people hated it, imagine how many people loved it!’”
The Aunty Jack Show screened in primetime on ABC, with its mix of comedy, anarchy, surrealism and music. Weekly episodes were themed such as The Aunty Jack Kulture Show, The Golden Glove Show and even The Channel 9 Show in which a Packer-like character disliked the character until faux execs suggested some dancing girls wearing chiffon.
“There was always a storyline. There was The Aunty Jack Horror Show where she turned into a vampire. The Aunty Jack War Show was one of my favourites, with Aunty Jack saying ‘War is lovely. It was a beautiful thing.’ She talked about the wonderful people in the war and introduces a character that I played called Colonel Passionfruit who taught his his people to dance through the war. They did the Pride of Erin all through the minefields.
“As Helpmann warned me many years before, it was a bit ahead of its time.”
“Many families wouldn’t look at The Aunty Jack Show because it was just too out there. As Helpmann warned me many years before, it was a bit ahead of its time.”
John Derum departed as Narrator Neville after the first six episodes with Garry McDonald joining as Kid Eager in the second season.
“I met Garry auditioning for a voiceover or something. I liked Garry and I said, ‘Would you like to do it?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, that’d be good.’ So he drove me home and and then we did a musical section called Aunty Jack Rox On which had Stevie Wright from the Easybeats and he actually did Rip Yer Arms Off, one of the songs with me. I think he was doing Jesus Christ Superstar with Rory at the time.
“When Derum left the show to go to Channel Seven to do The True Blue Show we lost our anchor. You need a great straight man but he was infuriated. He said ‘I was more than just a straight man.’ I said ‘No John you were just fantastic. You added another dimension to The Aunty Jack Show and you gave it a rock solid base.’”
“The next day Garry turned up with bits of toilet paper on his face, the hair combover and the voice.”
The show would also feature the first-ever appearance of Norman Gunston, inspired by an airline hostess named Norma Gunston whose manner and delivery on a plane was unforgettable. Norman became a untalented reporter for the sketch ‘What’s on In Wollongong?’
“At the first script reading Maurice Murphy said ‘Grahame, do you want to do the What’s on in Wollongong?’ I said, ‘Christ Maurice, I’m doing Aunty Jack, Neil & Errol, Len and Ron… give it to Garry!’ The next day Garry turned up with bits of toilet paper on his face, the hair combover and the voice. That’s how it started.”
Wollongong featured regularly across Bond’s work due to his early years due to family visits to the Illawarra region. Bond recalls one trip driving to the top of the mountains and being struck by the clash of beauty and industry.
“There were beautiful beaches as far as the eye could see. I loved it. Then BHP arrived and as gross as that was, to me the visual was an amazing look. It was other-worldly. So I placed Aunty Jack as the Queen of Industry really, the Queen of Wollongong. She rode a motorbike, she was rough and tough. Of course, BHP hated it.”
Even the local mayor complained to ABC about the show portraying the region in a bad light.
“I said ‘Talk to the lighting and cameramen.’
“People said why didn’t you make it Newcastle? I said, ‘The Queen of Newcastle doesn’t quite work to such absurd proportions.’”
One sketch ‘Elephanto Reducioso’ taught viewers how to reduce a full size elephant to an origami sizes paper one. It was filmed at Taronga Park Zoo with Bond working to camera with a live elephant named Raja, whom Bond decided to call ‘Colin.’
“There was no such thing as Occupational Health and Safety in those days!”
“There was no else there, just me and the elephant. The trainer was behind the camera but this elephant starts making chaos. There was no such thing as Occupational Health and Safety in those days! The bloody elephant just starts smashing the set to pieces and I’m yelling ‘Stop it Colin! I’m gonna have to punch you in the trunk!’ and I whacked him,” he recalls.
“The cameraman was rolling around on the ground pissing himself laughing. I’m trying to control this elephant and it’s got its eye on my boxing gloves and swallows my arm up to about the elbow. Then the trainer yells ‘He seems to like you! Just say the magic words ‘Oomba Raja!’
“This bloody thing throws its trunk between my legs and throws me up onto its head!”
Cameras kept rolling for the bizarre live moment between pantomime dame and beast. Only later would Bond learn Raja had only recently broken his last trainer’s arm.
While The Aunty Jack Show only ran for 13 episodes the team would regroup for the arrival of colour television in Australia. Due to take place at midnight, Bond & co. hoodwinked ABC management by switching to colour 30 seconds ahead of time and subsequntly making television history.
“We’d told them we made a three minute black and white section but we’d made a two and a half minute black and white section that turned into colour two and a half minutes in. They started running it three minutes before colour television was meant to arrive.
“How we got away with that I’ll never know.”
Aunty Jack would also spawn the #1 single, the iconic Farewell Aunty Jack, albums and concert tours.
Ever the anarchists, Bond and Rory O’Donoghue, also shocked a Logies room with an acceptance speech, following a line of earnest, sometimes tearful TV Week award winners.
“I don’t know what to say,” Bond quipped. “I think winning this award is probably the most exciting thing that’s happened to me …..today.’
“Rory said ‘What about the flight down?” and I went ‘That was pretty good.’
“We went backstage and the organisers said ‘You ungrateful shit. You made fun of our award.’ I said, ‘I’m doing jokes!’ but they never wrote about me again.”
Other TV projects The Off Show, News Free Zone, Wollongong the Brave would follow while Bond played the Ancient One in US sci-fi Beastmaster, which filmed in Queensland from 1999 – 2002. Around the same time he was approached to feature in Better Homes & Gardens for Seven, a time he admits looking back on “Not fondly.”
“I was in Syria at the time and I got a phone call from a producer at Channel Seven. He said, ‘We’re looking for an architect for Better Homes and Gardens with John Jarratt & Noni Hazlehurst.’ I said, ‘Oh shit. It’s a bit low rent, isn’t it?’ And he went ‘No, no, we pay very well.’ I wasn’t really that interested,” he insists.
“Why employee a comedian when they just kept holding me back all the time?”
But he would go on to present segments for six years, struggling with having to play it straight in a liestyle show, whilst continuing work on Beastmaster.
“Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, I was speaking gobbledygook as some sort of as Merlin the magician. Then I’d come back and I’d be on Better Homes & Gardens teaching people how to turn their water closet into a gymnasium,” he continies.
“I bless the time that I worked at the ABC. Yes, things were difficult, but never as hard and as perverse as they are in commercial television.
“It was very hard. Why employee a comedian when they just kept holding me back all the time?”
Bond, who wrote his autobiography Jack of All Trades Mistress of One and received an Order of Australia in 2012 believes Aunty Jack opened up doors for other types of TV comedy.
But in 2024 he still misses many of his performing mates.
“I’m missing so many people, Jonathan Coleman, Doug Mulray… I’m still in touch Geoffrey Atherden and he’s still a fabulous writer.”
But the death of longtime collaborator Rory O’Donoghue in 2017 was particularly sad.
“Especially Rory. We were in touch all the time,” he recalls.
“Since his death I haven’t picked up a guitar. I don’t feel any drive to do it anymore. At my age anyway what would you do with it?”
Photos: ABC Archives, Grahame Bond.
TOMORROW: A pioneering actress from the 1970s.
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