"News Free Zone" (1985) TV series

Directors:

Judith John-Story
Maurice Murphy

Writers:

Grahame Bond (writer)
Maurice Murphy (writer) (1985)

Genre:

Comedy

Cast

  (Series Credited cast)

Grahame Bond	...	Rick Veneer / Kev Kavanagh
Wendy Patching	...	Herself

Runtime:

30 min (50 episodes)

Country:

Australia

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Company:

Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)

Embarrassing, but with the odd laugh

News Free Zone was an attempted half-hour comedy show which ran each weekday at 6pm. Judging by the number of episodes reported by IMDb it ran for 10 weeks, which is a miracle considering how embarrassingly few laughs it delivered. Each episode consisted of a number of regular segments. There was Bond's fat guy character doing the introduction and finale on stage to the studio audience, selected clips from Bond's old "Aunty Jack Show", Bond's Kev Kavanagh character doing a segment on culture, a one-woman soap opera consisting of a monologue delivered by a switchboard operator, and a sitcom segment featuring six people each of whom represented an Australian state. Perhaps there was another segment or two that I missed, I'm not sure.

If none of the above sounds even potentially funny, you're sadly right. The program's failure was predictable from the start. Bond and 3 other writers (there was one more who didn't actually contribute any material) had to come up with a little over 2 hours of fresh comedy each week for ten weeks. Bond then had to act in a number of segments in a variety of costumes and makeup. However talented Bond and his co-writers may have been, this was beyond any normal human's capability. With a 6pm timeslot, he couldn't even do anything vaguely risqué. To top it all off it was filmed in front of a live studio audience, who maintained a deathly silence until the end of most segments, when they would clap politely to the APPLAUSE light. Quite why Bond agreed to such inevitable humiliation is beyond me. He hadn't done any television comedy before this program for some time, which may have been a factor in his decision. However the program ensured he wouldn't do any afterwards either.

Nevertheless the show had a couple of redeeming features, which is the reason I watched multiple episodes despite the embarrassment. The clips from the Aunty Jack Show were always original & surreal, often quite funny, and hitherto unseen by many younger people. It was the show that gave Gary McDonald (Norman Gunston) his big break. In addition Kev Kavanagh, the last living bodgie, was quite a funny character, and was the one saving grace of the new material. The one Kavanagh sketch that I remember had Kev "improving" a Van Gogh painting by sticking a bleeding amputated ear onto the canvas.