Yesterday, I spent 290 minutes reliving my youth. ABC TV (Australia) has released the first series of The Aunty Jack Show on DVD. Bliss.
Who - or what - is an Aunty Jack? As the name implies, a bit of a mixture. Massive of girth, with glasses, moustache, football boots and socks and sporting a golden boxing glove this monsterpiece of anarchy stalked across the screen of Australian TV in the very early 70s. The first series starred Grahame Bond (Aunty Jack), Rory O'Donoghue (Thin Arthur), John Derum (Narrator Neville) and Sandra MacGregor (Flange Desire). Whilst there are elements of both the Goon show and Monty Python, (although it predated Python) it is uniquely Australian humour, which fails attempts to translate it onto paper. (But that won't stop me from trying!!!)
Attacking the establishment. Sure, why not? Whilst Australia was still mired in Vietnam, Aunty Jack takes a stinging swipe at war by showing how World War I wasn't really the hell it was supposed to be with a performance by Colonel Passionfruit and his "Dancing Diggers" singing and choreographing their way across a nasty old minefield.
Sex? Well, check out "Stella the Starlet", the moustachio-ed (and completely armless) siren whose agent tries to win over a hard bitten movie director by showing that whilst Stella may not have arms, her rather ample bust is up to most tasks. Director: "But she'll have to climb a tree". Agent: "She can do it, she can do it." And for those brave folk who live in lovely Wollongong (an industrial city south of Sydney) there is a heartfelt rendition of the classic song "I've been everywhere man ... Wollongong Wollongong Wollongong ... " etc.
But truly the most bizarre memory I have from the original days of broadcast, and today proved to be as funny as I remember it, was Thin Arthur conducting a four piece chorus - in an elevator - and as the doors close, having to grab his music stand and run up to the next floor and wait for the doors to open to conduct the next musical passage - in a 10 storey building.
Not forgetting the original "origami opera" based on superhero Tarzan. (According to the interview with four of the original cast members/writers on the DVD, such was the enthusiasm of the cast that one young lady's role required her to leap from a fair height into a rather deep pool of water - she never told anyone she couldn't swim, but thought she'd "ad lib" once she got there.) The episodes on this double DVD include the pilot, Radio, War, Kulture, Anonymous, Family, Sex and Horror, as well as a retrospective "History of Aunty Jack" interview.
This isn't uniformly great stuff, but it was groundbreaking, and the entire cast, but particularly Bond and O'Donoghue, are extremely talented, wrote most of their own music and performed it live - which you don't get too much of these days.
I'd give it 3 1/2 out of 5, just on historical value alone.
And to give Aunty the last word: "Buy the VDV and watch it, or I'll come round to your house and rip your bloody arms off."
PS It's also fun trying to spot some of the very young faces of future stars of film and television.
