1992

From Wanted For Questioning: Interviews with Australian Comic Artists

(Editors) Murray Bramwell and David Matthews, Allen and Unwin, 1992.

Barry Humphries

Barry Humphries is a major Australian artist. He is also a connoisseur, a scholar and surely one of the funniest people alive. His burlesque creations define the art and his writings are some of the best in Australian theatre.

It was my good luck that Humphries was in Australia with The Life and Death of Sandy Stone and that the tour included a season in Adelaide. I was looking forward to seeing the exhumation of Sandy, one of my favourites in the Humphries menagerie. I was also keen to interview Barry Humphries and so I began making arrangements with his Sydney agents to find a time to talk.

They suggested that I try to catch up with Humphries after one of his performances. The first time I stood about backstage waiting to see him he was off to stay with friends in the Adelaide Hills. Full of apologies, he suggested the next night instead. Again I waited at the stage door at Her Majesty’s along with a mixed collection of others — friends and acquaintances of the actor, old chaps with antiquarian publications to add to Humphries’ collection and fans, waiting with rare EP’s of ‘Wildlife in Suburbia’ for autographing. With each, Humphries, slightly wearied by the performance, was painstakingly courteous and attentive.

As he was when he eventually got to me. The interview took place in his dressing room. It was all faintly surreal in this overlit room full of mirrors, surrounded by costumes on racks. Barry Humphries was fop­pishly dressed in a suit with matching tie and handkerchief, his hair wet and combed across in the familiar Beardsley style. I was momentarily fazed. I tried to contain a bout of obsequiousness while Humphries started to think aloud about the comedians I should be interviewing.

M.B.

What about the old-timers — like Frank Rich, Norman Erskine? Some of these people still do the clubs and they play to big audiences. Willie Fennell? You mustn’t forget the old-timers. Some are out of the range of your microphone, like Dick Bentley, living in London, who must be in his early seventies. He was in the Tivoli circuit and then he created an Australian character called Ron in those Ron and Eth dia­logues on ‘Take It From Here’. Then there are people like Kevin Bloody Wilson. You’re talking to Leunig? Bruce Petty?

Comics aren’t usually very interesting. They tend to be very conserva­tive and introspective and because they are generally rather like that, people assume hidden depths that don’t always exist. It’s enough really to enjoy them on the stage. Whether they bear closer examination is another matter. Whether we do. Australia has certainly produced a lot of humour, particularly in black-and-white art. That long tradition past Smith’s Weekly and when the Bulletin was good, which was a long time ago. We’ve still got a lot of very good black-and-white artists. Have you noticed how many people imitate Michael Leunig?

You’d think he was so distinctive they wouldn’t dare.

Of course you just have to read the caption to see it isn’t Michael Leunig, or see the drawing. It is an uncomfortable compliment for an artist to have to put up with.

Is that the feeling you have?

It doesn’t really happen to me.

Don’t you think? Your influence has been considerable.

It may have. I’m not sure. I try to see the work of as many comics as possible but it’s not always easy since I live a lot of the time in London.

Do you have particular enthusiasms among the new work?

Yes I do. I like McFadyen and Maryanne Fahey very much. I feared for them when they became huge television successes. It’s not very easy. It is so dangerous to be devoured by Australian television. They’ve seemed to survive it. The people in Los Trios are very good. You should really talk to them. Not only bright but gifted. They’ve even been talking about doing Waiting for Godot — you’ve heard this mooted? I did the first production of Beckett ever seen in Australia — in the fifties. We did Waiting for Godot and Melbourne didn’t really know what to make of it any more than Sydney did. I think traditionally, most comics, with few exceptions, seem to always come from Melbourne don’t they?

Do you have a view about this?

I’m not sure why that is. At all. I don’t understand why that is the case.

Talking about Beckett. Do you feel that your work is over-interpreted by people drawing connections with writers like Beckett?

Not really. And it can’t affect an audience’s response. I guess if some academic stood up in the stalls just as I was about to deliver a line and explained it to the audience then that would be an intrusion and a disconcerting one at that. One would have to have him ejected from the theatre. What people choose to do between the covers of books or journals or on the radio is beyond my control. It is a source of some irritation that one journalist has merely to say, splenetically, that Humphries hates Australia for this to be taken up by a lot of people. I wouldn’t have thought that anyone who’d attended a performance of mine would have come to that conclusion. But the fact that it is once said means it goes into a sort of journalistic computer — and crops up. So that a reviewer, a very generous reviewer of the show in Melbourne, began her review with some such phrase as: ‘There are two schools of thought about Barry Humphries’. Well there may well be a hundred schools of thought about the work of a comedian. But it is as though, how can I describe it, as though the public is being invited to consider what side to come down on. The whole thing is a lot simpler than that. There are two schools of thought about a theatrical artist. One, you would like to go and see him or her, the other is that you’d prefer to stay home and watch the television. They are the two schools of thought.

But these days it is important for people to feel that they have to approve of your political point of view — not so much your religion any more. When I think of the old days, Mother wouldn’t let you go and see a Catholic. Perhaps it was a Father Sidney McEwen concert, who was a popular entertainer of the public. I don’t know, it just puzzles me a bit that this has been taken up in some sections of the press.

It seems to exist in Australia where people are worried by vulgarity. It seems to be the essence of successful comedy especially in the theatre, that it is an interpretation, an expression of vulgarity, which is a vigorous aspect of Australian culture and it’s certainly central to British, Anglo-Saxon humour. American comedy is rather puritanical by comparison. Nonetheless Australian audiences respond rather equivocally to a por­trayal of themselves as vulgar.

Does that mean that Sandy Stone is more benignly received than Sir Les?

He’s a much less threatening character. First of all he remains rather within the area of the stage. He might glance at the audience. Some­times he talks to the audience as if there is someone there. He takes the audience quietly into his confidence but it is uncertain as to whether he is using a theatrical convention. The audience prefers the illusion that he is inhabiting an opportunity shop or his own house. My other characters tend to impinge on the audience in a threatening way.

Les Patterson most?

Particularly. Because he actually sprays the audience with his saliva and he reminds an Australian audience that there are such people around. There would not be quite such hostility to the character — I’m not saying this happens when I do a show because the audience love him vigorously — but there is nonetheless a kind of terrific prudery to­wards him and high-minded journalists in particular tend to write to disapprove.

What about characters like Lance Boyle and Neil Singleton?

Neil Singleton aroused a good deal of hostility from the kind of middle-class left-wing group. Especially in Sydney. Because, of course, he was recognisable as one of them and in that way he was a worrying figure they had hoped would not stray on to the stage, certainly into vaudeville, into variety. They were impervious to comic treatment. There were whole no-go areas in Australian life — for comedians. Neil Singleton is probably a character worth reviving. He’s probably terribly conservative, and is probably a bit conservative about Gough. He’s probably equally boring but only on the other side of the political coin. That character aroused a bit of animosity. But that’s the idea too. If one doesn’t stir people up a little one isn’t succeeding. Despite that, somehow or other I have got a larger popular audience than I’ve ever had — due to television I suppose. A big cross-section of people come to my shows, as you will notice. It’s hard to know where they come from. A lot of people who never go to the theatre come to see me. But in spite of that I still give offence to someone. I wonder what would happen if I tried not to give offence — I’d probably give twice as much.

I’ve got a couple of new characters I’m doing for my new show which will be out at the end of 1991 or the beginning of 1992. They’ll be rather more modern Australian figures — legal characters, tycoons. We’ll see what effect they’ll have. But the idea is to sometimes present the kind of figure the audience don’t immediately know personally. Like when I did Phil Philby who was the film-maker, a person who conned grants for himself, he tended to make expensive films on esoteric subjects like the persecution of lesbians in Aboriginal women’s prisons. The average member of the public would never have encountered such a person. They’d have to live in a special milieu to meet such a character. But they recognise him as a type or a funny character. These comic stereotypes entertain an audience on a number of levels. I’m not going to use that dreadful word sub-text. I wince when I hear it. But I do think one can nonetheless reach an audience in all kinds of different ways, attack them from all kinds of angles, tickle their funny bone from a number of angles.

To talk about the writing. The original Sandy Stone sketch, for instance, is like a prose poem.

It has a refrain you know, it’s rather stylised, isn’t it?

Is there a paradox — the language is a collection of clichés but performed and crafted and given rhythm so it is no longer mediocre. The satiric point is that the language is impoverished, the dramatic effect that it is poetic?

Yes. That’s something that has happened unconsciously. It certainly is the portrait of a man with a lot to say and inadequate means of expressing it. He has just a few dried phrases which he’s obliged to repeat, rather lamely sometimes. The effect is, of course, to suggest a kind of passion that this character experiences, a surprising lyricism which develops over the years when one looks chronologically at the monologues of Sandy Stone. You do get a portrait of a kind of middle Australian by looking at them. And they do elicit quite a strong response from a generation of Australians who perhaps might have recognised this character in their grandparents. They see him as a person in spite of the absurdity of what is being theatrically presented. One is inviting the audience to listen to and accept the presence of a ghost. Not only a bore but a ghost. A born-again bore really.

Unlike Beckett’s Krapp or Watt he’s a good-natured bore, though.

He’s more good-natured than those misanthropic figures.

But he’s not disconnected from them — or ‘Prufrock’?

Oh no. I think there is a connection with some of those early Beckett creations. Things like All that Fall, Embers — and ‘Prufrock’ which I actually thought of when I wrote Sandy Agonistes. But when I wrote the pieces, finally I put aside all literary references. There’s not much learned commentary really that can be attached to the monologues — more than we have.

Yet there are some parallels in poetry too. A poet like Philip Larkin was looking to be poetic with the ordinary and the modest.

Well Larkin is a poet I admire. I never met him but I always thought he was very good and I thought Betjeman was good — and much more serious than he was reckoned by a lot of contemporaries, particularly Gregson, who hated Betjeman. Gregson represented the academic modernist point of view, the puritan point of view. He was genuinely shocked by Betjeman’s enthusiasm for churches. I don’t think Gregson could stand the fact that Betjeman was popular, extraordinarily modern, daring, courageous, and at the same time old-fashioned. That was a paradox that a lot of critics of Betjeman and the early Larkin couldn’t fathom. I read these poets early on and never thought I’d get to know a few of them. I became a good friend of John Betjeman.

I was always much more interested in literature than in the theatre. I really drifted into the theatre through university productions. I just stumbled on to this job I do now, I found my way into it. Writing for the theatre is my main interest now. Although I’ve written other things, such as my imaginary life of Edna, which I think, by the way, along with the Les Patterson book, are the best things I’ve done. My Gorgeous Life, if I say so myself, is extraordinary. It’s very heady. It’s like a pudding. Everything has gone into it. It is overloaded, I must admit.

What I do is write plays. I didn’t realise this but I think it was Hal Prince, the director, who said to me: ‘You realise your one-man shows are not monologues, they are plays about your life, your perception of Australia’. I suppose they are plays in a way — although the characters don’t meet — because I try to express a picture of how things are at the time, as seen by a number of different people.

As characters have become more popular, like Les and Edna, their monologues have become very long and they’ve edged out other im­portant characters. So what I was thinking was to do Sandy Stone on a Sunday night. Because his monologue was an hour long it wouldn’t be very difficult to make it an hour and a half and give him a show all on his own. Then in other shows I could do about three extra characters and go back to the format of my earlier shows, which were more varied. And I think that’s not a bad idea — although people would miss old Sandy as the slow movement.

You describe him as the adagio.

He is really. He’s a rest. And also for me because the other people I tend to be are more and more frenzied and maniacal.

The hallmark of Edna seems to be her absolute sense of the Zeitgeist, the latest in everything.

She’s always been obsessed, even from the fifties when she wanted to know what the latest colour was. Venetians had to be duck-egg blue, aqua, burgundy. And she was already moving up the scale. Now the world tends to accept her at her own valuation. She still belongs to a great tradition of comic figures — the provincial who comes to the city and gives herself airs.

She’s Mrs Gloriosus.

She is. She’s in Jane Austen and Congreve and Sheridan, Goldsmith and Wilde — and every funny thing you’ve seen. And in the novels of Benson. She’s Mrs Mapp. She’s Mrs Dukakis and Joan Didion and Barbra Streisand and there’s a bit of Germaine in there, isn’t there? It’s still an enjoyable creation. Certainly it’s sort of manipulating my point of view. She’s also a music hall figure.

When I first went to London as a student actor I saw the tail of the music hall which I’d enjoyed on gramophone records in my youth. In the forties there were programs of comedy on the radio, big chunks of it. Not much Australian comedy because Australian comedians weren’t on record. There were records of British music hall turns — Sid Field, George Formby — they must have been recorded in the twenties and thirties. They were played regularly because during the Second World War, people needed cheering up so there were a lot of comedy pro­grams. And I listened to them. You could hear the audiences in the background. They all had British regional accents. None of them came from the south of England as far as I can see. They came from Lanca­shire, Yorkshire, Scotland, Ireland, the East End of London. A couple were toffs, funny people like Cyril Fletcher, there were comedians who called themselves the Weston Brothers who turned out to be Cockneys with la-de-da accents. And I was very intrigued by this and attracted to it.

There were also magazines called Humour, published in Australia, there was Smith ‘s Weekly edited by Kenneth Slessor which I read in the barber shop — I enjoyed the cartoons. And sometimes there were copies of Punch. There seemed to be a whole industry devoted to making people laugh and as I describe it to you I begin to recall how intrigued I was as a kid. Even though at the time I was an adolescent schoolboy, I was banned from attending the Tivoli, which was the vaudeville theatre in Melbourne (and other Australian cities) , because of its vulgarity, which offended and affronted my middle-class, upwardly-mobile parents. I did go to a place called the Galleon coffee lounge in St Kilda and saw Frank Rich, who was a stand up comic of the blue variety. He’s still alive and I thought he was hilarious. I don’t think I understood more than a third of his material but it was still very funny. There was something infectious about it. I can still see him with his black toothbrush mous­tache looking like a kind of slightly dissipated commercial traveller. And then my parents relented and they took me to the Tivoli once to see Tommy Trinder when he came out and Arthur Askey did a tour of Australia. Just to see these legendary British comedians do their stuff was very stimulating because they talked to the audience. They stepped out of the very rudimentary play in which they were appearing and addressed the audience.

Frankie Howerd took that into television.

Frankie Howerd did the aside to the camera which very few other comedians had done. Frankie Howerd of course was a music-hall variety comedian whose career was moribund until Peter Cook heard him talking to the Variety Club. Peter Cook got Ray Galton and Alan Simpson to write some up-to-date material about Harold Macmillan and Frankie Howerd was a huge success at the Establishment Club and he went on from strength to strength. He’s just had a very successful West End show, tour and television show.

A lot of roads lead to Peter Cook.

Yes. Peter Cook was an extremely generous impresario as well as a gifted comedian and he gave a lot of people opportunities. He took Lenny Bruce to England. He was solely responsible for the rehabilita­tion of Frankie Howerd and he gave me a great deal of encouragement. He commissioned the Barry McKenzie comic strip for Private Eye against the judgement of his editor Richard Ingrams. It became a kind of cult and he later played in the original Barry McKenzie film. He’s still a friend of mine of course. Then he went on to make those Derek and Clive films which were revolutionary, weren’t they? Mould-breaking. He’s a brilliant man. He inspired a lot of people — like the Pythons. If it hadn’t been for Cook and I suppose Spike and the Goons, the Pythons would never have developed. Peter Cook was a big influence on John Cleese, who is a most original writer and comedian. I think ‘Fawlty Towers’ is the most perfect comic creation of the 20th cen­tury. I think anyone who has a library of comic literature and hasn’t a full shelf of ‘Fawlty Towers’ lacks one of the most important creations. I think Rowan Atkinson is very gifted too — a rather dark, Celtic humour.

Most comedians make me laugh. I sometimes wonder why I find Bob Hope so funny. I keep reminding myself that all his jokes are written by someone else and he doesn’t really do much. Except he does look funny. He actually has a comic presence which is very difficult to analyse — or to resist. You can’t really watch Bob Hope at his best and not laugh. I was a big fan of the Marx Brothers too.

But it occurred to me that when I was going to start developing certain comic characters the thing was not to be grotesque, although I had a big background in the kind of full frontal effrontery of Dadaism and the kind of anarchic activities that I used to get into. I thought: The thing is to try to find the comic in the ordinary, and that’s where Sandy comes into it and that’s where, at first, Edna did because there weren’t jokes as such. Jokes have crept into Sandy. There are things you can describe as gags, there are routines. But originally, and perhaps at his best, it is just the ordinary things that Sandy says.

He’s even taken to delivering up non-aphorisms. Things like — and this is only a few performances old already — when he describes an air­raid shelter in the back garden of his house and he says: ‘Young people today don’t realise we had air raid shelters. They don’t think anything happened to us — when in point of fact it nearly did!’

Well I don’t know what you’d call that but the audience enjoy it. They enjoy all that that means. They know that Sandy is in fact confessing that really nothing happened. The war did not finally — it touched Australia — but nothing did really happen. They feel a kind of com­passion and they express their emotional response by laughing.

The brand names are intact from when they were written but time has changed the relationship of that material.

When they were first referred to these things were fairly new, recent. Sandy was talking about things that were so ordinary no-one ever really thought about bringing them up. To have a bit of strife parking the vehicle was something everyone had. To hear it isolated in a spare monologue on stage gave it a certain intensity. People tittered at the thought of it. When products were mentioned it was still a little bit startling, to hear advertisements lifted straight off the radio or the Women’s Weekly and pasted into a theatrical monologue like a collage. Of course since then it has become very common.

Not that I think it was an original device even then. Name-dropping was very common in the Phillip Street Revues which, apart from the Tivoli, were the most successful theatrical phenomenon of the fifties. It was a huge success. There was a packed house every night. A lot of it was crudely rewritten, Australianised Alan Melville material, Lyric Hammersmith revue material, just updated, made Australian with a few names of socialites thrown in. But other material was much stronger than that, better observed and more comic and that was written by McKellar. He would be worth talking to. It’s a pity that people like Ross Campbell aren’t still alive, who wrote about suburban life when no-one else did, wrote about his own family, very amusing. I’ve never been a big fan of Lenny Lower. I just didn’t think he was terribly funny to read on the page. They’ve sort of built a myth around him. But then it’s possible with comic writers that there is a generation that misses them. They disappear, they no longer mean anything.

I felt that about ‘Much Binding in the Marsh’, which was one of my father’s favourites.

It had that headlong bonhomie. I never thought ‘Much Binding’ was terribly funny. I thought ‘Take It From Here’ was and I used to like to listen to ‘McCaughey Mansions’ because that was the end of Australian vaudeville on radio. It was Roy Rene’s last gasp. There was Willie Fennell and Hal Ashford in the same program and I thought that was very funny because there was a tremendous underlying vulgarity. You’d hear Roy Rene make a dreadful sound and you’d hear the studio audience laugh and you didn’t know what he’d done but you imagined some­thing absolutely terrible. It was this puncturing of the Australian gen­tility that was somehow cathartic even to a child listening. You realised something deeply offensive and improper had happened. The vicar had farted. And it was a great relief in those puritanical times. I liked listening to radio comedy. There wasn’t much else to attend. The theatre was soon just South Pacific and Paint Your Wagon. The Tivoli carne to an end, pulled down. Vaudeville found its way to television and it was all pretty crude and unfunny. There were the ad-libs on Graham Kennedy and that was about it. Of course we got lots of American material — ‘The Lucy Show’ — some of it very good, some of it not so good.

Dean Martin?

On film. And the American comics — Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Laurel and Hardy and Chaplin. But you couldn’t name an Australian comedian. The old-timers in the end were playing pantomime dames, doing smoke nights and the occasional RSL club. In a way the vaudeville tradition persisted at the clubs when it was swept out of the theatres. It was purged from the clubs and survived in the clubs attended by the more sophisticated Australian audiences. They might have been generally working class and lower-middle class but nonetheless they saw the best acts. They saw Sammy Davis Jr. The best people came out there whereas the upper-middle classes and the journalists all went to the theatre and had to sit through that awful West End comedy from the touring com­panies. The leads were brought out by Williamsons with a few Australian hopefuls playing the small roles.

Do you think theatre is still a bit po-faced?

Yes. I think it is. Po-faced is exactly the word for it. There are people in the business who shrink a bit when things get a laugh.

You often refer to yourself as a music-hall artiste as if you want to locate yourself apart from the theatre.

I think I’m much closer to a music-hall performer. But also it’s a bit hard to categorise it because in spite of the fact that I’ve been doing it for thirty years there aren’t other shows like it. It doesn’t fit comfort­ably does it? Other people like Reg Livermore have done shows. Reg you should speak to.

When I talk of vulgarity, by the way, it doesn’t necessarily mean blue. I’m thinking of vulgarity in the sense of the popular, like the work of Rowlandson or Cruickshank or Dickens. Dickens was an authentically vulgar artist, as was Joyce at his best.

Of course Australians were deeply shocked in the fifties when Parlia­ment was broadcast because again they heard the voice of their admin­istration and although it was their voice they would not accept it. For some reason they wanted to hear something else. It should have sounded more like church. Instead it sounded like the racetrack and the public bar. Worse, the gents. That was deeply mortifying for the Australian middle class because Mr Menzies seemed to be the only man with a nice speaking voice.

It served him very well didn’t it?

It certainly did. It kept him in power for a long time. So much so that you can still listen to Bob Hawke and wonder how a person who speaks like that could ever be the prime minister. You can’t help feeling that someone to whom rhetoric is such a stranger . . . Of course there is the radio announcer, that’s another kind of Australian voice. An invented voice. That bears no resemblance to any real person’s voice, nonetheless it’s the voice that Clive James has decided to appropriate. So he now addresses, very successfully, a large television audience with the voice of 2UE in the fifties. Slightly adenoidal, slight American twang — a little tune. Difficult to describe. Mid-Pacific, I suppose.

You have an extraordinary ear for the nuances of accent and vocabulary. You also have a scholarly interest in language.

Yes. I am really very interested in slang and in the richness of our common language. So I’m always listening for changes in fashion and usage. Listen now for the word ‘basic’. See how many times you hear it tomorrow, you ought to tick it off. People say it all the time. It was like — ‘in terms of. I thought: Can I stop people saying in terms of if I use it all the time as Les Patterson. No. People didn’t notice I’m saying it. It is growing over the language like Patterson’s Curse or the Crown of Thorns starfish.

Things are ‘set’ to happen these days.

Yes. Things are set to happen. And people ‘address’ things a lot. They address problems and they address themselves to their lunches and their partners and whatever. Politicians are always embattled and be­leaguered. This happens a lot. It’s entertaining really.

Where do you go in search of material?

Newspapers, unerringly. I generally get nutrient from almost anything. I just grab a few magazines, listen to the radio, talk to taxi drivers. You get it quickly, very quickly if you’re a bit of a sponge like I am. I can get the Zeitgeist, the feeling of the place, the genius loci, very quickly.

Is Edna the most heat-seeking of the personae? Sandy wouldn’t pick the trends.

No, no. He is casting like a distant star, a faint glimmer of the present. Although, of course, he seems to evoke quite a response from a youth­ful audience, he belongs where he belongs. Edna is a threatening figure. She is more unreal every time we see her. More resplendent, more bedizened by the trappings of megastardom and fashion. And yet once her eye falls on a woman in the stalls, the audience feels profound dis­comfort. She looks at them with the eyes of Patrick White. It’s a steely gaze and they just hope there’s forgiveness at the end — and, of course, there is. There’s a kind of apotheosis where Edna finally — there’s a benediction. There ought to be mass healing at the end of the show.

It’s an act that’s got away. It began as something and it’s turned into something else. Lots of people say: ‘What a pity she’s not old Mrs Everage again, she was more’ — and I say: ‘I wish I could control it but I’m going with the character’. That sounds very odd doesn’t it? But I really have to go with it — what would Edna be doing now, what would her preoccupations be? Would it be some new kind of austerity, would she renounce her title? Is she going to get religion? I’m not certain what she’ll do. She’s a kind of cypher.

Where is she on the Gulf War?

She would have gone. She would have been quickly in there to see Saddam Hussein. She would have got there before that hopeless author of doggerel, Anne Fairburn. She would have been deeply attracted to Hussein. She would have been worried about the hostages but some­how she would have forgotten about them. Only when she got back on the QANTAS plane and flew out of Baghdad would she suddenly have thought: Oh, I was supposed to release those poor little hostages and I completely forgot; still, I’ve got his autograph and a nice video of his home and he’s given me a recipe. She would have been on Iraqi TV and so a kind of vanity would have taken over and in that way one could have satirised, too, the kind of self-seeking aspect of certain people who did take the opportunity to draw attention to themselves. They weren’t all philanthropists.

Also it is a comic idea because Edna would have been a match for Saddam Hussein. Thinking about it, she would have been more of a match than anyone who went to see him. In a way she would have been the perfect person to go and see this unreal figure. An entirely theatrical person, this nonentity who has become a demagogue because he said: ‘I am a demagogue’. Because he carried around an iron bar at the age of 10 which he exchanged for a pistol. He is the Islamic megastar, a similar phenomenon. So that would be entertaining. And if it were not such a tragic, alarming event one would go the whole hog and do it. You could make a film about it.

Are there some things you can’t make jokes about?

I think most things you can make jokes about — even that, but you would have to do it then. If I had a weekly television program — I would hit them immediately with it. I would have done it then. But in retrospect you can’t, with what takes place subsequently. You see I always thought television satire has to be about the news today. You have to go straight in there and do it.

Adelaide, February 1991