Parky: My Autobiography (33 page)

I should have kept my mouth shut. The more I tried to explain the more the media made mischief. Nor did it help when, at the same time, I wrote an article for
The Sunday Times
in London based on an interview with Harold Larwood. Larwood was the fast bowler who was England’s spearhead in the infamous Bodyline series of 1932–3. He was the weapon used by the England captain, Douglas Jardine, to nullify Bradman’s genius and win the Ashes by the simple expedient of bowling at the batsman’s head. The plan succeeded but the echo of anger and disapproval resonated through succeeding generations of Australians.

I met Larwood in Sydney, where he had lived for a number of years, and had lunch with him and Keith Miller, plus a few other heroes. He said Bradman was the greatest batsman he ever bowled against and the only chance you had was to get him out early on. Otherwise he would destroy you. He said in the 1930 Test series, when the Aussies came to Headingley, the England team worked out he was vulnerable to the short ball when he first came to the crease. According to Larwood, the second ball he bowled at Bradman was a short-pitched one, which he nicked and the wicket keeper caught. ‘We thought we had him but the umpire disagreed. Mind you, we got him out soon after,’ said Harold.

I fell for it. ‘How many did he make?’ I asked.

‘Three hundred and thirty-four,’ replied Harold, with a grin.

Sir Donald took exception to the anecdote and wrote to the editor saying I had cast doubts on his sportsmanship. I certainly had not intended so to do and had merely treated Larwood’s anecdote as it had been told, to enhance the Bradman legend rather than diminish it. It didn’t make any difference. The mischief-making continued and I never did interview Don Bradman. Some might wonder why I dwell on the story of my failure to persuade Bradman on to the show, why I placed so much importance on getting a mere cricketer into our studio.

I did so because anyone who regarded Bradman as simply a gifted sportsman is missing the point. Sport played a large and important part in establishing the Australian identity and Bradman provided the evidence of the nation’s ability to produce an athlete who had his own place in the pantheon of the greatest sportsmen of all time. In a country where sport really matters, and which has produced so many great international sporting heroes, Bradman remains the towering icon.

Even without Bradman, the first series of shows proved more successful than we had ever dared to hope. The ABC put it out on Saturday evenings and it flourished like no other Saturday evening show on ABC had done in recent history. Our success had much to do with the type of guest – the Don notwithstanding – we were able to attract. Our biggest coup was Kerry Packer. He was not only, along with Rupert Murdoch, Australia’s most powerful media mogul, he was also Australia’s most controversial figure, adored and loathed, feared and respected in equal measures. He was the head of a family who had lived the Australian dream, coming from nowhere to a position of such power that members of it could treat the country as a personal fiefdom, an observation that might seem exaggerated until you hear the story of Frank Packer and the winner of the Melbourne Cup.

Frank Packer, Kerry’s father, was the man who built the family fortune based on publishing and television. The family owned Channel 9, which, during my time in Australia, was the country’s favourite channel. Frank Packer owned a horse that won Australia’s big race, the Melbourne Cup. At dinner on the night of his triumph as an owner, a guest told Packer he had not yet seen the race, whereupon Packer rang the television station and ordered a bemused duty officer to take off air whatever was on air at the time and replace it with a rerun of the big race, to the general bafflement of the millions watching at home who couldn’t work out why the Melbourne Cup suddenly reappeared in the middle of their favourite soap.

What made Kerry Packer particularly interesting was that his phenomenal success in consolidating and building upon his father’s enterprise was unexpected. He had been marked out as ‘the idle playboy’ by the media and it was generally assumed that when Frank Packer died his eldest child, Clyde, would take over. But Clyde and his father fell out a year before Frank Packer died, Kerry took over and proceeded to expand the empire to the point where he became Australia’s richest man.

That apart, I had another reason for wanting to interview Kerry Packer. He was in the process of creating World Series Cricket, which at the time I, along with many other lovers of the traditional game, regarded as an act of vandalism.

When he arrived at the studio, he managed to split his pants while getting out of the car. Kerry Packer was a very big man and it was a considerable split that required the combined talents of the wardrobe department to mend. My first view of the great man was sitting in wardrobe, minus his pants, seemingly not the slightest bit fazed by his predicament. He was a fascinating interviewee, articulate, combative, humorous. He told the story of his family’s rise in fortune. It started when his grandfather, flat broke in Tasmania, went to the races and found ten bob, which he put on a horse. It won at twelve to one so he bought a ticket to New South Wales with the winnings, where he started a career in the newspaper industry.

‘Ten bob on a racecourse. That’s how it all started,’ said Kerry Packer, who was worth a billion dollars at the time.

Things warmed up when he discussed World Series Cricket. I told him I didn’t like the idea. He said I hadn’t the right to visit Australia and put the Establishment’s point of view. I said the MCC would find ludicrous the idea that I was the Establishment. He said I was a Yorkshireman and all Yorkshiremen were ‘unreasonable’ about cricket. He was trying to rile me and he succeeded. In the end he was right about World Series. His concept of one-day cricket changed the game for good, and for the better. Kerry Packer fundamentally shaped the modern game, and cricket – particularly its players – owes him an enormous debt.

So do I. His appearance on the show, his frankness, his argumentative style, made an enormous impact, and the door opened. Bob Hawke came on the show. Jack Fingleton, the former Australian cricketer and writer, bet him fifty dollars he would be Australia’s next prime minister. Bob Hawke said not a chance. Jack waited just three years to collect his money.

I interviewed artist Lloyd Rees, who talked about coming to Sydney for the first time in 1916 and seeing the gap between the two points where the Sydney Harbour Bridge was eventually built. ‘Nature puts awful temptation in the way of humanity,’ he remarked. It was Lloyd who gave me a privileged insight into the world of art. I opened one of his last exhibitions, which the critics praised for his ethereal depictions of light, pointing out how his painting had gradually refined from the more conventional style of his early years. I asked him what he made of their remarks.

‘They know nothing,’ he said. ‘Shall I tell you why I paint the way I do?’ I nodded. ‘Because I am going blind and I paint what I see,’ he said. And then he added, ‘But don’t tell them. It will make them seem foolish.’

A natural history expert, Harry Butler, talked about the damage English settlement had caused to a land protected for so long by what he described as ‘the gentle custody’ of the Aborigines.

Sir Robert Helpmann, the actor and ballet dancer, described by
The Times
as ‘a dancer of mimetic genius and theatrical flair’, remembered prancing round his house as a child covered in mosquito nets. He was a country boy and when he moved to Sydney he went to Bondi Beach wearing a pair of Oxford bags, popular in England at the time, but not yet acceptable men’s wear in Oz. He was set upon by a crowd of men who picked him up and threw him into the surf, leaving him to crawl out ‘like a drowned rat’.

‘You couldn’t wear a pair of suede shoes in those days without being attacked for being effeminate,’ he said.

He lived to see Sydney become the gay capital of the world. A couple of years ago, on the eve of the Gay Mardi Gras, Mary and I were in a lift about to leave our Sydney hotel when we were joined by two men entirely dressed in rubber – one in a suit, the other a dress – who were joined together at the wrist by a pair of handcuffs. ‘G’dayparkoowyergoin?’ said one. That was many years after I first met Robert Helpmann, who perfectly summed up my feelings about my first visit to Australia when he said, ‘Someone asked me the other day, do I regard Australia as a cultural desert? And I said how could I think it so when it has given birth to Dame Nellie Melba, Dame Joan Sutherland and me?’

Another clue to the effortless and pleasant way I was accepted into Australia was given by a wonderful old actress called Enid Lorimer, who was born in London in Victorian times and had emigrated to Australia as a young girl. When I met her she was in her eighties, but an imperious figure, still possessing her English accent. She reminded me greatly of Dame Edith Evans. One day I asked her why she, the archetypal English woman, had chosen to live in Australia.

She said, ‘Because the English invented the word snob and the Australians don’t know what it means.’

34

TWO BAGGY GREENS

Australia gave me a much-needed injection of enthusiasm for the job. All the palaver and politicking at the BBC had left me jaded and discontented, but my experience in an altogether more relaxed environment down under produced renewed optimism, not for staying any longer than necessary at the BBC, but for making the best of it while I was there.

I was greatly helped in this ambition by a move of office, which meant sharing with a group of amiable lunatics assembled to make a programme called
Not the Nine o’Clock News
, subtitled
When Pamela Met Billy
. The first week they moved in I arrived at my desk to find a bloody hand hanging out of my filing cabinet. In weeks to come, opening a cupboard might reveal a false leg or an inflatable banana. You never knew. Nor did sharing an office spare me from their irreverence. On one show they featured a sketch depicting me interviewing Geoffrey Boycott, both with impenetrable Yorkshire accents and exceedingly boring dialogue.

I thought I would have a word and arrived early the morning after the show to be sure to catch them as they arrived at the office. I was standing there, with a large stick in my hand, when the door opened and Rowan Atkinson scuttled past me, going sideways like a crab, while at the same time touching his forelock and muttering, ‘Sorry but it wasn’t my idea . . . terribly sorry.’

The two shows a week compromise looked what it was, a compromise, neither one thing nor t’other, and no matter how hard I tried, there had been a significant shift in my relationship with the BBC. Hitherto I had been confident of the support of the organisation, now I wasn’t. I had seen its flaws, been disappointed by its weakness. I was on the lookout for alternative employment. Australia gave me that opportunity. I returned to produce a new series for the ABC, which proved more popular than the first and succeeded so well it had the two major commercial companies, owned by Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch, bidding for my show.

I thought long and hard and eventually settled for the Channel 10 deal put forward by Rupert Murdoch. It was a five-year agreement and meant spending at least six months a year in Australia. I was joined by James Erskine, an ambitious former medical student, now working with my agent Mark McCormack. It was the beginning of a business partnership and friendly relationship that has lasted until the present time. James is now my business manager.

I brought Mary and the children out to Australia before I signed the contract to see what they thought. They loved it. We bought an apartment looking down the harbour to the Heads in the same block as Danny La Rue, who entertained the most amusing and exotic house guests. One morning I was sitting by the communal swimming pool when Liberace appeared as if in a Ziegfeld movie. He was wearing a purple silk beach robe with ivory piano keys stitched onto its large lapels.

‘Hi, I’m Lee Liberace,’ he said.

‘I know,’ I said.

He indicated the keyboard on his lapels. ‘These are just in case you didn’t,’ he said.

Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips agreed to appear on our show. This was big news, a great coup for Channel 10, who redecorated a large dressing room, draping it with silk and hanging a royal coat of arms that had been used as a prop in a courtroom drama. We were told Princess Anne drank only Coca-Cola from small glass bottles. They were not sold anywhere in Australia except Adelaide so we ordered a special shipment. When Princess Anne arrived and was asked what she would like to drink she said, ‘A mineral water, please.’

We were informed it would be acceptable if we invited Princess Anne to an informal lunch at our apartment. Mary and her friends went into overdrive. What to wear? How informal is royalty? The office driver was told to sit outside Princess Anne’s hotel to see what she was wearing when she left en route to our apartment. Was it a trouser suit, a frock, a sundress? When the Princess arrived it was with the minimum of fuss and palaver and she put everyone at ease with her direct and friendly manner.

Everything was going perfectly until, recalling one or two of the civic functions she had attended, she told a story about a man who drank the contents of his finger bowl.

Someone observed, ‘When he saw the slice of lemon he must have thought it was a gin and tonic.’ Whereupon the Princess declared one did not put lemon slices in finger bowls.

I looked at Mary and she looked at me because sitting in our kitchen were finger bowls containing slices of lemon. They were despatched over the balcony into the garden, causing consternation among the bodyguards concealed in the shrubbery who were not used to being bombarded by citrus fruit.

It was a happy time. My boss at Channel 10, Greg Coote, was kind and supportive. We had assembled a team of bright and funny Australians, led by David Mitchell and David Lyle, who made work an agreeable pastime. However, the move was not without its problems. For one thing, to get value for their money, Channel 10 wanted the show stretched to ninety minutes. This meant an extra booking per show and, given we were doing more than thirty shows a year, it involved going farther afield for some of our guests. We imported Alan Alda, Joan Fontaine, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Kenneth Williams, Adam Faith, Lee Marvin, Harry Belafonte and just about anyone else who had a current passport. We brought back stalwarts including Jack Fingleton, Spike Milligan and Billy Connolly.