The King is dead

By David Dale
May 26, 2005

Australians like to say they have a "larrikin sense of humour", going back to the convict days when satire was the only way to get back at those who ruled us. Graham Kennedy, the long-reigning King of Television who has died at 71, was the embodiment of the larrikin.

He'd do anything for a laugh, no matter how embarrassing to himself or others. And warnings from the authorities that viewers might be offended only spurred him to grander outrages. He'd wink at the viewers, letting them in on the joke before springing it on those unlucky enough to be sharing his studio.

That made him post-modern decades before such jargon was invented. Other candidates for the title of Australia's greatest television comedian - Paul Hogan or Norman Gunston, for example - offered humour based on innocence, even when they were ridiculing pretension. Kennedy's style was knowing and cynical.

As "the court jester of Australia", he was comfortable with cruelty. In the late 1980s, by then a 30-year television veteran, he suggested it would be helpful - for the ratings of his comedy-news program - if the Pope's aircraft were to fly into a mountain. And he told viewers that the Queen "didn't have bad breasts" for her age.

As his old boss at Channel Nine, Sam Chisholm, said yesterday: "Graham Kennedy will go down in television history as probably the most, if not indeed the most, significant influence on television in this country."

His manager of 20 years, Harry M. Miller, said: "Everybody ... has tried to duplicate, replicate, copy anything he ever did, but nobody was able to do it."

In the 14 years since we last saw Kennedy, Australia has become a more solemn place. Our television is safe, suburban and comfortable. We've retreated five decades.

Variety shows such as Rove Live might contain the odd dirty joke, but nobody offers the sense of danger Kennedy brought to his work. He was never predictable, so he could have only succeeded in the time before television became fossilised by formulas.

When Australian television started on September 16, 1956 it did so not with a bang but with a variety show. Immediately after saying "Welcome to television", Bruce Gyngell crossed to singer Johnny O'Connor, who established what was to become the "tonight show" format - a host who sang a bit, told a few jokes, introduced guest singers and conducted worshipful interviews with celebrities. It was all very safe and comforting.

The big bang happened a year later. That was when Kennedy, then a 23-year-old radio announcer, launched In Melbourne Tonight and subverted the whole notion of "variety".

Graham Kennedy didn't sing and didn't interview. Instead, he indulged a penchant for double entendres and pies in the face that went back to the days of vaudeville, did sketches in which he kept dropping out of character to break up the other performers, and showed a contempt for his sponsors' products that horrified producers and delighted audiences.

In 1959 a planned 30-second commercial involving a temporary presenter, Bert Newton, turned into 27 minutes of chaos, and Australia's greatest TV partnership was born.

Kennedy first went national in 1960, but Sydney took a while to warm to him. For us, he was too abrasive, "too Melbourne".

His national show lasted only two years the first time around, and didn't return to Sydney for a decade. But by 1975, when Kennedy was suspended from live TV for doing a crow imitation that sounded a bit like "Faaaaaark", he had the hearts and minds of a nation in his hand.

We stuck with him when he returned as host of Blankety Blanks in the late '70s, then as a weird sort of current affairs commentator in the late '80s. By then his treatment of the hapless sidekicks assigned to feed him lines was so humiliating, the viewer sometimes had to turn away. Only Newton was a match for him.

By the time he presented Funniest Home Videos, before his final retirement in 1991, we'd come to realise, through films such as Don's Party, The Club and The Odd Angry Shot, that he was a pretty reasonable actor, with a quality of deep sadness.

In Graeme Blundell's biography, King: The Life and Comedy of Graham Kennedy, Kennedy described himself as "just a sad little weird kid from Balaclava with funny eyes". And there was a sad, solitary way about the man. In retirement, he became a virtual recluse. He lived with his golden retriever, Henry, at his home near Bowral. "I prefer my own company to a lot of others," he said in 1989.

He suffered several long illnesses. Close friend Tony Sattler recalled a scare in 2000. "I rang him and said 'Are you dead?' And he said, 'I don't know, I'd better check.' "

In 2003 Kennedy fell down a set of stairs, breaking his leg and skull. He died at about 4.30am yesterday from complications of pneumonia at a nursing home in the southern highlands.

Rove MacManus acknowledged a debt to Kennedy: "I think he will remain unmatched on Australian television." And actor Stuart Wagstaff lamented: "They say 'The King is dead, long live the King'. But there isn't a King to take over from him. He was a one-off."

It was Kennedy who named Australia's top TV award, the Logie - ostensibly after John Logie Baird, the inventor of the medium. He would go on to win 19 Logies, including five gold ones. But as one viewer pointed out, a Logie sounded "more like something you pull out of your nose". The larrikin would have loved that.


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