No more will Clarke & Dawe slyly skewer the doublespeak abounding in public life. It’s been my Thursday night highlight for years, that tightly crafted jewel of scathing simplicity. I will miss that 3 minutes each week immensely.
Two nations have lost a great satirist, a terrific writer, and by all accounts a delightful human being generally. So many people I know are utterly staggered that he’s gone. We were all lucky to have him in our lives, even those of us who only knew him from afar.
Categories: arts & entertainment, Politics
Today was a singing day 
Are cultural politics worse than no politics at all? 
The 62nd Down Under Feminists Carnival 
On the averting of civil unrest and slime on the carpet 
Someone who was genuinely treasured on both sides of the Tasman. Here’s a brilliant piece he wrote about New Zealand a couple of years ago: New Zealand, a user’s guide.
I feel really sorry for Bryan Dawe as he’s lost his creative partner and has to suffer people acting like the party is over now and Dawe can’t offer anything by himself.
I remember first running across John Clarke in “The Gillies Report” and “The Gillies Republic”, and just loving his deadpan delivery of the farnarkling results as part of the in-show “news” broadcast. It was the eighties, I’d grown up watching deadly serious commentators on the ABC talking about the footy (AFL) and the cricket for years, and I loved the way he ripped the heck out of the whole business without so much as twitching an eyelid.
When I was in high school, we were handed a copy of “Fred Dagg on Real Estate”, which, once I understood that Fred Dagg was the same bloke who did the farnarkling results, cracked me up completely, because I could just about hear it in my head being read out in those same deadpan tones. Re-reading it today reminds me firstly, how little has actually changed in real estate in forty years, and secondly, how much we’re going to miss this guy.