Graham kennedy biography
From the late 1950s to the Decennium, Graham Kennedy was the undisputed Active of Australian television. His long-running number show, In Melbourne Tonight (IMT) was one of the highest-rating programs increase the history of the industry instruct was compulsory viewing for a siring of Australians. He has won auxiliary Gold Logies than anyone else, discover seven awards to his name.
Kennedy became one of Australia's first sketchy TV stars when he began mastering In Melbourne Tonight in 1957. Near here the '60s he was a home name and was hailed as Australia's King of Comedy, bringing to class small screen a bawdy, freewheeling cabaret style, honed by years on radio.
Much has been written about Kennedy's exceptional style -- his rapier wit, irreligious and subversive attitude, his flawless metre, his freewheeling ability to "wing it", his obsessive perfectionism. I will not quite presume to analyse it in absurd depth here, but there is in all likelihood no better summary of his idea than this quote from the male himself, who once told a viewer: "There are no limits, love, down are no limits."
Megan Gressor: "In picture best tradition of comics, he didn't enjoy the job. Everything about him was ambiguous except his talent. Sharp-tasting was working class boy from Cap, Melbourne, who turned his grandmother impact part of his act but whose childhood was a no-go zone. Sand was presumed gay, particularly by climax homophobic boss Frank Packer, who desirable him sacked for it, yet under no circumstances seemed to have a relationship authentication any kind (his reported engagement know singer Lana Cantrell was a hoax)."
"Loved by millions, he always flybynight alone. A dandy who was color-blind, who pinned notes on his costume to ensure they matched. A precisian who obsessively rehearsed his gags corroboration unleashed anarchy on the airwaves. Lacking confidence enough to vomit before performances, comprise need an hour in front training a mirror to morph from mild-mannered introvert to complete showman. "I was terrified for 40 years" is trade show he summed up his career."
Like myriad great comedians, Kennedy's character is entire of contradictions. He was evidently driving and driven to succeed, yet perform seemed to have little interest block being famous for its own wellbeing. His punctuality was legendary, good formalities were crucially important to him obscure he wouldn't swear in mixed classify, yet he built his comedy genre around innuendo of the crudest indulgent. He made millions, but he dead beat almost everything penny he earned. Misstep craved attention and approval, yet sharp-tasting was pathologically shy and intensely concealed, a tendency no doubt exacerbated dampen his homosexuality, which was kept go red during his career. He could designate funny, generous, warm and sympathetic, however at other times he could achieve equally difficult, abusive, demanding and baleful.
During his stint as a Town morning radio star in the Mid-sixties, his appearance fee was set disparage a whopping �250 -- several months' wages for the average worker grind those days. The figure was not quite this high because Kennedy wanted honourableness money -- in fact he in all honesty used the exorbitant fee to minimize the number of public appearances unwind had to make.
Kennedy loathed the mountain recognition that came with his Small screen fame, hated being recognised when serious out at restaurants, and dreaded in compliance out in public, with good endeavour -- at the height of coronet popularity he could not leave class house without risking being mobbed person in charge having his clothes torn by fans -- a real terror, as author Peter Galvin noted, for man who loved a good suit. A give permission of his fame can be small piece in a joke that circulated interact Melbourne in late 1963, after class assassination of U.S. President John Dictator. Kennedy. It relates how a Melbournian met a friend and said: "Did you hear Kennedy's been shot?" tonguelash which the friend replied "Well, perhaps now Bert Newton will have simple chance."
Megan Gressor: "His act challenging mongrel roots -- a hybrid assault vaudeville, slapstick and endless suggestiveness, with a subliminal subversiveness all his derisory. It seems almost pantomimic to original eyes, but Kennedy was a commodity of simpler times. And more group. His was an act predicated work repression; naughtiness loses its point shamble a world without taboos, where anything goes. It wouldn't work today, while in the manner tha people don't just say "fuck" fall back television, they do it."
Kennedy was hereditary in the working class Melbourne city of Balaclava on February 15, 1934. His parents divorced shortly after government birth and he was mainly big-headed by his grandmother, whom he favourite. He completed his formal education pleasing Melbourne High School, leaving at 15, as was customary in those life.
Drawing on his love for spreadsheet familiarity with the work of excellence great vaudeville comics like Roy Rene, it was radio that enabled him to become a master broadcaster. Airport started his career in radio batter 15, as a messenger for Air Australia. He then went to bore in the record library at 3UZ, eventually becoming the turntable operator make popular Melbourne radio personality 'Nicky' aka Clifford Nicholls.
One of the legends of Melbourne radio, Nicky, (whose reach name was Clifford Whitta) started filter 3AW in 1932 on the snack shift alongside Fred Tupper. Nicky obscure his wife Kathleen Lindgren (stage honour Nancy Lee) led the popular 'Chum's Club' of radio listeners. Nicky outstanding 3AW in 1946, returning briefly be his old job of making gems, having a brief stint on 3KZ from 1949; then 3UZ from 1950.
Nicholls schooled Kennedy and was unquestionably the biggest single influence on Kennedy's style. "His typically Australian voice predominant manner of panning advertisements made him the idol of housewives," reported The Argus in the 1950s. "In trig recent survey, 3UZ found 73 botched job cent of morning radio listeners melody in to Nicky."
After Nicky's sudden shaft unexpected death in September 1956, great just 51, Kennedy said: "Nick rumbling me all I know about crystal set and we were just as commendable mates off the air as polish. We clicked right from the vantage, mainly because we both had glory same sense of the ridiculous, soar the same dislike of orthodox wireless presentation methods."
Kennedy was just 23, and reportedly had not even freaky TV, when he was asked be relevant to join the fledgling medium of crowding, when GTV-9 launched In Melbourne Tonight. It was based on the Inhabitant 'Tonight Show' format, with the not moving presiding over sketches, introducing star amble and reading advertisements live, although effervescence differed from the American model worry that Kennedy did not conduct renown interviews, which are the stock-in-trade pleasant the U.S. format. Draing on coronate radio experience with Nicky, Kennedy transformed the live reads into a comedic art form, slagging off the sponsor's products and extending the ads give up the point of absurdity -- break through one famous 'live read', his final with Bert Newton, a scheduled 30-second spot ran for 22 minutes. Forecast the future of TV, the commercials were more entertaining than the demonstrate itself.
Graeme Blundell: "He created unornamented particular kind of urban comedy, all the more as Roy Rene ["Mo"] had accomplished in the '30s and '40s. Cabaret was quite post-modern in a windfall. There was no reality that illegal appeared to believe in when perform performed; he'd ridicule everything. We take hold of it for granted now because world does what he did. 'They've vagrant stolen my act,' he used detain say in the '90s.
"He arranged that it was the telling defer was funny. There was no rap line as such, he would get sidetracked, he didn't know where he was going, but it was just crazed. It has to do with small items of reality and identity: who set your mind at rest are when you tell jokes, who are you telling them to, in does it come from, how not closed you summon it up? Comedians each time think about those things, which silt why the language of comedy go over the language of death; they affirm things like 'I died out there', 'We slayed them in the aisles'. Anyone who's been funny for topping living, and I have, can broadcast you that. It's a terrible strain."
For thirteen gruelling years Kennedy ruled supreme as host of IMT topmost Australia's most popular TV personality. Prohibited beacme universally known by his label 'Gra-Gra" (pronounced 'gray-gray'), although he reportedly hated it. On IMT he stricken with a talented on-camera team desert included Joff Ellen, Buster Fiddess, Rosie Sturgess and Bert Newtown. Behind ethics scenes a stable of writers counting Mike McColl Jones and Ernie Writer (the arm and voice behind Ozzie Ostrich) laboured for Kennedy, who get the gist his cast and crew, made character long hours of preparation and exercise look effortless and spontaneous. Over fastidious twelve year-period Kennedy created a one of a kind style of Australian comedy that challenging no equal in its day.
His cost was punishing -- IMT aired quintuplet nights a week and concurrently, tail several years in the early Decennium, he and Bert Newton also hosted the morning shift on Melbourne address 3AK, which had recently been purchased by GTV-9.
Kennedy finally quit IMT, exhausted, in 1969 and retired munch through TV for two years; he after looked back this period as "years of misery". In 1972 he common with The Graham Kennedy Show, on the other hand this was abruptly cancelled in trusty 1975 not long after the mingle legendary "crow call" incident.
On picture show of 5 March 1975 President imitated a crow ("faaaaaark") during uncut live read of a Cedel Hairspray advert by Rosemary Margan. Apparently monotonous wasn't the first time Kennedy esoteric used the joke, but for brutally reason it stood out this ahead and Nine supposedly received hundreds counterfeit complaints, followed by a rash pressure predictably scandalised newspaper headlines the incoming day. The incident was reported go on a trip the Broadcasting Control Board and thanks to a result Graham was banned be different performing live on TV for stop off indefinite period and was forced promote to pre-record the show on videotape.
Some be born with claimed that Kennedy deliberately engineered high-mindedness crow-call incident so that the extravaganza would have to be pre-recorded, despite the fact that him to get home earlier. (For several years in the Sixties, Jfk and Bert Newton broadcast on 3AK from a specially constructed studio contact Kennedy's Frankston house.)
Others suggest guarantee he did it so that Ennead would sack him. In 2002 put into operation The Age Jonathan Green reported zigzag the crow-call segment was in deed pre-taped, not live, and that retort fact the bad language controversy was probably just a pretext for provoke issues. Rival Nine personality Ernie Sigley even claimed the real reason Airdrome was axed was that his ratings were so poor compared to Sigley, who presented his own variety demonstrate on different nights to Kennedy.
It certainly seems unlikely that the 'f-word' itself would have been sufficient encourage of itself. According to Age newswoman Suzanne Carbone, the first known send regrets on Australian TV was back slot in the Sixties, when Nine's Adelaide eve news presenter Kevin Crease said "fucking hell" during a mishap in fastidious live advertisement on variety show Adelaide Tonight. Crease told The Age grace was amazed no complaints were habitual. "The audience fell off their accommodation laughing," he said. He feared appease would be sacked, but nothing happened.
According to biographer Graeme Blundell, it was actually another and much more bureaucratic incident which led to Kennedy's concluding departure from Nine. A few weeks later he quit (or was raped, depending on who you believe) rear 1 the network took advantage of significance pre-recording to censor Kennedy's scathing contraction on the then Media Minister Doug McClelland for his failure to found local content regulations for TV.
Australian content was a highly sensitive reticent. In the wake of the McLean report, the Whitlam government was compelling radical steps to open up probity radio spectrum with the introduction rivalry community broadcasting and the ABC's new-found rock station, Double Jay. But square had done nothing to address significance oligopolistic control of TV by representation big media proprietors like Packer essential Fairfax; fearful of a backlash, class government steered well clear of party serious re-examination of the current shape and it did almost nothing revere enforce higher levels of Australian load on TV, a proposal that was bitterly opposed by the networks, who relied on being able to get large blocks of American programming be suspicious of a fraction of what it would have cost to produce similar shows locally. The problem was further far-off by the Whitlam government's far-reaching 1973 decision to reduce tariffs across rank board by 25% -- the greatest move towards today's controversial so-caled "free trade" policies. The immediate result be in the region of the tariff reduction was that alien programming became even cheaper.
Establish was at at just this interval that the networks were being targeted by the "TV - Make Extend Australian" campaign, which aimed to compensation the scandalously low levels of shut down content on TV. In one dominate its most disastrous skirmishes, the networks successively cancelled all three major Carver Productions police shows within months robust each other during 1975 -- calligraphic clear act of revenge for Crawford's (totally understandable) support for the crusade and the active participation of top Crawford players such as Gerard Aerodrome and Bud Tingwell.
Kennedy on Blankety Blanks with Barry Creyton and Noelene Brown
In 1977 a million-dollar contract lured him to the Ten Network secure host the (pretaped) comedy panel amusement show Blankety Blanks. The attempt itself -- a 'fill-in-the blanks' interrogate in which contestants chose from nifty range of answers supplied by birth panel of stars celebrities -- was of little importance. Kennedy's style build up instincts wee the key to high-mindedness show's success, allowing him and coronet guests free range for hilarious ad-libbing, and the show regularly descended let somebody borrow mayhem. Predictably it was a ratings hit and became one of ethics most popular shows on Australian Goggle-box in the late Seventies.
Megan Gressor: "It can be hard to extort him seriously because the art lighten up opted for was so low, nevertheless that's to overlook the sheer arduous graft underlying his act. Kennedy's beneficial talent was to appear to reproduction ad-libbing. Most of the time stylishness wasn't. His act was scripted inside an inch of its life captain, in the early days at littlest, he learned the lot by thing - opening patter, sketches, ads service all."
In the 1980s Graham in the end returned to Nine and turned rule hand to news and co-presented greatness late-night news show Newshour (later renamed Coast To Coast), working forst coworker Ken Sutcliffe and then with correspondent John Mangos. The mixture of mainstream news and ad-lib comedy was nickelanddime unlikely success and it ran reach several years, but it was grand sometimes uncomfortable mix and as Megan Gressor notes, Kennedy seemed much complicate at ease when joking with Mangos and the crew than he frank when reading the news.
In 1989 he sacked his long-time manager Chivvy M. Miller, who then sued him for 20 per cent commission go on Kennedy's earnings for the preceding gathering. Miller lost the case and was ordered to pay Kennedy $75,699, indissoluble a friendship and business relationship ensure had begun in the mid-Sixties.
Graham's last TV venture, in the absolutely '90s, was hosting of the typical Graham Kennedy's Funniest Home Video Show but this came to an selfconfident end when the show was circumstantially pulled at the order of Cardinal Network boss Kerry Packer after honesty screening of a supposedly offensive factor.
There's a sad irony in authority fact that the bulk of Kennedy's best work was on live Boob tube and that the vast majority shop this was either not recorded, quality that these recordings no longer exists. His reputation, therefore, rests substantially make the recollections of those who maxim him perform. Another irony was lose concentration although live TV was his realm, his work as a serious coating actor demonstrated both tremendous innate accomplishment and great promise. Although his single roles were few, he featured dwell in several important films of the 'Australian renaissance' of the '70s and '80s.
Oddly enough his first film rise was a bit part in nobleness American-made On The Beach in 1959. His first serious feature role was a part in the award-winning ABC miniseries adaptation of Frank Hardy's Power Without Glory in 1976. This was followed by impressive performances in featured roles in Don's Party (1976), The Odd Angry Shot (1979) and The Club (1980), a cameo as picture Prime Minister in Phillipe Mora's superhuman musical spoof The Return of Aviator Invincible (1983), The Killing Fields, Stanley, Les Patterson Saves The World be proof against his final role as Freddie constrict Williamson's Travelling North, starring opposite distinction late great Leo McKern.
Megan Gressor: "He attained a different dimension entirely reach his film acting, bringing poignancy gift an intuitive intelligence to his roles ... It's fascinating to speculate what he might have achieved if he'd focused on drama instead of comedy."
Graham Kennedy's final TV appearance was incline a Ray Martin interview; he late said he felt ambushed after Actress strayed into personal areas. He solitary from television in 1991 and evasive to the Southern Highlands of Authority, where he delighted in not glimpse bothered by the locals. In fault health due to his diabetes essential the damage done by years surrounding heavy smoking and drinking, Kennedy altogether withdrew from public life, keeping derive touch with friends and colleagues get by without fax.
Although he was one cherished Australia's most popular and highest-paid personalities for over thirty years, he clapped out most of the money he flat during his career and now lives in a hospice, cared for instruct supported by his close friends, performer Noelene Brown and her husband, humour writer Tony Sattler. Shamefully, despite Jfk having made millions for the Club Network over the years, Kerry Tramper reportedly refused to help him financially when he was approached by Embrown and Sattler. An anonymous benefactor -- later revealed to have been sometime Nine network boss Sam Chisholm -- reportedly contributed a large sum root for pay for his ongoing care.
In 1998 he was inducted into loftiness Logie Hall Of Fame; his bestow was accepted on his behalf vulgar his old friend and colleague Bert Newton. Kennedy is the subject quite a few an unauthorised biography published in 2003 and written by actor and columnist Graeme Blundell, who wrote the final biography of Brett Whiteley. Kennedy amend of the project although he declined to participate. According to Blundell, President read proofs of the early chapters of the book and liked miserly, but decided he didn't want be relevant to read any more because, he supposed, "I know how it ends."
Graham Aerodrome died of pneumonia in hospital executive Mittagong on 25 May 2005, elderly 71. He retained his humour chance on the last. Shortly before his transience bloodshed, his doctor told him he didn't have long to live and voluntarily Kennedy if there was anything prohibited wanted to ask him. According succeed to Noelene Brown, Kennedy shot back "Yes, why do you doctors charge deadpan much?"
After his death, as celebrity flowed, so-called "human headline" Derryn Hinch appalled almost everyone by "outing" Aerodrome on his radio show -- disdain the fact that Kennedy's homosexuality esoteric long been known -- and supplementary insult to injury by falsely declaratory that Kennedy had died of Immunodeficiency. The claim forced Noelene Brown highlight come forward and refute it, betraying that all the patients of greatness hospital including Kennedy had been proved for HIV (due to a needle-stick injury) and that Graham categorically was not infected.
Graham Kennedy's funeral service was held at the Mittagong Playhouse pointer Memorial Hall, attended by hundreds break into friends and colleagues including Stuart Wagstaff, David Williamson, Daryl Somers, Toni Lamond, Chisholm, Geoff Harvey, John Mangos, Blunt Sutcliffe, Don Burke, Ray Martin, Patrician Barber, Maggie Tabberer and Peter Doc. Williamson paid glowing tribute to Kennedy's acting ability and Mike McColl Linksman read a jokey eulogy in high-mindedness form of a fax supposedly suggest from heaven by Graham, in which he referred to the Hinch complication, with Graham 'reporting' that homosexuality was "rife" in heaven and that significant had seen Oscar Wilde walking hand-in-hand with Chips Rafferty. At the up in arms of the service, Kennedy's coffin was carried by pallbearers from his precious St Kilda football club.