The child runs home to tell her mum, who, while telling a Listener journalist this a few years later, beams with pride.<\/a> The torch has been passed. If there is ever a John Clarke biopic, there\u2019s the posthumous closing scene.<\/p>\nBut there is already a John Clarke movie, a documentary written and directed by daughter Lorin Clarke, mother of Claudia.<\/p>\n
In an hour-long interview to discuss the film, the anecdote about Star of Wonder emerges when the Listener asks whether family Christmases might involve the Fred Dagg song. The one that began life as We Three Kings of Orient Are. That was before her father took it to the shearing shed for a quick snip and added it to the huge-selling recordings of his 1970s Dagg days in New Zealand. <\/p>\n
Fifty years on, his ditty clearly still appeals to the primary sector.<\/p>\n
Watch: Fred Dagg on Christmas (courtesy NZ On Screen).<\/p>\n
Second voyage<\/p>\n
When Clarke died of an unforeseen heart attack aged 68 in 2017, he wasn\u2019t long into his grandfather years. His becoming as doting a grandparent as he was a father was described by Lorin Clarke in her 2023 book Would that be Funny? Growing up with John Clarke. The book was a mix of affectionate insider biography and expansive family memoir. It was also a tale of private grief caught up in the public celebration of the man in Australia and New Zealand, where we put out our gumboots to mourn his passing.<\/p>\n
The book traced her father\u2019s career as satirist-in-chief in two nations across different decades; how the man with talent to burn found the right fuel for his fire in Australia; how despite growing up caught in the crossfire of his parents\u2019 dysfunctional marriage \u2013 and having been forced to testify at their divorce hearing \u2013 he and Australian wife Helen, an art history lecturer, created a happy \u201coffensively idyllic\u201d childhood for their two daughters in Melbourne.<\/p>\n
![\"Clarke]()
Clarke as grandfather-to-be with Lorin. Photo \/ Supplied<\/p>\n
The book was essentially a very long, digressive, lovely answer to the question Clarke was often asked \u2012 whether he was as funny at home as he was on television.<\/p>\n
Now she has completed a second voyage around her father. While the book told us she thought the world of her dad, she\u2019s now directed a film that tells what the world thought of him.<\/p>\n
Clarke says she didn\u2019t want the film to be a visual audiobook of her memoir, or to just channel everything you could google on the man. Her mother Helen didn\u2019t want a hagiography because her late husband would have hated it. There had been sainthood-conferring pitches from NZ production companies after he died.<\/p>\n
Helen Clarke was a reluctant interviewee, says her daughter, adding that her Australian mother didn\u2019t much like the recounting of how the couple first met through mutual friends in a London pub while both were on their OE and got into a high-minded argument about art.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut to me, he was basically at rock bottom when one of the best things that could happen to him happened to him. Their partnership is just so key. It\u2019s so crucial I wanted it to be there.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wanted to respect her privacy. But I also did want to show that loneliness that you can sense in his childhood, even when he got famous; their relationship was a crucial anchor.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Clarke]()
Clarke with Helen on their wedding day in December 1973. Photo \/ Supplied<\/p>\n
But a psychological portrait of her father aside, Lorin Clarke still wanted it to be fun. And it is, especially for anyone who grew up in the Fred Dagg era, of which there is quite a lot in the film, considering his relatively short time in the New Zealand limelight. That was before creative differences with co-writers on a Dagg series and the NZBC made him head for the Lucky Country.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt actually shows it\u2019s important, not just because of where he\u2019s from, because it does show something really specific about that time \u2026 this evolution of comedy in both Australia and New Zealand.\u201d<\/p>\n
The documentary also recounts his formative years in Palmerston North, then as a magnet for corporal punishment at Wellington private school Scots College, before finding his feet \u2013 socially and creatively, if not academically \u2013 at Victoria University of Wellington. His friends there included Sam Neill, Scots College classmate and human rights lawyer Tim McBride, and RNZ broadcaster Simon Morris, whose father Alan was at the time head of TV One and who advised Clarke he needed to leave the country for the sake of his career.<\/p>\n
John was a polymath,he could write, he could perform, he could knock out a poem for you. There\u2019s nothing he couldn\u2019t do. But, you know, there was always that sort of John Clarke thing in the middle of it.<\/p>\n
Sam Neill<\/p>\n
In Australia, the documentary\u2019s title has been shortened to But Also John Clarke, not something she\u2019s happy with. In New Zealand, it gets the full Not Only Fred Dagg But Also John Clarke \u2013 a reference to Peter Cook and Dudley Moore\u2019s Not Only \u2026 But Also 1960s sketch comedy series, which Clarke first saw when he scored a backroom job at the NZBC assessing shows. \u201cIt literally gave him access to stuff New Zealanders didn\u2019t see for another 10 years,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
![\"With]()
With Sam Neill in Death in Brunswick (1990). Photo \/ Supplied<\/p>\n
The film is rife with insights like that on the creation of Clarke, grandfather of Claudia, godfather of Kiwi comedy in absentia.<\/p>\n
Though it might be a film about the late John Clarke, the living John Clarke had a big say in it. Lorin Clarke has some interviewees, including Sam Neill, David Wenham and Ben Elton, read John Clarke\u2019s first-person accounts of his life. They are from a 70-page document titled, \u201cFor Lorin and Lucia\u201d, his daughters, and left on his computer.<\/p>\n
Elsewhere, Neill\u2019s thoughts on Clarke and the loss of a friend he first met in Wellington in the early 1970s are some of the most affecting parts of the film.<\/p>\n
\u201cJohn was a polymath,\u201d says Neill. You know, he could write, he could perform, he could knock out a poem for you. There\u2019s nothing he couldn\u2019t do. But, you know, there was always that sort of John Clarke thing in the middle of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Other notables to feature include Stephen Fry, a fan of Clarke\u2019s books in which his love and knowledge of poetry and literature shone in amusing ways, his early Wellington stage revue cast mates including Roger Hall and Helene Wong, and contemporary Kiwi comedians doffing their caps.<\/p>\n
Lorin Clarke admits to a certain nervousness to crossing the ditch for the interviews \u2013 she\u2019s still worried her birth was seen as a sort of Yoko Ono-breaks-up-Beatles reason for her parents\u2019 decision to shift to Australia after the Dagg era. She was once bailed up by someone at a writer\u2019s festival with an accusatory, \u201cOh, you\u2019re the baby.\u201d<\/p>\n
But she met New Zealand comedians who had their own takes on Clarke (Rhys Darby pitches himself as the star of that biopic), had a beer with the Fred Dagg Appreciation Society (Manawat\u016b branch) and was able to visit the Dagg singlet, shorts and gumboot vestments in Te Papa, which her father used when he mowed the lawns before the museum got in touch and sent someone in rubber gloves to uplift (who then had to clean the gumboots to negotiate airport biosecurity on arrival).<\/p>\n
Man of the moment <\/p>\n
Lorin\u2019s career \u2013 which has included everything from acting, scripting children\u2019s TV shows such as Bluey and writing children\u2019s books to podcasting \u2013 had started interviewing her father in the year before his death. Among many things he reflected on was how at the various stages in his career he managed to be in the right comedy place at the right time \u2012 whether it was Fred Dagg, his faux political interviews on Australian TV or The Games, which created a workplace mockumentary template for others \u2013 especially the producers of the BBC\u2019s London Olympics comedy Twenty Twelve (it\u2019s a long story) \u2013 to follow.<\/p>\n
![\"With]()
With Bryan Dawe and Gina Riley in The Games (1998). Photo \/ Supplied<\/p>\n
\u201cIt got a bit esoteric and academic, but we were talking about how each thing \u2013 Fred Dagg, the Clarke & Dawe interviews, The Games \u2013 each of them has an acute awareness of, and a home in, the media moment.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe talks about how, when he was a kid, he used to watch early TV and think, \u2018Someone\u2019s going to do it in a minute \u2013 someone\u2019s going to go on there and be a New Zealander.\u2019 He couldn\u2019t believe nobody had done it, and then he did it. It wasn\u2019t the whole reason that Fred Dagg worked but it was definitely that media moment, right? <\/p>\n
\u201cHe said about Clarke & Dawe, there was the media moment that it came into being. When Fred Dagg was happening, people weren\u2019t used to media manipulation. But by this time, they were fluent in the grammar of media and were cottoning on to the fact that this was being curated for them, and it was about the time when politicians were getting media training.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd The Games was the same. That first episode of The Games is set in a press conference, and you\u2019re watching it, going, what is this? <\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s no structure to this at all \u2026 you know the media format, but you\u2019re getting this unfiltered thing. So, it was further down the track of where media was.\u201d<\/p>\n
We sat there and we watched it, and finally it worked. I just had tears and I remember thinking, \u2018Hi, Dad\u2019, because he was suddenly there.<\/p>\n
Lorin Clarke<\/p>\n
Clarke reckons she had enough material for a 10-part series. Among that left on the cutting room floor is Brit comedian Elton, a long-time Australian resident, arguing the UK-influenced Clarke was an unsung influence on British comedy. <\/p>\n
The finished film drew from a rich archive, some created by Clarke himself with his home handycam; some of it bemused answerphone messages to his daughters. Elsewhere, Clarke\u2019s mother and early literary influence Neva is seen interviewed for Gaylene Preston\u2019s documentary, War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us, about the experiences of Kiwi women in World War II. She\u2019d served overseas.<\/p>\n
When it was all finally assembled, Clarke found herself transfixed and emotional.<\/p>\n
![\"With]()
With Dawe at Clarke\u2019s induction into the Hall of Fame at\u00a0Australia\u2019s 2008 Logie Awards. Photo \/ Getty Images<\/p>\n
\u201cWe sat there and we watched it, and finally it worked. I just had tears and I remember thinking, \u2018Hi, Dad\u2019, because he was suddenly there. Intellectually, I\u2019d seen that coming, but emotionally \u2026 I love sitting in there watching the film and it\u2019s not because I think I\u2019m a genius; I see my Dad. That\u2019s what he was like \u2026 there\u2019s just so much sort of incidental Dad banality. I love that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now, after a book and a film, Clarke can go back to what she was doing. \u201cI was brought here reluctantly. I wasn\u2019t sure it was what I wanted to do. I was enjoying doing my own projects and I wanted to be independent of him my whole life. Then suddenly, when we lost him, I realised that\u2019s not realistic any more. But doing it, writing the book and directing and writing the film, those things have been creatively fantastic for me.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was hard work doing both these projects and being so careful of his legacy and his story. But that hard work means that I feel like, creatively, I\u2019ve done my flying hours.\u201d <\/p>\n
Not Only Fred Dagg But Also John Clarke: in cinemas from Boxing Day.<\/p>\n
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