“But also, John Clarke.” - Film Review

By Geoff Hutchison

There is something thrilling and poignant about watching Lorin Clarke’s beautifully observed documentary about her father, the satirist and actor John Clarke, which opens in cinemas nationally on 4 September 2025.

John, who many of us hoped would live forever and then offer dry, pithy truths about the experience, died suddenly in 2017 after suffering a heart attack on a bushwalk in the Grampian Ranges.

Lorin explains the film represents her search to discover her father’s inner essence. Something he’d never been very keen on exploring. “My life,” he says, in one of many recordings they made together, “is not the point.”

It was the work that mattered.

The film opens with home video of John mowing a lawn, wearing the black singlet he made famous in New Zealand as the character Fred Dagg and traces his extraordinary career celebrating and puncturing the buffoonery of Australian politics and society, most notably through his long collaboration with Bryan Dawe.

Watch those “Clarke and Dawe” sketches today and what makes them so remarkable is the fact he could play an under-siege John Howard or Jeff Kennett or Julia Gillard not with impersonation or an identifying tick, but wearing only, as Shaun Micallef notes “a very light assumption of a mask.”

The words, delivered in that deadpan nasal twang, did the damage.

“But also, John Clarke.” traces an unhappy childhood in New Zealand; he describes his parents’ relationship as being filled with “enmity, sabotage and loathing”- to an equally miserable experience at Scotch College in Wellington where he came to hate authoritarian figures and ‘‘held the school record for being caned.”

But it was onstage at university and in the company of three friends there, all devotees of the comedy of The Goons and particularly Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, that John began to write and perform. Comedy that was cerebral and subtle and silly and often without a punchline.

All that morphed into the character Fred Dagg, arguably the most famous Kiwi of his time and to this day, still honoured at annual gumboot throwing festivals.

“Clarke and Dawe’’ might have made him famous in Australia, but for me, it was the mockumentary series “The Games” which stood out as an absolute highlight.

Seen through the eyes of the middle level bureaucrats who would have to deliver the 2000 Sydney Olympics, “The Games” hilariously exposed the pressures and power plays of staging such a global extravaganza – none more memorably than the episode which revealed the 100-metre athletics track was in fact six metres shorter than it needed to be.

And at a time where Prime Minister John Howard continually rejected any notion that he should apologise to IndigenousAustralians for the impact of colonisation, John came up with the idea that the actor John Howard should appear on the show, seemingly addressing the nation and yes, offering an apology.

The speech was pitch perfect. The episode created uproar.

Both my wife Phillipa and I got to work with John – well, stand at the side of a darkened television studio with a stopwatch in hand as “Clarke and Dawe” was recorded. She, first as a young producer on Jana Wendt’s A Current Affair in the early 1990’s and me as a producer for the 7.30 Report on the ABC many years later.

The format never changed. The standard never slipped. And what struck us both, was John’s kindness towards and curiosity about other people.

In the film Andrew Denton and others refer to John’s great willingness to support and celebrate the achievements of other performers trying to make a go of it.

Wearing a small smile, he explains it as, “Encouragement is a book voucher you don’t have to spend next week.”

“But also, John Clarke” is a moving tribute to a great talent.

And yet, that he is gone, still seems very hard to reconcile. As Lorin explains from her family’s perspective, “It felt like a library had burned to the ground”

We miss him so.

By Geoff Hutchison

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