Some of the funniest Australian television moments we have ever seen on Australian television involve Norman Gunston providing on-the-spot reports or 'ambushing' interviews with the rich and famous at major events like the Logie Awards. Basically Gunston, or should I say Garry McDonald, for it was he who created and played the character and brought him to life, would play the fool. in order to disarm the person being interviewed, he would take the mickey out of himself in order to take the mickey out of them.

He caught the majority of them totally all off guard - the overseas one in particular, being unfamiliar with Australian homour, and were never quite sure whether to be amused or offended at Norman's probing questions. Mohammad Ali threatening to beat him into a powder, Warren Beatty was perhaps for the first time in his life, speechless, when asked whether or not Carlie Simon did indeed write the song The Impossible Dream about him. Poor Sally Struthers of the American sitcom All In The Family just about choked to death, almost falling of the couch in hysterics at this straight-faced, gawky interviewer and his ridiculous questions. Perhaps Norman's most well known interview was with Keith Moon at Charlton stadium in 1976. Moon famously ended his brief encounter with Norman by tipping Vodka over his head.

Garry McDonald (front left) in The Aunty Jack Show

The Norman Gunston character first appeared on a legendary Australian comedy show, The Aunty Jack Show, which featured Grahame Bond as Aunty Jack. She wore a dress, glasses, a big moustache and boxing gloves, and she rode a motorcycle. A character of that description needs equally wacky sidekicks to bounch the humour off, and one of these was Norman Gunston, a roving reporter who supposedly presented a show called What's On In Wollongong on local television. On the creation of the Noman Gunston character, McDonald recalls in an interview on The Gunston Tapes DVD set: "When I was about 13 I think, I went to see a documentary that was a big hit called Mondo Cane, and there was a segment in it that struck me as terribly funny, was where they went back to Rudolph Valentino's hom town: all the young men in the town hoped that they were going to be kind of discovered . They all became like Elvis: they all dressed like him and slicked their hair back."

"There was one guy they panned across, and he was like Norman Gunston - he had this extraordinary lower jaw, and he just looked terribly amusing, and that developed then with a school friend. Whenever we wanted to make fun of something we would slip into that character with the shot jaw. "And so when I did a tour with David Frost - I was doing some sketches with him - we had a run-in with an an air hostess (Norma Gladstone) and she actually had this lower protruding mandible. She gave David Frost a really hard time on this flight. So when The Aunty Jack Show was offered to me there was a character in it that didn't have a name, and he used to do reports from Wollongong. I thought it would be very funny if I did him like this character that I 'd always done and I would name him with the same name as this woman, just as an in-joke. I bumped into her many years later on a plane and she came up to me and she said, "you know a lot of people say that that character s based on me - I mean, the name was so close."

The potential in this character was spotted by an ABC producer, and he was offered a tonight show of his own on ABC television in May 1975 (John Laws was also one of the people considered to host the show!) Somewhere along the way, he was christened with the sobriquet The Little Aussie Bleeder. The name borrows from the term little Aussie battler, for a battler he was, but the phrase was modified as a reference to Gunston's shaving nicks.

Through sheer good luck, Gunston was immortalised in Australian political history when, on the morning of 11th  November 1975, McDonald and his film crew - who happened to be in Canberra at the time - found out that the Labor government led by Gough Whitlam had just been dismissed by the Governor-General Sir John Kerr. On hearing the news, McDonald and his crew raced to Parliament House, where they were able to film McDonald (as Gunston) briefly addressing the assembled crowd, only moments before Whitlam and the Governor-General's press secretary appeared for the reading of the now-famous proclamation announcing Whitlam's dismissal.

In 1978, Gunston transferred from the ABC to the Channel 7 network. They aired another Norman Gunston series, which continued over an 18 month period till 1979. Sadly, the Norman Gunston character was put to rest permenantly after an aborted comeback series in 1993, at which time McDonald was suffering from an anxiety disorder.

The remarkable thing about Norman Gunston and his 1993 demise is that, by that stage, McDonald was already enjoying huge success with another character he had created, Arthur Beare, a beleaguered and wimpy, divorced son living under the thumb of his exploitative mother (Ruth Cracknell) in Mother And Son.  Written by Geoffrey Atherden and directed by Geoff Portmann, Mother & Son enjoyed six seasons over ten years and was winning awards up to its final season in 1994. 

Garry McDonald and Ruth Cracknell in Mother & Son