I returned to Australia and contacted Icon development. Unfortunately Braveheart had gone over budget and Icon had a cash-flow problem.
Tony Barry and I had spent two years on this project and to go back to square one again was too hard. I gave up trying to be a movie-maker. Middle East peace seems easier than getting a film up.
Better Homes and Gardens
Hazelbrook was my fifth house build. I’d found an effective way to build with great results was to use second-hand materials, which are generally superior to new ones. I’d figure out a materials list for what I was about to build, then I’d collect and stockpile until I had everything for the job. To match the rest of the Federation-style house, I needed to collect materials to build the huge living area, mostly from demo yards. I’d drive home very slowly, with an overloaded trailer. Someone demolishing a house just up the road at Lawson said I could have the floorboards if I pulled them up myself. Not a problem. Two days later, I had a shitload of floorboards for nothing.
I was halfway through building the living room when Noni was offered a job hosting a new show called Better Homes and Gardens. It had cooking, gardening, decorating, consumer and DIY segments. They needed someone who could build and present to be the DIY presenter. Noni said, ‘I know one,’ and that’s how I got the gig. Noni thought it would be clever to co-host the show, do a lot of stuff in our house and give it a family feel. Not to get things done on the house – believe me, it didn’t work out that way. The tax department doesn’t allow that kind of freebie. The upside was being in the house with our boys every day; the downside was living on a film set.
If we hadn’t had our PA Linley Bettles organising the whole thing, it would have disintegrated very quickly. We met Linley when we were living in Sydney, when she was working for a friend of Noni’s. She was our kind of person and the three of us hit it off straight away. Linley could make anything run smoothly. She wanted to get her toe in the door of the entertainment biz, and this was her chance.
Better Homes and Gardens took care of the next four years of my life, 1995 to 1999. In the beginning they gave me a typical director for my segments. They’d hand me a script, which was as boring as batshit and as funny as a cup of cold sick. I threw the script away and ad-libbed my segments; I was always trying to make them funny. It’s called infotainment. On other similar shows, there was plenty of info but not much ’tainment. Noni and I knew that. Noni took over the script for the hostings we did, which were always brilliant, informative, entertaining and funny. We got off to a good set of ratings and critical approval. Before long we were the number-one info show and number four in the all-round ratings. At this stage I was enjoying the show. Because of the style I used, I got an old mate of mine, Alister Smart, to direct my segment. He was an actor, Playschool presenter and dramatic director. I’d worked with him on a telemovie and an episode of Blue Heelers in ’94. He allowed me to do my thing and helped me with it. He was far and away the best director I had during my time on the show. The other directors were all lacking performance expertise. This wasn’t a problem as Noni and I had twenty years of experience doing movies and TV dramas. There aren’t a lot of good directors, full stop. We’ve both had to direct ourselves and look after ourselves many times. The Better Homes directors knew how to put together a lifestyle segment, while Noni looked after the performance. I did the same unless I had Alister. Alister actually had trouble putting a segment together, because that was new to him. We all found a way to make it work and we ended up with the number-one show, picking up the Logie every year I was there, and I believe it still does.
Dad’s life goes from autumn to winter
In mid-1995 Baz and Dad were working on Dad’s house. We didn’t use concrete mixes; we mixed concrete in a wheelbarrow with a mattock. Dad always took the toughest way: if you helped him move a fridge he’d insist on carrying the heavy end, even though he was pushing seventy. He was mixing concrete in a barrow, full to the brim of course, and he had a massive stroke. He was sixty-nine. Dad’s parents both died in their fifties from high blood pressure, so our family is riddled with hypertension. I’ve got it and Dad had it worse. When Dad had the stroke he was a physically fit, hard-working old bastard. He had a 44-inch chest and a 34-inch waist (better than me, I’m 36). His downfall was bad habits and diet. He loved red meat and three veg, covered it with salt, ate all the fat off the meat, and always finished a meal with dessert, usually cheap ice cream and tinned peaches. In front of the TV he’d eat chocolate and half a kilo of peanuts washed down with tea and three spoons of sugar. He smoked.
He was numb down the left side. Things in the middle – nose, mouth and penis – weren’t numb; he was particularly happy about the penis. His mouth had drooped and his left hand was clenched. He could talk with a slur, but at this stage we didn’t know if he’d be able to walk. The doctor felt he was in a bad way and probably wouldn’t improve much. He was lucky to be alive. A week later the doc couldn’t believe what the old man was doing. They found him pulling the drip along with his right hand and dragging his left leg along like Quasimodo.
The nurse panicked. ‘Mister Jarratt, what do you think you’re doing?’
‘I’m goun for a thyit, I dowanna thyit in the fuckin’ bed.’
The doc said, ‘He’s going to be all right. He’s very determined.’
Dad stayed numb down one side and suffered from fatigue from then on. He ended up walking with a slight limp, but he could use his left hand quite well and his speech recovered completely. He ended up driving again until the day he died, but it was a long, slow haul for the tenacious old bugger.
Dad finally came home from hospital. They had lousy neighbours on both sides, a madwoman on one side and a madman on the other. The madwoman would yell at them over her fence all the time. Mum ignored her, while Dad swore back at her. ‘Go bite yer arse, you stupid old bitch!’ She didn’t like Mum and she hated Dad with a vengeance. One day Dad parked across the road and he was about to cross when the woman next door drove off. He stopped and waited. She aimed the car at Dad and tried to run him over. He jumped back but she ran over his foot. He thumped the roof of her car as she passed. She slammed on the brakes and came back and yelled in Dad’s face. Dad’s foot was throbbing and he thought, I’ve gotta shut this woman’s flapping mouth. He gave her a short jab in the mouth. It shut her up, but it upset Dad no end. He couldn’t believe he’d punched a woman; it was against everything he stood for.
My brother Baz is a great musician. He’s written amazing songs and entertained all his life. He looks like a muso, with long wavy black hair and some kind of beard or moustache. He’d had enough. The woman was always working along our fence, looking for an argument. One day she was working away and Barry slowly emerged from below and looked at her across the fence.
‘Woman…woman, you may affect the old ones, woman, but you don’t affect the young ones. The young ones will get you, woman, we will get you, woman.’ Then he slowly slunk back down and out of view. It freaked her out, and we didn’t hear from her after that. Fight madness with madness.
The bloke on the other side was always whingeing and complaining about everything. He especially hated Barry’s band practice in the downstairs sandstone studio that he’d built and soundproofed. Dad continuously told him to bite his arse, too. Dad was struggling down the side steps using a walking stick, and Mum was with him trying to help. The bastard next door came to the fence and deliberately gave it to the old man because he was down.
‘You know why you are sick? Because your sons are parasites, they’re bleeding you to death!’
‘Get up the front! Get up the front, you piece of shit, I’m gonna knock your fuckin’ head off. It might fuckin’ kill me, but I’ll kill you first.’
Mum was screaming, ‘Bruce, Bruce, stop it, you’ll kill yourself, stop it!’
Dad wouldn’t let up and the gutless bastard from next door shat himself and ran inside.
‘Ya gutless fuckin’ mongrel bastard, get o
ut here and put ya hands up, ya poofter!’
Mum got him inside and he was as sick as a dog. It took him a week to recover. Brian went next door and gave it to the bastard again, both barrels. My dad knew it would kill him to fight the prick, but he didn’t hesitate. You can have a go at an Irish Australian, but don’t, whatever you do, have a go at his family. Do I love my father? My bloody oath I do.
It was sad to see the old man lose his mojo, but life goes on. He got very depressed; Mum went through hell with his misery. He finally came to terms with it and got back to living the best he could. It softened him and he understood how lucky he was to have Mum still with him. Earlier in their marriage it had been touch-and-go. He always loved her deeply, but now he was voicing it; in fact it went the other way, he wouldn’t shut up about her.
‘Course I’m happy, why wouldn’t I be, I’ve got the most beautiful woman in the world!’
He was the same with us. ‘Bloody proud’ was his favourite platitude. The biggy happened about two years after the stroke. I knocked on the door and he opened it. He looked me in the eye and he said with a degree of difficulty, ‘I’m sorry about the way I treated you when you were kids. I had no right to belt you like I did or speak to you the way I did.’
I paused, completely taken aback. I expected more, I thought it was the beginning of a speech, but it wasn’t. We put our arms around each other and I hugged my father for the first and last time.
‘Who’s your favourite actor?’…John Hargreaves
Better Homes and Gardens was all-encompassing. In the five years I was involved, I managed only two other gigs, both in 1995. The first was a cough and a spit on Blue Murder, one of the world’s best TV shows of all time. Richard Roxburgh, one of the greatest actors going around, played Roger Rogerson.
Talking of great actors, it was John Hargreaves’s last gig. He played a lawyer and I was lucky enough to be involved in a scene with him. He was ravaged with AIDS. He said to me, ‘Why don’t you do a segment on Better Homes, an AIDS makeover, give my body a quick run over with a sander.’
We had a break in late 1995 so I was able to play a co-lead in the film of Dead Heart. Bryan Brown played the part I’d done in the theatre. It was shot on location in Alice Springs. The story lent itself brilliantly to film. The magic of black skin against red earth is a cameraman’s dream. Bryan played the hard-arsed cop brilliantly.
We had a lot of fun making that film. We did the tourist thing and chartered a plane to Uluru and drove out to a place called Glen Helen homestead and then to a magnificent gorge. We had plenty of fun back in the Alice as well. One night, Bryan put on a barbecue in the grounds of our hotel, just outside the main bar. We hung in until about 1 a.m. and Bryan, who’d had a few, thought it was time to turn in. He walked up a few steps to just outside the bar area. Standing there was a big bloke with a mop of red curly hair and a big bushy beard. He said to Bryan, ‘Bryan Brown, you’re even fuckin’ uglier off screen.’
Bryan stared daggers at him with those big eyes of his. ‘At least I’ll never be as ugly as you, ya cunt!’
I immediately slid up beside the redhead. If he even moved a muscle, I was going to plough my right fist into his ear. They kept up a staring contest for about 15 seconds, then the redhead thought better of it, grunted and went back into the bar.
‘You silly prick, Bryan, what if he was any good?’
‘She’s right, mate, you were there.’
He turned on his heel and went to bed.
We went back to Sydney and finished the film in the studio. Johnny Hargreaves was on his last legs in hospital. He was a close mate of Bryan’s and mine. Bryan had taken him in to his family and tried to make the time he had left as enjoyable as possible. We were going to see him in hospital after filming one night. We were told he was too sick to see us. We didn’t go and we missed out on seeing him before he passed. The sad thing is, they’d told him we were coming. He was excited that ‘the boys are comin’ to see me!’ and was very disappointed when we didn’t. If we had known, we would have stomped over people to see him. I was incredibly sad when I heard that.
His funeral knocked me over. I fell to bits. I was sitting next to Peter Weir, who was very kind to me that day. Bryan’s heartfelt eulogy just made it worse. John was fifty when he went. He was so full of life, so charismatic; he had hold of life with two hands and shook the shit out of it. Death wasn’t part of that man, death just didn’t fit and that made it harder to accept.
Boring Homes and Gardens
By the end of ’95 I was over Better Homes. It was same old, same old, week in, week out. The crew were great, everyone was fine, I was just bored and I stayed bored for four more years. If I did building work, I did it with a bloke I knew from Blackheath, Andy, a real bushy larrikin, good value on camera. He was wiry with a big bushy beard. Andy’s mate Mick, who did the metalwork, was a tough, quiet, unassuming little bushy bastard, but if you got him riled you were grabbing a snake by the head. My brother Barry did everything: masonry, stonework, bricks, blocks, concreting and landscaping.
My Greek mate Nikos, also a mountain man, did the cabinetmaking and fine carpentry. He was so funny and he didn’t know it. He was always messing his English. For instance, he had to say, ‘I’ll get you in a headlock, John,’ but instead he said ‘lockhead’.
I said to him, ‘You know the Greeks invented concrete?’
‘True?’
‘Yeah, a bloke called Con from Crete.’
‘Yeah, that make sense.’
‘Nah, I’m joking.’
‘Joking, ha, fucking actor.’
Unlike other similar shows, I didn’t pretend I could do everything. I’d work with these guys on camera. I can’t lay bricks, so my brother and I would find comedy with that. Barry’s a natural; he could have been an actor, same with Brian.
There was a show on TV called Club Buggery, starring Roy Slaven and H G Nelson, over-the-top sports commentators played by John Doyle and Greig Pickhaver. I loved them and never missed a show, so when I was asked to be a guest on Club Buggery I was over the moon. They interviewed me with great comic prowess. The secret with these shows is not to try to be funny and chances are you will be. If you try too hard they’ll eat you for breakfast. A couple of weeks later, they had Shirley Strachan on the show; he did the DIY for Our House on Channel Nine. Out of nowhere, he started having a go at me.
‘The actor, he’s not even qualified, he can’t even sharpen his carpenter’s pencil. They’re not his hands on camera, they’re other people’s hands.’
‘Are you talking about Johnny Jarratt?’
‘Yeah.’
’You wanna do a cubby build-off with him on the show?’
‘Sure!’
I was seething. This bugger was jealous because we were out-rating them. This industry is too small for any of us to have a go at each other.
The producers of the show rang me. ‘Do you want to do a cubby build-off with Shirl?’
Roy and HG are more sports-orientated, so I said, ‘I choose boxing. I’ll do three three-minute rounds with Shirl on the show.’
He declined, unfortunately.
Shortly after that, Nikos and I built a gazebo at his place in Springwood. As Shirl was the lead singer for Skyhooks, I did a very interesting closer.
‘Seeing as we’ve built a gazebo, I think it only fitting we have a quartet playing. Nikos will be the conductor.’ I handed a carpenter’s pencil to Nikos, who was dressed in a tuxedo.
‘Here’s my carefully sharpened carpenter’s pencil baton.’
I then leapt onto the deck of the gazebo, microphone in hand, backed by a four-piece rock band and sang…
If you’ve got to build a gazebo
You’ve gotta do it right
I’ve built it with my own two hands
And I think it’s dynamite.
Gazebo is not a dirty word
Gazebo is not a dirty word.
I’m told Shirl took it in good spirits and sang ‘Gaz
ebo’ on the Our House set. Shirl sadly lost his life in a plane crash in 2001. I never met him but I was a fan, and I thought he was very good on Our House. They always started their show with ‘Welcome to Our House.’ When I built an outside dunny on our show, I opened the dunny door and said, ‘Welcome to outhouse.’
They had every reason to be jealous, I suppose. We knocked them off the perch and kept winning the Logie. Channel Nine was determined to knock us off the perch. They paid good bucks for the highly anticipated Superman TV series from the States, and they decided to put Superman up against us. At the Logies that year, we won again. Noni did the big speech thanking everyone, and when she finished I leaned in to the mike and said, ‘What’s the difference between kryptonite and Better Homes and Gardens? Nothing, they’re both killing Superman.’ I was Seven owner Kerry Stokes’s best mate that night.
In the snow with my bros
In August 1996, Brian, Baz and I went on a ‘mongrel weekend’ to Mount Hotham. We stayed Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights in a caravan at Harrietville. We drove down on Friday and returned to Sydney on Monday. My brothers and I are close. We’re a close family. Barry and Brian lived at Epping for most of their twenties. When Dad went to Elanora Heights they went three ways in the building. Upstairs he built two two-bedroom flats and downstairs was a one-bedroom flat. Brian lived there on and off for fifteen years and Barry similarly for twenty. I lived nearby except for five years all up in the mountains. I have many, many stories about me and my brothers; I’ve had to steer away from many of them or this book would fill a shelf on its own. I could write a book just about them. This is just one of the gems.
We drove down in Brian’s Fairlane, a nice roomy V8. The boot was so big that all our skis fitted in. When we got to Harrietville, it was pissing down with sleet, almost snow, so we knew we’d be on fresh snow up at Hotham. We drove up and it was still snowing, so we had to put the chains on. Hotham is different to most ski fields: the resort is at the top and you ski down from there. We parked the car and kitted up in a full-on blizzard; you could hardly see 2 feet in front of you. Hotham was almost empty because of it, so we had the slopes to ourselves. We were in fresh-snow heaven. Each time we skied down we’d take it in turns to lead, so every third run you’d ski blind. That just added to the mad Irish in our blood. We skied the same chair most of the day as we’d figured out a good run. We were having a bit of a yarn, as you do.
The Bastard from the Bush: An Australian Life Page 29