Impractical Jokes
CHARLIE
PICKERING
Impractical Jokes
First published in 2010
Copyright © Charlie Pickering 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
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ISBN 978 1 74175 726 2
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Contents
Prologue
1 THE GENERALS
Part 1: Ronald Leonard Pickering
2 THE GENERALS
Part 2: Richard Opie
3 A Shot Heard Around the Restaurant
4 Behind Enemy Lines
5 Codename: Poodle
6 Flinders
7 Misinformation, Disinformation and Goddamned Lies
8 Trouble in the Pacific Theatre
9 A Tale of Two Toilets
10 The Winter Campaign of 1991
11 Must Have Good Sense of Humour
12 A Full-sized Gavin Wanganeen
13 Operation Lovely Rita—Part 1
14 Operation Lovely Rita—Part 2
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
For my family
Prologue
I used to think I was raised by television. Like so many of my generation, language, attitudes and a world view came from infinite re-runs of Family Ties, Alf and, to a lesser extent, Punky Brewster. Later, as we grew up, The Simpsons set that in stone. Our dads all became Homer Simpson, lovable buffoons whose flaws were made acceptable through familiarity. Through my twenties this continued to be how I saw my father, until in 2007 I sat down to write a show for the Melbourne Comedy Festival and decided to tell the story that had entertained friends the night before at the pub.
This is my family’s favourite story. Every Christmas, after a few bottles of wine, we end up telling it again. Even though we all lived through it; even though we all know how it goes; even though we’ve told it to each other more times than we can count, it never stops being funny. If anything, it just gets funnier.
That’s because this story is my family. The chain of events that began with my dad being pushed into a pool and proceeded, on a few occasions, to almost cost us our lives, sounds borderline insane. But to me, it’s what makes a Pickering a Pickering. Growing up, these adventures taught me that no matter what happens, a good laugh is the most important thing in the world. Indeed, all Pickerings are comedians; I was just the first one to turn pro.
Until I started telling this story to people outside my family, I’d always thought that my father and I were very different people. Sure, we both like Steve McQueen, ’66 Mustang convertibles and beef, but that’s really just the unspoken bond of all men. Like menschkeit, but less spiritual and complicated. And even though my father likes Carey Grant and so do I, we’re still very different. He’s semi-formal, I’m smart casual. You see? Different. Like cheese and an altogether different variety of cheese.
I have often read about fathers’ desires for their sons to follow in their footsteps. Generations of accountants, builders, senators and oil men handing down a living from father to son; hoping, in some way, for an immortality born of replication. While I understand all that kind of malarkey, it isn’t analogous with my experience. If anything, my father made it perfectly clear that if I were to become a pharmacist like him he would have been very disappointed. This isn’t because he didn’t respect his own profession—far from it. He was a remarkably good pharmacist, a self-taught businessman who believed the only way of doing a job was doing it properly. Over a period of many, many years he made people’s lives better and I know that is a thing he is proud of. It was just that more often than not the best part of his working day was the glass of wine he had when he got home from work and he didn’t really want that for me.
But without realising it at the time, my dad gave me my career. He was the one that played a video of The Party to me on an almost weekly basis from about the age of eight. He is the one who gave me a Derek and Clive record with the warning that I would never be the same again. And he was the one who taught me that unless you were living the joke, then you were really missing out on something.
I remember the day I told my parents that I had quit my job at a law firm to become a comedian. My mother went silent. After a three-minute pause that seemed like an hour she began washing dishes in the kitchen sink, occasionally pausing to look out the window into the garden and sigh. Ever-practical, my dad just wanted to know how the hell I was going to make a living. I think he quickly realised the unavoidable truth that I wasn’t the only one who was going to be making sacrifices to achieve my dream.
In fact, I really wasn’t going to be the one making sacrifices at all. I moved back home, leant on them heavily for emotional and financial support, and pretty much reverted to being the oversleeping night owl I’d been throughout university; chain smoking in the back garden and claiming I couldn’t possibly do housework because I was wrestling with big ideas that just had to get out. To their enormous credit they accepted that this was just what I’d decided to do. Pretty soon they started finding funny articles in the newspaper that they thought I should talk about on stage; they came to every show I ever did at the Melbourne Comedy Festival and gradually made my dreams theirs.
The first time I performed this story live, my dad was in the audience. At the end of the show, he and his best mate, Richard, stood to take a bow and received a standing ovation. They soaked it up like an applause-hungry vaudevillian double act, but to say that my dad had the biggest smile he’s ever had would be a lie. He had the same smile I had seen on him every time we played a joke on someone. And it was the same smile he wore whenever anyone played a good joke on him.
By the time I had told this story on stage in Melbourne every night for a month, then around the country and the world at other festivals, I realised that everything I thought about my childhood had been wrong. I was not raised by TV, or Homer Simpson for that matter; I was raised by my family without even knowing it.
1
THE GENERALS
Part 1: Ronald Leonard Pickering
Let me tell you about my dad.
He could be described as a pharmacist, a dog lover or the only person I know of to be blessed by Mother Teresa against his will. But he is best described as the man who loves a joke more than anyone else in the world. It’s his defining characteristic. How he came to be the best practical joker in the world was decades in the making.
Dad grew up in Footscray in the western suburbs of Melbourne. These days Footscray is undergoing something of a resurgence, with rising property values, declining crime rates and a burgeoning restaurant scene worthy of its multicul
tural community. But the post-war Footscray of my dad’s black and white memories was a very different place. For nearly a hundred years this town on the banks of Salt Water River was the epicentre of Melbourne’s brick-baking, meat-canning, fat-boiling and candle-making industries. It was the kind of suburb that terms like ‘working class’ and ‘industrial’ were invented for. And in amongst it all lived my dad, Ron, his mother, Wilma, and his grandma, Grandma.
Tired of his roving eye, Wilma had left her husband when Dad was about four. She worked hard to support the two of them but, as is often the case, that wasn’t always enough. With no father figure to show him how, Dad did what he could to help. He slept in a lean-to to make his bedroom available for boarders, he did odd jobs around the neighbourhood and made his own fun. The winters were cold, money was tight and times were not particularly forgiving. This combination could easily make a person mean. In my dad’s case it made him resourceful.
Sodality Sunday was the monthly roll call at Dad’s local Catholic parish of St Monica’s. For three Sundays a month it was possible for the less pious members of the congregation to simply say they’d been to mass, when actually they’d been playing hooky; no doubt drinking, smoking and committing other sins they would probably have known not to do had they been attending mass more often. But on Sodality Sunday you had to front up and get your name ticked off the register. This involved all the parishioners queuing up at the door of the church and on their way into mass, one by one, filing past an altar boy with a clipboard. For years Dad watched this procession until one Sunday, at the age of ten, the penny dropped and he realised three things. First, it was always the same altar boy, second, that clipboard held enormous power, and third, he wanted that job.
You see, when Dad was about five he once overheard one of his mother’s boarders say rather loudly over a longneck, ‘Wherever you find gambling, you’ll find Catholics!’ For years it hadn’t made any sense to Dad. Surely wherever you found gambling, you found a lot of other denominations as well. And surely what you found most of was gamblers. Perhaps because he had trouble understanding it, the phrase had stuck with him. By the age of ten he was a man of the world and had a far better idea of its people. And though not all gamblers were Catholic, and vice versa, he could see for himself that for some of the more truant of the flock, Sodality Sunday was the only Sunday they weren’t gambling.
Mr Ayre was the local SP bookie. SP stands for ‘starting price’, which pretty much means you can bet on any race anywhere. At the time, concepts like phone betting and TAB internet accounts were a long way off and it was against the law to take racing bets anywhere but at the track. Which is to say that Mr Ayre’s business was completely illegal. Which is to say, business was booming.
After applying to be the keeper of the clipboard, and being successful, Dad walked into Mr Ayre’s place with a proposition.
‘I want to talk to you about Sodality Sunday, Mr Ayre.’
‘What about it, young Ron? It’s a dead bloody day for me. I may as well be in church myself.’
‘What if it was busier, Mr Ayre?’
‘How is it going to get busier, Ron? Everyone’s busy getting ticked off the list.’
‘Well, I run the roll now at St Monica’s. And I was thinking that for a shilling or two I could get people’s Saturday winnings to them on a Sunday morning. And if they had that money with them then, they might even want to place a bet with you Sunday after mass.’
‘That is the best idea I’ve heard since getting little men to jump on horses and race around a track.’
And with that, my ten-year-old father began running the Sodality Sunday book out of St Monica’s. And by not telling any of the fold that he was on Mr Ayre’s payroll, Dad would earn an extra few shillings in tips when someone won big. His mum didn’t have a problem with it because it was bringing in more money. His grandma didn’t have a problem with it because she could now place bets on Sodality Sunday. And Mr Ayre was ecstatic.
‘How did you think of this, young Ron?’
‘Wherever you find gambling, you’ll find Cath’licks, Mr Ayre.’
My father worked in his first pharmacy in his early twenties. It was as a trainee at Roger James’ shop in the suburb of Sunshine. When Dad joined the staff, the store was new and still building its clientele. That is to say the only staff on duty were Roger and my dad and their day was only interrupted by a customer about once every three hours. Sometimes these customers would buy something, other times they were just asking for directions to the train station. Dad had the theory that if they put up a sign in the front of the shop with directions to the station, they could cut down their interruptions by half. It was an idea he kept to himself. He figured that if he brought any unnecessary attention to the shop’s lack of traffic Roger may come to his senses and realise there was no commercial justification for having an assistant. Dad stuck, instead, to making sure they had plenty of activities to fill the customerless hours.
I don’t know many things in life to be absolutely true, however there is one certainty in this world of which I am sure: two men when left alone for any length of time will invent a game. It’s just what they are programmed to do. I once walked into an all-night bottle shop at one in the morning to find the two guys who worked there standing at either end of the wine aisle, frozen as though they had been sprung in the middle of some nefarious act. One of them held a piece of paper that had been scrunched up into a ball and wrapped in sellotape. The other had his hand on his hip in a pose best described as ‘half a teapot’. I took one look at the situation and knew instantly what was going on. I let the awkward silence hang just a second longer than necessary before I broke the tension.
‘Shooting hoops?’
‘Yep.’
‘What’s the score?’
‘7–6’
‘Wow, it’s close.’
‘Yep.’
‘Carry on.’
Three years later I walked into an off-licence in Dublin. Two men were standing in exactly the same stunned positions. This time, while one held a paper ball, the other stood looking at the floor between them. There in the aisle was a large black marker standing on its end, clearly the target.
‘What’s the score?’
‘Nil all.’
‘Low score.’
‘Yeah, it’s bloody hard to hit.’
‘Have you thought of just making a hoop?’
The rule of game invention was true of Roger James and my dad, and for them it involved playing Combat!
Combat! was the name of a popular World War Two television drama in the sixties. It followed a band of US soldiers fighting their way through France giving Germans hell. Rick Jason and Vic Morrow were likeable roustabout leads and the show’s action credentials were made very clear in the opening credits, where the exclamation mark in the title was in the shape of a bayonet.
Around the height of the show’s popularity, my dad came into work one morning brandishing a slug gun, capable of shooting ball-bearings at high speeds at the crows and magpies that had been terrorising his mother and grandmother. Roger inspected the weapon, commented on its sturdiness and construction, before resuming his regular position of serving absolutely no customers whatsoever. Four transaction-free hours later, Dad, Roger and the slug gun were out the back of the shop. They’d lined up six faulty cans of L’Amour hairspray, a locally manufactured hair lacquer whose quality control procedures were about as legitimate as its French heritage—about one in four cans failed to work. This would have been a great inconvenience had they not made such outstanding targets for Combat! (or had there actually been anyone wanting to buy them).
Still dressed in their white pharmacist jackets, Roger and Dad would take turns leaping out into the alleyway and yelling, ‘Take that you lousy kraut!’ before blazing away at the tins. Combat! rapidly became their time-waster of choice and it would be played every day without fail. The only tricky part of the whole game was when Bruce Green, the L’Amour rep, would
come around to collect the faulty cans which were then peppered with bullet holes.
A few doors down from Roger’s chemist was Bradman’s department store, owned by the then Lord Mayor of Melbourne. He would occasionally check on his investment, parking behind the store in his black Jag, registration LM1, and, flanked by two security guards, entering via the tradesman’s entrance. Most people in the neighbourhood thought that the lord mayor having his own secret service detail was a bit of overkill, given that nobody in history had ever made an attempt on the life of a lord mayor. Or at least that’s what they thought until one afternoon when, just as the mayor was getting out of his Jag, Roger leapt around the corner brandishing a pistol.
‘Take that you lousy kraut!’
‘Don’t shoot!’
‘Shit! Sorry!’
The security snapped into action. They bundled the lord mayor into the car and sped away, collecting a few rubbish bins as they screeched around the corner. Within an hour, the local constabulary were making their way door to door, canvassing for witnesses to the bungled assassination attempt. They walked into the pharmacy, where Dad and Roger were busy pretending to file receipts.
‘Did you see anyone around here with a gun?’
‘Nope. Haven’t seen anything,’ said Roger. My dad backed him up.
‘We’ve been too flat out with customers.’
After graduating, Dad bought a small pharmacy in partnership with Peter, another pharmacist he had met in the final year of college. The men didn’t know each other that well. In fact, all they really knew of each other was that they were both pharmacists and both had exactly half the money needed to go into business with the other.
The partnership began well for Peter and Dad. The novelty of a new colleague and the pride of owning their own business made the first few days exciting and fun. This initial momentum was helped along by a procession of eccentric local customers who provided no end of entertainment. There was old Mrs Stevens who never bought a thing but would come in at eleven-thirty on the dot to sit down and have a rest on her way to bingo. Then there was Mr Pappas, perpetually complaining about the ‘blardy garment’, but when pushed for specifics was unable to name which party or level of ‘blardy garment’ he was talking about. And then there was the dynamic duo of Mrs Mackilroy and her mature-aged, developmentally-challenged son, Maurice. She had a short-term memory that would make goldfish look gifted, while he found it infinitely funny that his mum was utterly incapable of getting Dad’s name right.
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