(Unfortunately, the YouTube videos linked are blocked on third-party websites, but readers can click to watch them on the YouTube site.)
Boomers like to brag that the 60s was a time of social change, which is true enough, but the 60s don’t hold a candle to the staggering social changes of the post-2000s. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been change for the better.
Nowhere is the change for the worst more obvious than in comedy. Lenny Bruce made a career out of being deliberately offensive — before he was crushed by the outraged pearl-clutchers. Sixty years later, being offensive is even more of a crime for a comedian. Even what was innocuous just two decades ago, like Seinfeld or Friends, is now “problematic” and “offensive”. Mel Brooks admits he’d never get Blazing Saddles green-lit today.
If cat’s-bum-mouthed millennials are “offended” by Seinfeld, they’d have been driven screaming from the room by Hey, Hey, It’s Saturday, and especially its voice-over man, John Blackman.
Blackman’s passing this week marks the end of an era in Australian culture. The knockabout, larrikin television culture that brought us the likes of Graham Kennedy, who famously outraged TV execs with his on-air crow impersonation (“Faaaaaarrkkkkkkkk!”), as well as The Naked Vicar, and so much more, has come to an end.
Although it apparently aired on late, late night NZ TV in the early 90s, BFD readers will probably mostly only know of Hey, Hey from some references in the great movie comedy, The Castle, but for nearly three decades, this weird variety show dominated Australian television. Like all the great TV comedies of Australian television from the 60s and 70s, it was a wild free-for-all of ad-lib, anything-goes impudence, and thinly disguised ribaldry.
And few did it better than John Blackman.
“Blackers” was an omnipresent Voice, rarely seen, but always heard, whether it was on the radio or TV with Hey, Hey. Blackman’s role on Hey, Hey was ad-libbed, voice-over commentary. Often delivered through a series of cheap prop characters, whether it was a floating Christmas Angel, Alfred the Desk Mike, Doctor Ben Dover, or “Mrs Mac”, a hideous old hag with a raspy voice. But his most famous character was undoubtedly “Dickie Knee” — a polystyrene ball on a stick, only ever seen from behind, with a black curly wig and a schoolboy cap.
Hey, Hey was a perfect vehicle for Blackman, whose quick wit, larrikin vitality and resonant baritone, won over audiences as he effortlessly riffed on the show, often ribbing celebrity guests mercilessly. He denied being cruel or, to use modern parlance, “punching down”. Instead, he described his style as schoolboy naughtiness. As for “offence”: “if you make a joke, you’ll always offend someone”.
“I’m a comedy sniper,” he said. “Just waiting for my chance to go ‘bang’.”
One person who claimed, albeit belatedly, to be offended was Sri Lankan-born singer, Kamahl. A regular guest on Hey, Hey, Kamahl said in 2021 that he had been humiliated by “racist jokes” the show made at his expense. Blackman shot back that perhaps Kamahl, who was a mega-star in Australia, should have spoken up at the time. “Goodness me Kamahl,” Blackman wrote on Twitter. “37 years and you’re still humiliated”.
In another segment which was resurrected to woke outrage a few years ago, host Daryl Somers donned brown makeup to duet What A Wonderful World alongside regular guest, Kiwi singer Ricky May.
Although Blackman long dominated Melbourne radio, Hey, Hey, it’s Saturday was the perfect vehicle. Frankly, one of the most surreal experiments in television history, Hey, Hey started in 1971 as a Saturday morning children’s show, consisting mostly of cartoons, with host Daryl Somers and his sidekick, puppet bird Ossie Ostrich (Ernie Carroll), providing intro and outro commentary.
The fact that the show was so disregarded by TV execs gave them enormous freedom. They were able to expand the comedic aspects of the show, eventually leading to phasing out the cartoons altogether. What resulted was an odd chimaera of children’s and variety TV. A mix of the Marx Brothers, vaudeville, the Goons, and Johnny Carson.
Much of the show was ad-libbed and heavily laced with double-entendres, which attracted a cult following among older viewers and kept its core audience’s loyalty as the kids aged into teenagers able to appreciate the thinly disguised adult humour.
By the early 80s, they dropped even the pretence of children’s TV and moved the show to a Saturday night slot. For young adults of the era, it became a Saturday night ritual to watch the show before heading out for a night of grown-up partying.
At the heart of the often chaotic goings-on was John Blackman.
Blackman was one of the hardest workers in the business, a working-class kid who started working as a kid and left school at 16. Like Kenny Everett, he attributed his lightning wit to childhood bullying. “The easiest way of avoiding getting bashed up was to make the bullies laugh.”
After a marriage at the age of 19 that lasted five years, Blackman met his second wife, Cecile at a party in Canberra in 1970, saying later: “It was almost love at first sight.” The couple married in 1972 and had a daughter, Tiffany, born prematurely in 1974. The oxygen treatment required to keep her alive was subsequently revealed to have irreparably damaged her vision.
Blackman in later years had a string of health problems of his own, no doubt brought on in large part by his long-term heavy smoking. A seizure in 2007 led to a brain tumour being removed, and in 2018, he was diagnosed with cancer. The man whose voice was his life developed an aggressive basal-cell carcinoma on his chin that spread to his jaw. He underwent surgery to remove his lower jaw, replacing it with bone taken from his leg. In mid-2022, he announced a new diagnosis of bone cancer at the top of his head. After surgery in May, he was scheduled to start radiotherapy.
Blackman died of a heart attack on 4 June, 2024.
He is survived by his wife and daughter. Unfortunately, the larrikin Aussie comedy he so personified seems unlikely to survive in today’s culture.
