Early in 1970, when we were about 20 or 21, John Banas, Ginette McDonald, Paul Holmes and I generated a series of late night comic shows at Downstage Theatre, which then occupied the upstairs floor of a boating club. Our shows were presented on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights after the main play had finished. We built an audience quite quickly and we wrote and added new material about every 4-6 weeks to keep them coming back. Some of the sketches parodied film and television but were filled with references to New Zealand life and politics; ‘The News in Briefs’ for example, which featured Holmes in his underpants reading the news and which the audience loved, was full of standard sketch material but with scurrilous references to prominent locals.
Holmes was a likeable and rather naughty boy from Hastings. I arrived to pick him up one night before the show. He was working as a waiter at a place in Oriental Bay and we were running a bit late and Holmes whipped a bloke’s coffee cup away from him in his haste to clean up and leave. ‘Hang on a minute’ said the bloke. ‘There’s still coffee in that.’ Holmes slapped the cup back down again and glared at the bloke. ‘Well fuckin drink it’ he advised.
Paul and I had grown up with a lot of the same sounds in our ears and he was a particularly keen observer of the cadence and idioms in local radio. If you asked him the time he’d look at his watch, lower his voice slightly and say ‘It’s Firestone Tyres time 4.26 Clarkie. Firestone. Where the rubber meets the road.’ John, Ginette and Paul were young Turks in the Downstage acting company but acting wasn’t really what Paul wanted to do. He really wanted to be a radio. His special forte was racing commentators. In a previous show I’d written a piece for myself to do as Peter Kelly and had established to my own satisfaction that it resonated with an audience and that racing and its language and associations worked as metaphor. When I met Paul I saw that he didn’t do just Peter Kelly, he did Syd Tonks and Dave Clarkson as well and could confect a broadcast as all three of them. We would sometimes do this together, in pubs. We’d get an empty jug each (try this yourself; it’s better into an empty jug) and we’d make up a race call, crossing to each other when we needed a break. Paul’s favourite race was Peter Kelly’s call of the 1970 Wellington Cup and he’d generally wind up with ‘….and with three great strides Il Tempo will take the 1970 Wellington Cup…..’ and the rest would be lost in delight and general uproar in the bar.
When I wrote a Kelly piece in those days I gave it to Paul to perform. He did them superbly. He would disappear into their rhythm, adding little flourishes and including people he saw in the room as part of the race-day atmosphere. It was a piece of idiosyncratic magic and was a joy to watch. The audience loved the sound. It was the sound of New Zealand on a Saturday.
That winter, we were asked to provide the mid-evening entertainment for the annual ball at Chateau Tongariro. We tailored the show for the crowd, lacing it with references to Griff Bristed and Grady Thompson and other citizens among the snow community. We had to make do with a very small rostrum for a stage and we changed behind a screen. There was nowhere else to go and as the lights dimmed we might have been Christians at the Coliseum. The crowd was very large and had been engaged in rutting rituals and wassail.
From the outset the show went beautifully and Holmes doing Peter Kelly was a sensation. When he finished the racing commentary the crowd lifted the roof off. We looked at each other as they roared and whooped and it was pretty clear that he should repeat it immediately, in its entirety, which he happily did. The response was even greater this time because Holmes now relished something he knew was working and he eased the throttle open and gave it the herbs. The crowd went nuts again when he finished and after we completed the show he moved away to the bar and did it a third time.
We were all feted afterwards but Holmes was the genius of the night and he was never the same again. He didn’t go to bed that night and he didn’t stop talking as Peter Kelly for the whole rest of our time at the Chateau. He couldn’t stop doing the thing they loved. He was captured by the audience’s love for what he was doing and an addiction was born. Holmes could giggle about how silly it all was but these were the first steps towards a towering need and towards a belief that if you get the voice right, it doesn’t much matter what you’re saying. My very fond memory of Paul tells me he didn’t always agree with this rather dangerous proposition. He was a good fellow and a very gifted natural performer. He was full of affection for others, loved every bit of his life and at his best he was magnificent. We’ll miss him.
Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own:
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
Be fair or foul, or rain or shine
The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.
Not Heaven itself, upon the past has power,
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.
-Horace