John Clarke and Bryan Dawe at the 2008 TV Week Logie Awards at Crown Casino. Credit:Justin McManus The brain is housed in that familiar, standard­-issue head that could be screwed onto a bank manager, a parish priest or, if you added a little stalk, a banana in a pyjama. The pale­-green eyes specialise in stares of penetrating gormlessness or sympathetic bewilderment, illuminated occasionally by a wild and impish gleam. The voice is flat and nasal; not commanding, but the sort of pleasant, reassuring drone that could talk you down from a tall building. All in all, they are simple and undistracting features with optional animation. Their blankness suits a performer who tends to play himself imagining what it would be like to be someone else, while remaining who he is ... Or something like that. "There are two kinds of actors," Clarke likes to say. "There are the kind who actually pretend they're other people. Like, if they're doing Hamlet, they actually pretend they're a Danish prince of that period and deeply angst-­ridden over their inability to take action to revenge their uncle having murdered the king, their father. Then there are actors who pretend other people are them. So if they're playing Hamlet, Hamlet comes from Palmerston North."

John Clarke the man behind Fred Dagg once dubbed "the thinking man's Paul Hogan". Credit:Fairfax Media That's Clarke, who was born in Palmerston North, a bleak and dreary city on New Zealand's North Island, and still carries a lot of unassuming Palmerston­-Northness with him, even though he has lived in Australia for 29 years. He arrived on the back of his alter ego Fred Dagg, sheep farmer and social commentator, but is probably best known now for television series like The Games and for his weekly satirical political "interviews" with Bryan Dawe. Clarke has been writing and performing these ludicrous renderings of political bluster for almost 20 years ­- first on A Current Affair and now on The 7.30 Report­ explaining things like T2 or sharing with the electorate the recent insight that global warming is actually a process by which the globe warms. The good sport: a keen swimmer and a diver as a schoolboy, Clarke is still described by friends as a totally natural sportsman. Credit:Simon Schluter They are what cartoonist and friend Bruce Petty calls "incoherence with huge conviction".

"Where we all do huge exaggerations, banana-­skin sort of stuff, for politicians," Petty says, "John gets right onto the edge of the code that they use. It's talking on the edge of madness with such conviction that you realise it's what half the world's decision­-makers do. It's the mechanism by which they get away with things. Bluffing." John Clarke with long-time straight man Bryan Dawe. Credit:Fairfax Media Clarke has written or co­-written ­ he's a keen collaborator and performed for film, stage, radio and TV, including The Fast Lane and The Gillies Report. He has a sharp ear for form, which means he can also turn his hand to literary pastiche and parody. In The Complete Book of Australian Verse, as John Clarke, PhD, former Professor of Comparative Relevance and one­time Reader in Extremis at Melbourne University, he demonstrated that some of the world's leading poets were in fact Australian­ bards like Fifteen Bobsworth Longfellow, Neville Shelley of Eildon, Walter Burley Yeats, Emmy­-Lou Dickinson and Sir Don Betjeman. Lately Clarke, with script editor Doug MacLeod, has completed his first stage adaptation, turning May Gibbs's Snugglepot and Cuddlepie books into a musical, The Adventures of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie and Little Ragged Blossom, for this year's Sydney Festival. It is directed by Neil Armfield, with music by Alan John.

Certain adjustments had to be made to the original text. For a start, the gumnuts needed personalities. Says Clarke: "They struck me as being a bit like those little cherubic people who blow winds in the corner of old maps." Snug and Cud, as he calls them, won't be hailed as two of the world's great dramatic figures, but the script is very jolly and sparkling, full of hilarious songs and absurd Clarke­-isms. Here are the bad Banksia Men plotting: Banksia 4: We need a plan that works and a plan that doesn't work. Banksia 2: Why do we need a plan that doesn't work? B4: So we can tell which plan to use. B2: If we only have one plan, there won't be any confusion.

B4: Too risky. It mightn't be the one that works. This way we know one of them will work ... All in all, he has proved a prodigious, unique talent, so of course we're glad to claim him as our own. Bruce Petty says there's not much John Clarke can't do. "I'm quite glad he doesn't draw, actually. If he could draw, we'd all be out of business." At the cafe, Clarke orders coffee, then remembers he hasn't had lunch, so orders soup, to be followed at home soon afterwards by tea, the mild beverages of a man who no longer drinks as heavily as he once did. He manages to talk as he eats. Clarke is a good listener but a famously good talker, subject no object. He has literary passions, often for Irish masters of form and rhythm and wit, like Samuel Beckett, novelist Flann O'Brien, poet Seamus Heaney. And, being of Irish descent himself, he loves to tell stories, including stories about Beckett, O'Brien and Heaney. (One of his favourite Heaney anecdotes has the Irish poet at the 1994 Melbourne Writers' Festival, sitting on a panel about religious poetry. "There were some clergy there," Clarke says, "and perhaps they thought Heaney was the full­-forward for their side and would kick a few goals. In the question time, one of the priests got up and said, 'Can I ask Seamus Heaney how he would describe religious poetry?'

"Seamus leant into the microphone as if he was at a House Un­American Activities Committee hearing and said, 'Reli-­jus po-­etry ... is that po-­etry ... in which the exclamatory particle 'O' figures considerably.' ") Then again, Clarke is just as likely to be interested in something the garbo said to him the other day. His discourses are discursive. His phone calls are legendary. Bryan Dawe claims once to have had a 3 ½ ­day conversation with him. Gina Riley, of Kath & Kim fame, first met Clarke when he rang after seeing her in Big Girl's Blouse. They spoke for more than an hour, in which time, she says, "he was terribly flattering and nice". "He does like a chat," Riley confirms. "He can fill up three bits of your answering machine. You know: beep, 'Sorry about that, just got one more thing...'; beep, 'Sorry, I got cut off again...'; beep, 'Just to finish...'"

Nobody minds because he is such engaging company and, as one friend says, you can always put the receiver to one side, do a few chores and come back. Says Riley: "He's not all saint. He has got a really wicked sense of humour. And the great thing about him is that while he makes everybody laugh, he's desperate for you to make him laugh, too. He's the most generous person I've ever worked with. Both at work and away from it, he's very aware of letting everyone else shine. No, he doesn't talk over the top of people ... Hard for you to butt in though, once he's on a roll." There are few subjects Clarke isn't prepared to mine. The exception seems to be certain aspects of John Clarke. I had interviewed him previously, more than a decade ago, and then as now he had shown a highly evolved skill for leading interviewers off the trail. He distracts with amusing stories and original thoughts, dazzles with an extraordinary gift of phrase, and delights in reducing you to helpless laughter. Before you know it, you have hours of tape with lots of diverting smoke and little in the way of personal revelation. Even some of his close friends say he is a contained man about some matters. Comedy writer and performer Rob Sitch, who regards Clarke as one of his mentors, suspects the lack of confessional detail and "poor-­me-­ness" is something of a Kiwi characteristic: "Among that lot, it seems to be a bit of a crime to talk about yourself on too deep a level, as if it's indulgent, or they're taking up your time. They might feel melancholy but they would divide it by 10 before they told you. You know, they could lose their family and call it 'a bit of bother'."

In Clarke's case, perhaps, the reticence flows from painful events in his childhood he has papered over and prefers to keep from public view. Clarke's father was a businessman who worked for a chain store. His mother was an amateur actor and a writer. They met in Italy during World War II, where she was in the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps and he was in an anti­tank unit. (Clarke later relates a story about American troops arriving in Trieste after the New Zealanders had done most of the fighting. The Americans marched through the town carrying a banner that read "US Army ­Second to None". The New Zealanders marched behind with their own banner: "None.") John was born five years after his parents met, and a sister followed. Back at his large, shadowy terrace in Fitzroy, where he has made tea, I ask him about his early years and how he got along with his father. He glances at the floor, as if hoping to find an escape hatch there, and lets out a long, strangled breath somewhere between a groan and a sigh. The man who has so much to say falls oddly silent. "I'd have to tell an enormous story," he says finally, "which I don't wish to, and it would only be my version." His elderly parents are still alive, he says, and he doesn't want to upset them. Relations have mellowed over time and a certain peace has been brokered, although it wasn't always so.

But what sort of household was it? One of those funny ones? "No, ours was not like that." His parents' marriage, he allows, was unhappy, although it staggered on, as they so often did then "for the sake of the children", until he was in his 20s. His discretion stops him from saying so, but there is the sense that John bore the brunt of much of his father's displeasure. Did the marital troubles affect him? "Probably. Yes," he says, his voice slow and cautious. "I was aware of the tensions. But things that were happening to me when I was quite young are things that are so ..."

He pauses and tries again. "Developing ways of dealing with that are probably so deeply embedded in the personality you develop ... As Louis MacNeice said, 'the woven figure cannot undo its thread'. "The line preceding it in MacNeice's lovely poem Valediction: "But I cannot deny my past to which my self is wed". Later, on another day, we talk about the defences children erect to protect themselves from wretchedness at home, and how they can be carried, mistakenly, into adulthood. "For a long time you think of them as strengths," Clarke observes. "Then you see that they're not. They're interfering with your relationships. "Imagine you have spent a lot of time running from tigers when you were young. At some point in later life you realise they're not chasing you any more. You realise you don't need to keep smearing yourself with anti­-tiger cream."

He laughs, but he is clearly uncomfortable talking in detail about the subject. Clarke was a sporty boy who excelled at swimming and was a champion diver. He still loves to swim and to play golf. At 58, he has the square shoulders and dense frame of an athletic man. Robyn Williams, from ABC Radio's The Science Show, has known the satirist for decades. Many years ago, the Williamses invited the Clarkes to join them on holiday at Mount Eliza, on the Mornington Peninsula. Says Williams: "We discovered there was a nude beach nearby. So we'd go there with the family and there'd be the kids and all of us and a whole lot of naked people playing volleyball, and there would be John Clarke, stark bollock naked apart from a bowler hat, doing Frisbee moves that would almost slice your legs off. He's a totally natural sportsman. His reflexes are unbelievable, he's superbly co­ordinated. He could also stand there with his bowler hat on and exposed to the elements with the most amazing aplomb." (Clarke chortles when he hears of Williams' account: "Yes, imagine that," he says. "You invite someone for a holiday and the first thing you do is take them to a nudist beach.")

Bruce Petty, who directed Clarke and Ross Stevenson's play A Royal Commission into the Australian Economy, remembers him doing handstands during rehearsals and walking around upside down ­clothed, of course. Clarke was happy at primary school, mostly miserable at high school. "I was a refusenik, a bit of a rebel. I didn't like the school or anything about it. It all ended in tears." He wasn't exactly expelled but "I had an early shower, as they say when you get sent off the field. I was asked to move on. I hadn't done anything terrible. In those days, it was your 'attitude', this non­specific thing that was apparently an enormous threat to all the known structures." Clarke joined a shearing gang for several months after he left school, believing he'd lost his scholarship to university. He hadn't and so he went, although he never finished his degree. Instead, he fell hopelessly in love with performing. "I was studying arts with law, then arts without law, and then arts without arts. I was acutely ill-equipped to go to university. I was completely unstructured and all over the place and very confused. The thing I latched onto were these fantastic people I met. They were clever and talented and multi­lingual and they could play instruments. It was fantastic for me. I couldn't get in the swimming pool fast enough."

His time in the shearing sheds helped inspire his great comic creation Fred Dagg, the bucolic intellectual who holds forth in gumboots and singlet on anything from car maintenance to the "non-nuclear risk" (the risk of dying peacefully in old age instead of swiftly in a nuclear mishap), from the Socratic paradox to writing a novel: The first thing to decide is what sort of novelist you'd like to be: a tall novelist, a short novelist or a novelist of medium stature, a modern novelist, a neo-classicist or a pastoral stream­-of­-consciousness gothic feminist. And once you've made this decision, you're halfway there really. Next, of course, you've got to sit down and pound out your actual novel, beginning each new sentence with a capital and numbering the pages very carefully. There's nothing more frustrating to the reader than getting right through a novel and then discovering that it was read in completely the wrong order. Clarke's father hated Dagg. He thought the character was crude, parochial and would never get anywhere. "But he was wrong," Clarke says crisply. He carried on regardless. "Quite early on I was my own project. It's a product of coming out of a background where your parents aren't going so well."

Perhaps it also explains why a small moment in his youth meant so much. In 1972 in London, Clarke appeared as a "glorified extra" in The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, written by Barry Humphries. In his brief appearance, Clarke managed to make a small but inspired gesture (farewelling Bazza with his index finger while continuing to drain a beer) that caught the eye of director Bruce Beresford. "I can't remember doing anything in particular," says Clarke, "but afterwards, Bruce Beresford, Barry Crocker and Barry Humphries took me aside and said something like, 'You ought to be doing this', meaning, I suppose, being amusing, performing ... 'Don't worry about the money, don't stop doing it because you can't making a living out of it.' "To encourage somebody, especially if they're a bit confused and don't know what they're doing, is a wonderful thing. In their case, it was not only a great kindness, it was kind of a secret I held in my head. I didn't tell anybody, but I can't tell you how good it was sometimes when I'd be thinking, 'I'm never going to be able to do this.' Instead, I'd think, 'Just relax, sooner or later something might go my way.' "I was just a young drunk in London, and here they were taking an interest in me." Of course, he wasn't alone in epic drinking. At that time, clever young drunks were thick on the ground, if not insensible on the ground. There were leagues of them in London's creative circles, and they included people like Clive James, Barry Humphries and Peter Cook.

Says Clarke: "The culture was full of it. And if you see a whole lot of people having fun while drinking, it's easy to think drinking is the source of the fun. I knew it was a mistake but that didn't stop me from making it." In London around the same time, Clarke met his Australian wife, Helen McDonald, a sloe-­eyed beauty of serious intellect. She and Clarke have been married for more than three decades and have two adult daughters. McDonald is now a respected art historian and curator. Unlike many antipodeans who went to Europe in the '60s and '70s, Clarke never wanted to stay. He lived in France and Greece for a while, which only confirmed his sense that he didn't belong there. Real life for him lay in wait at "the bottom right­-hand corner of the world". He has not been back since, partly because he dislikes flying ­- the legacy of a flight from Hong Kong to India that hurtled through a monsoon before crash­landing at Delhi ­- and partly because he can't see the point of travel or looking at medieval churches when you could be home. "I always think it's better to have a good idea than go somewhere.

"There was a sign up all over the place during the war when they were husbanding resources that said: 'Is your journey really necessary?' Then, after the war, travel was commodified and suddenly there were signs: 'Have you been to South America? Go there ... Today!' "Given the environmental issues currently under discussion, 'Is your journey really necessary?' should be revived. Psychologically, I've always found it quite a good guide." Around 1973, Clarke left London to return to New Zealand and Fred Dagg. The character became a fixture on television there, and assumed cult status in Australia in the late 1970s when Robyn Williams and Bob Hudson invited Clarke to do ABC radio spots. Williams recalls, "One of the early pieces we did was about whether Communism was infectious, and whether it was exacerbated by eating red foods like tomatoes or strawberries. We found that it was." In New Zealand, Clarke had had a job at the Broadcasting Commission as a film assessor. In the days before video, it meant he and his friends were the only people in the country who could view programs more than once.

"When it rained, as it frequently did in Wellington, a couple of friends of mine and I would go down and we would watch all of the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore series. I must have seen them 50 times. All of the Alan Bennett series. I can still recite huge tracts of On the Margin." In time, Clarke came to work with many of the people he admired. Peter Cook, for instance. They did a stage show together, became friends and often played golf. "He was a pretty good golfer on a good day," Clarke says, "although the day would be completely formless. If you finished playing the sixth hole, he wouldn't necessarily proceed to the seventh. He'd proceed to what he thought might be the seventh and it might be the 15th, so we'd be playing into another group of people." Cook, he acknowledges, was often brought low by the alcoholism that led to his death at 57, but it never drowned his genius.

"Even when he was ill, he was tremendously funny. I got a message one time to ring him ­ he was in a hotel in north Queensland ­ and I rang but his wife said he wasn't well, so I said I'd ring back later. Then I heard Peter in the background and he came on the phone." Clarke puts on a low English growl for Cook's half of the conversation: "'Hello.' 'It's John, Peter,' I said, 'I hear you're not terribly well.' He said, 'No, I'm not terribly well. Got the flu.' 'Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.' "'Also,' he said, perking up slightly because we were having a conversation, 'also, when we got back to the hotel last night, I had a drink at the bar and then I was coming back to the room and I cut across the tennis courts and I must have activated the tennis ball serving machine, because I was quite suddenly struck by many thousands of tennis balls.'" Humorists are often asked to name their influences. John Clarke says if you looked at his early work, you'd see the hand of Spike Milligan, but also the gentle wit of his own uncles. He remembers taking his children as youngsters to meet his famous Uncle Ernie, having told them what a funny man he was. Says Clarke: "We got in the car after the visit and I said to them, 'So, what did Uncle Ernie say? Did he say anything funny?'

"'No,' they said, 'he just took us round the garden.' "'So he didn't say anything funny?' "'No, he just showed us how he'd made all the plants grow towards the sun, how he'd even made one come around a corner.' "That vein of "deadpan mischief" still runs through Clarke's work. He likes humour to creep up in carpet slippers, "a sort of secret between the people who get it". Even in his political satire, he excels in a sort of lethal reasonableness.

Says Robyn Williams: "Quite a few comedians are willing to be vicious. Never have I seen John Clarke do that sort of thing. It's always something wonderfully subtle. He's being pointed ­ he's not soppy about this stuff ­ but he's got enough in his lexicon to wipe you off the face of the map, if need be, without anyone seeing blood." "It's always seemed to me," Clarke says, "that the best way to point out the flaws in an argument is not to go, 'There's the flaw in your argument.' It's to go, 'I know this argument and there's nothing the matter with it. I will now demonstrate ... whoops, I seem to have fallen over...'" In between all his other projects, and one­-off works like Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, Clarke intends to continue writing and performing the popular 7.30 Report spots. Let's hope he can. More than once he makes the point that they are about political ideas, not attacks on particular personalities. It's a distinction he and others may have to keep stressing as the new ABC "anti­bias" machine powers up and the political climate risks confusing satire with sedition. They seem safe for now, but does he fear the interviews will come under further scrutiny? He takes a sip of his tea and delivers one of his poker stares.

"No, I'm at the ABC to provide balance." First published in Good Weekend on December 9, 2006