Tim Shadbolt and Gary McCormick are living treasures, and not just because they have been around and doing their stuff since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. They are very funny people in a special Kiwi way.
On Saturday night, we saw them perform together at the Thistle Inn, Wellington’s oldest pub and itself a treasure. Larger than life, they held the floor for two hours of gags, anecdotes and rollicking reminiscences. They might have done it all before, but it was still a great performance that seemed impromptu and unjaded. And what a contrast they were to the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s stunning Exploring Antarctica concert, which we attended the night before at the town hall. Only in Wellington can you have cultural events of such diversity on subsequent nights, week after reliable week.
I particularly enjoyed Shadbolt, as the tall tales he told about his life and times had more than the ring of truth about them. Many of the events he reeled off actually happened. I know that for a fact, as I have written about them, and his part in them, during the course of my journalism career. It led me to believe the ones I didn’t know about might be true, too.
Some of his funniest were about Invercargill, where, of course, he is mayor. “How do you know when an Invercargill woman has an orgasm?” he asked. “When she drops her pie.” And referring to the time the Rolling Stones notoriously described Invercargill as “the arsehole of the world” (Shadbolt claimed they were stoned and were actually in Dunedin and meant that city), he told how an Invercargill city councillor actually proposed erecting a set of huge plastic buttocks above the highway leading into town, with the road passing through the orifice. But only Shadbolt supported the plan so to date it has not happened.
The one I liked the most deserves to be true. Some 40 years ago, people older than me will remember, Shadbolt, then a student protester, was arrested at Albert Park in Auckland for saying “bullshit” in public (he told Saturday night’s rapt audience it was actually for handing out jellybeans but I think that was embellishment, though his famous autobiography, soon to be republished, was called Bullshit and Jellybeans). He was sent to Mt Eden jail for his profanity, where his duties included sweeping the prison kitchen. One day, a group of trainee police cadets arrived to spend a morning in jail to see how the other half lived. This included eating a prison meal. It was a stew that day, Shadbolt recalled. While it was being cooked, an inmate squatted above the pot and defecated in it. Other inmates tipped a huge quantity of curry powder in the pot to hide the taste, and the cadets ate it.
Shadbolt and McCormick seem to be travelling the country doing this show, called A Barrel of Laughs. It was especially a barrel for us, because we had to sit at one and eat our meal from it during the show, having arrived a little too late to get a table in this small, intimate pub. But with the tickets just $25 a head, who’s complaining? Maybe Invercargill folk, if they knew what their mayor is doing, and saying, on his Saturday nights.
The Thistle Inn, at the bottom of Mulgrave St, is Wellington’s oldest pub and one of the oldest colonial-era commercial buildings in New Zealand still in daily use for its original purpose. When it was built in 1840, it was right on the harbour and so was a favourite sailors’ drinking hole. It featured in Katherine Mansfield’s scandalously erotic 1907 story Leves Amores. Recently renovated, it has a cosy gas fire for winter’s nights. Part of the main bar area’s floor is glass, allowing a view from above into a cellar that has what looks like a huge stuffed rat sitting in it among the wine bottles and discarded corks.
2 Comments
April 21, 2008 at 2:19 pm
I was at Auckland University when Tim Shadbolt was there. He was arrested many times during protests, including for handing out jellybeans to the stuffy old City Council members:
http://www.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/aup/book/big-smoke1.cfm
“Albert Park liberated Sunday 21 September, after marches on Auckland Central Police Station from Myers Park to demand civil rights. … Tim Shadbolt sentenced to four months periodic detention for distributing jellybeans and streamers to City Council members during the park liberation.”
May 30, 2008 at 6:08 am
I was fascinated to read the review involving the old Thistle Inn which was a regular watering hole of mine many years ago before refurbishing. It was a great place to meet everyone from railway workers to Government printing staff and the occasional MP such as Winston Peters. We all knew not to use a particular seat (then on the north wall before the bar was shifted) because it was reputedly Te Rauparaha’s regular seat after he escaped from being banished to the Chatham Islands. In those days a Sergeant would bring rookie policemen around twice a year to introduce them to the publican and explain that there wouldn’t be any trouble because the bar policed itself. Coming up Christmas each year the pub would barbecue a whole sheep out in the small backyard in a cutaway 44 gallon drum.
Being one of the few pakehas and the only one in a suit and tie in the bar (I was a TV news reporter at the time) I got challenged a couple of times by non-regular Maori patrons. I replied once when using the old concrete men’s urinal wall (circa 1840 ?) that if my challenger was wearing his working gear, so was I.
A young rugby league player once said to me when I walked in, “Hey pakeha, why don’t you go back where you came from”. I knew his uncle was Black Jack Stewart of the railways union so I said to the guy “Look don’t hit me but do you realise that you’re a mongrel. Where do you think your uncle got the name Stewart. One of my old Scottish grandfathers came over and poddled one of your Maori grandmothers. But don’t hit me because I’m a mongrel too. One of the Vikings came over and poddled one of my short arsed celtic grandmothers and that’s why there are tall blondish Scotsmen like me. He backed off and obviously consulted his father and uncle who were good friends of mine. He wiped under my glass the following day whether it was needed or not, we shook hands and mana was saved.