Everyone involved in Doug MacLeod’s comedy show about advertising, Campaign, should resign, journalist Bruce Elder once declared.
‘‘It was the worst review of my life,’’ MacLeod says. But it was not the only reason he decided to shelve his television career to write children’s books full-time.
One of the luminaries of Australian television, MacLeod has had a hand in some of the country’s best-loved programs including The Comedy Company, Full Frontal – in which Shaun Micallef insisted upon doing live silent slapstick, a producer’s nightmare, MacLeod says – SeaChange and Kath and Kim. Having worked on such popular shows, why would MacLeod want a career change?
‘‘I thought I should do something I have more control of,’’ he says. ‘‘I’d done sketches on the Seoul Olympics, Barcelona and Atlanta and I thought, ‘I’m buggered if I’m doing Sydney’.’’
He was already a published author when he fell in with a group of ‘‘comedians, writers and ratbags’’ who did theatre sports at St Martin’s Theatre in South Yarra. His book-writing career was put on hold when he became head writer of The Comedy Company with other theatre sports stars including Glenn Robbins.
‘‘That kind of gave birth to a whole slew of comedy shows,’’ he says. After a shaky start (and some ‘‘sniffy reviews’’) the show was moved from late night Tuesdays to Sundays, where it took off, startling its creators and stars as much as its viewers.
‘‘Most of us were in our late 20s, we’d all been used to being poor,’’ MacLeod says of the surprising shoot to stardom.
But children’s writing is where it all began for MacLeod. He had a prodigious start when his fi rst book, Hippopotabus, penned when he was 14 and published when he was 16, resulted in an encouraging letter from a far away fan.
John Cleese wrote to say he and his daughter had enjoyed the book. ‘‘It is really delightful and I hope it is the fi rst of many,’’ Cleese wrote.
Old copies of Hippopotabus are rare, and even if you can fi nd them, they’re hard to read because many of the pages were glued together by a dubious printer in Hong Kong. A catalogue search may not help either as MacLeod’s name was misspelt on the cover. A comedy of errors, perhaps.
MacLeod has written 26 books, ‘‘half of them good’’, he says. The latest, The Life of a Teenage Bodysnatcher, sold out its fi rst print run in two weeks. The macabre comedy is set in the days when medical schools would pay good money for a corpse, and the hero sets about ‘‘liberating’’ the body of his grandfather – who wanted his body left to science – and becomes caught up in the world of body snatching.
MacLeod has advice for writers who want to profi t from their work. If you want to make money, write ads, he says. Magda Szubanski got him a job writing the jingle for the JetStar ad, and it’s the most he’s ever been paid. ‘‘Well, that and the bodies I delivered to the Alfred.’’
Email a friend