David McPhail: from satire to spandex...

Interview – 2009

Alongside fellow comedy legend John Clarke, David McPhail was one of the first people to get New Zealanders laughing at their television screens, thanks to 1970s sketch show A Week of It. McPhail and his comical partner in crime Jon Gadsby moved on to McPhail and Gadsby, Issues and rural sitcom Letter to Blanchy. In 2005 McPhail was invited to play an appallingly politically incorrect teacher in Seven Periods with Mr Gormsby.

David McPhail died in May 2021. In this ScreenTalk interview conducted in 2009, McPhail talked about:

The excitement of filming A Week of It an hour before it aired each week
Using satire to prick the ego of former Prime Minister Rob Muldoon
Why the format for the first season of McPhail and Gadsby was a mistake
Real life stories behind Letter to Blanchy
How Seven Periods with Mr Gormsby shocked the TV network, but delighted fans
Getting caught in public in a revealing spandex costume while shooting The Amazing Extraordinary Friends

This video was first uploaded on 21 December 2009, and is available under this Creative Commons licence. This licence is limited to use of ScreenTalk interview footage only and does not apply to any video content and photographs from films, television, music videos, web series and commercials used in the interview.

Interview, Camera and Editing – Andrew Whiteside

The danger with satirising a character is that you, in the process of making fun of them, you actually legitimise what they’re doing: you make it acceptable.

– David McPhail on his most famous impersonation: Prime Minister Robert Muldoon

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