It was at the regular gatherings at our Rimu Road flat that John Clarke first appeared with Paul Holmes. Looking back, he was already side-splittingly funny.
Many tributes have flowed for him in the last couple of weeks and I heard the actor Sam Neil, who was John's personal friend, describe him performing his hilarious take-off of a horse race. which I saw many times.
What John Clarke actually "called" was a flea race and this was done on stage in the course of a disreputable late night revue which happened over many years at Downstage Theatre in Courtenay Place in central Wellington.
This cabaret-style entertainment became popular and briefly profitable when ten o'clock closing caused the watering holes to shut at that time.
The show morphed into something called Knackers. It later became Knickers then Knockers and at various times not only featured John Clarke; it also starred Paul Holmes and the recently departed National Party Cabinet Minister, Tim Groser (now New Zealand Ambassador to the United States).
Peter Beaven and I had bit parts in an earlier revue. I played some weird tune on the bagpipes and Peter, dressed as a woman, was part of a marching team.
A great deal of cross-fertilisation occurred between John Clarke and Paul Holmes and the flea race that Sam Neil described was actually conceived by Paul and something very like it was first performed by Paul at Karamu High School.
I followed John Clarke's career with great interest and it wasn't surprising that he settled in Melbourne. He identified with, and enjoyed the earthy Australian sense of humour.
In his book "A Dagg at My Table" he tells of an Australian expat he met while working at Harrods, the posh department store in London.
This bloke got fired after only a couple of days on the job when he put up signs in the staircases which read "Harrods-No Farting".
While working for the Australian Labor Party in the 1980's I watched John Clarke's regular TV satire and even ran into him in a corridor at a TV studio in Melbourne when observing a state election.
He didn't remember me at all, but was gracious and had happy memories of the late night shows at Downstage in the early seventies.
In this period he invented the sport of Farnarkeling, a spoof on the Australian Rules football game which is immensely popular in John's adopted city of Melbourne.
This fictional sport caught on and at one stage the highly factionalised Australian Labor Party tried forming a Farnarkeling faction. This was intended as a Melbourne based drinking club where anyone could come with the benefit of it acting as a neutral meeting place for cross-factional meetings.
As CEO of Pip Fruit New Zealand, Peter Beaven visited John Clarke in Melbourne after New Zealand apple producers won their case at the World Trade Organisation and got access to the Australian apple market.
It seemed for a while that the Australian apple producers who had doggedly resisted New Zealand apple imports for more than eighty years were going to find some way of keeping our apples out of the Australian market so Peter considered some sort of advertising campaign in Australia in support of the New Zealand growers.
Peter approached John with a view to his fronting some sort of advertising campaign and while John told Peter that such a campaign was not part of his normal repertoire, as a kiwi he was willing to consider it.
His creative juices were obviously running and he speculated that the campaign might sell New Zealand apples as "red onions".
In a way, it's a pity the Aussie apple growers caved in and no campaign was ever mounted. It would have been memorable.
The Australians will undoubtedly ignore John Clarke's kiwi origins as they do with Phar Lap, Russell Crowe and Pavlovas and claim him as their own, but we are big enough to share what was a great comedic talent. He will be missed.
Mike Williams grew up in Hawke's Bay. He is CEO of the NZ Howard League and a former Labour Party president. All opinions are his and not those of Hawke's Bay Today.
