Obituary: The country in which a young John Charles (1940 - 2024) first sought his future was occasionally accused of being the Albania of the Pacific – with inferior wine. Equally exaggerated was the “rugby, racing and beer” put-down. But still, anyone with arty tendencies was pushed to wrangle up a crowd scene of the like-minded.
This may help explain the diversity of the skills of the man who died back in May. New Zealand of the 1950s and 60s was no country for the specialist, so there was a bit of space for the multi-talented.
Charles’s early influences included a mother who played piano and a father good enough on tenor sax and clarinet to feature in dance bands. The fact that the American swing-time band leader and clarinettist Artie Shaw had played in Wellington was something of a family anecdote. And Charles the pianist was drawn to play at the Victoria University of Wellington Jazz Club.
A previous brief encounter with a Marist teacher-training institution left him, however reluctantly, with a subtle sense of ritual, theatre and perhaps some of the self-discipline so useful in serious music composition and performance. It may have also brought out a little of the turbulent priest rebellion that was almost obligatory for the early 1960s and a survival mechanism in the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation, where he found a variety of employment niches.
Professionally, Charles will be remembered for his music. Yet his time in television – on both sides of the Tasman – as a director, producer and creative administrator – has a range that is seldom properly acknowledged. A list of his achievements shows how a jack of all trades can also be a master of many. And in fairness to the socialist emphasis of his country, it meant he could walk away from his first job in television to finish a university music degree and then return to television because the rules of that Pacific Albania insisted on keeping your job open.
What he made of that opening was a credit-roll during the 1960s and 70s that covered drama, the studio direction of former Listener editor Ian Cross’s Column Comment, the Brian Edwards current-affairs fight club Gallery, the John Clarke sitcom Buck House, and On Camera, and the afternoon women’s show fronted by Irvine Lindsay (There were then no female NZBC studio directors).
His drama direction included early episodes of Pukemanu, perhaps the first New Zealand non-derivative series, and Report on Henry Bascombe, a current affairs-style drama for which Charles had to fight his boss to use a persona-non-grata performer whom the corporation had once sacked.
Even by the small-country standards of New Zealand, the Charles entanglement with family and friends was severe. John had married Judy Robins, whose sister Pat had married Geoff Murphy, who had also gone to school with John.
And one of Judy’s other sisters, Veronica, had married Bruno Lawrence, who often played drums with John on piano and Geoff on trumpet. First, the brothers-in-law made music and then they made the mischief of Blerta (Bruno Lawrence’s Electric Revelation and Travelling Apparition). Inevitably, they also made movies.
It began with shortish home-made films; everyone pitching in and working for nothing and no one asking which truck the film stock might have fallen off. Murphy usually wrote – with some help from Derek Morton – and directed. Lawrence acted and sometimes acted up, and Charles added music when needed. The Box and Tank Busters were followed by Wild Man, in which Charles is seen playing the piano.
Then the self-help learning of one’s craft gave the country a decade of cinema that would change so much. Charles composed the music, initially, for three Murphy features: Goodbye Pork Pie, Utu and The Quiet Earth. The recording of the Utu soundtrack demanded the space and acoustics of the Wellington Town Hall, as well as William Southgate conducting a large segment of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.
Charles is marked as a composer of great range and some importance, from the music he wrote for Murray Reece’s TV adaptation of Ian Cross’s The God Boy to his soundtrack for the David Williamson Australian telemovie The Perfectionist and Gaylene Preston’s Bread and Roses.
His score for the tele-feature Iris in 1984, Tony Isaac’s New Zealand swansong about the writer and poet Robin Hyde, starring Helen Morse, was forced to compete with the end-scene music the writer had convinced the director to go with. It was, for many, one of greatest shorter pieces ever written – the Cavatina from The Late String Quartets by Beethoven. Charles held his own.
He believed that film music should never try to tell the audience what to feel and should always be more than a distraction filling in the silences. His regard for someone like Italian composer Ennio Morricone acknowledged that film music could grab you by the throat, be superbly crafted, uplifting, funny, moving or all of those almost at the same time.
Marginally puritan when it came to what he called “gorilla music”, he still worked as the musical director on The Avengers’ hit of the Dave Jordan song, Out of Sight – Out of Mind. When lecturing at the Australian Film School, he walked students through that strange short period when Hollywood film music used songs, as in High Noon, Gunfight at the OK Corral and the original 3.10 to Yuma, that essentially carried the plot.
Like so many Kiwis, he worked both sides of the Tasman. In his time at the ABC, he directed major outside broadcasts, including Joan Sutherland’s Lucrezia Borgia in the Sydney Opera House. He also directed a young Russell Crowe while at the ABC and worked on the much-loved, long-running children’s TV show Mr Squiggle.
John’s last “proper” job in New Zealand was as TV One’s Head of Entertainment. It was almost the classic poacher/gamekeeper fence jump. Among other things, he greenlit Play Something Fantastic, an outrageous Jeff Browett-written music/drama that dragged in some old friends: Bruno Lawrence, Ginette McDonald, John Bach, Ian Watkin and Malcolm McNeill. Charles was also responsible for The Neville Purvis Family Show that earned its footnote in New Zealand TV history by ending with the self-justifying claim: “at least we never said f---.”
Through the final years, his music allowed him some resistance to the brutality of his dementia. He still played piano deep into the days when most short-term memories were a blur. He’d loved the early Dennis Potter TV plays such as Moonlight on the Highway and Angels Are So Few, and he went on responding to those songs from the great golden era of the Tin Pan Alley masters. Eventually, he could fight no more. And he may have been amused by his participation in the trope that says he died peacefully surrounded by his family. For he did, despite the struggle that had gone before.
