Garry McDonald is a very, very funny man. Best known for playing the hapless offspring in Mother and Son (alongside the sadly departed Ruth Cracknell) and his celebrity interviewer alter ego Norman Gunston, McDonald has secured himself a hallowed place in the annals of Australian comedic history.
I interviewed McDonald for the release of Moulin Rouge last year. It was not the proudest moment of my journalistic career; rather embarrassingly, I had seen the film the previous day and was unable to pick him (well, it was a very brief role, and he was under several layers of latex!). My ignorance meant that I had to assail the actor with a series of questions so bland and uninspired that Norman himself would blanch (“So... what’s Nicole REALLY like?”), but even so McDonald was utterly charming, funny, and down-to-earth.
There is a point to my celebrity name-dropping; I want you to know just how much I wanted to enjoy this disc. I tried, I really did. But it's just plainly, inescapably terrible.
Reviews for volumes 1 and 2, including a potted history of the Gunston phenomenon, can be found by clicking the links at the bottom of the page. Like them, this disc is a rather shabby affair, and abysmal value for money. Twenty-eight bucks for seventy-five minutes of poor quality video footage? Fair go!
The disc is composed of ten (not eleven, as the case would have you believe) segments showing Gunston interviewing various faded stars, replete with out-of-date pop culture references and really, really bad clothes. As the cover blurb says, these were culled “fron (sic) the top rating 1993 TV specials.”
Sadly, McDonald was far from the top of his game at this stage, and the joke has worn thin. How many times can feigned ignorance of the subject's career and those trademarked bizarre tangental digressions be funny?
Interviewees include such luminaries as Ian Botham (he gets in about three sentences), David Faustino (the kid from Married: With Children), Lionel Ritchie, Dolph Lundgren (who looks as bemused as the audience feels), and Guns'n'Roses (the high point of the disc – it actually provoked laughter. Twice.)
As I said, Garry McDonald is a funny man... but you’d never know from this disc.
The image and audio quality are acceptable for a decade-old shot-on-video affair. The picture exhibits occasional blurriness and colour bleeding, as well as frequent aliasing, but that’s a minor carp – it does the job for what is essentially a montage of talking heads.
Extras include the somewhat ironic (and horribly unfunny)guarantee of excellence found on the previous two discs, a collection of unexciting trailers for other Umbrella titles, excerpts from the previous Gunston discs, and the unedited Tim Allen interview. This is a grainy twenty minutes of footage that adds nothing of substance.
