The world awakens a far less funny place this morning, although, in fairness, we’ve still got his memorial service to go.

Mike McColl Jones, Australia’s most admired, enduring and prodigious writer of comedy for live variety television, has died after a short battle with illness; or as Mike would have described it, a long battle with dubious canteen food and cantankerous television management.

He would have been 104 this August if he’d lived another 17 years.

Mike began writing comedy for Graham Kennedy’s In Melbourne Tonight  in the early 1960s and for the next 40 years worked at the epicentre of the Australian entertainment industry through the golden age of television, writing for live variety shows that shaped popular culture, including The Don Lane Show, The Graham Kennedy Show, Tonight With Bert Newton, The Bert Newton Show, Tonight Live With Steve Vizard – and countless special broadcasts including 25 Logies and two Royal Command Performances for Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles and Princess Di.

Mike wrote jokes and nurtured the performances of generations of television hosts including Don Lane, Tommy Hanlon Jr, Jimmy Hannan, Bobby Limb, Mike Preston, Steve Vizard, Peter Couchman, Noel Ferrier, Frank Thring, Pete Smith, Philip Brady, Toni Lamond, Ernie Sigley, Daryl Somers, Denise Drysdale, Larry Emdur, Richard Stubbs, Ugly Dave Gray, Stuart Wagstaff, Frankie J Holden, Buster Fiddess, Joff Ellen, Tim Evans, Mary Hardy, Kevin Sanders and scores of others.

But of all the stars for whom Mike wrote, the relationship he most treasured was his extraordinary partnership with Graham Kennedy and Bert Newton.

Said Bert of Mike, ‘When it came to writing one liners and personality material, Mike was simply without peer.’

Mike McColl Jones and Graham Kennedy. Photo: National Sound and Film Archive

Mike was born on August 12, 1937 in Kew, a leafy eastern suburb of Melbourne from which he would never move. His family were well respected dentists, and although Mike never for a moment considered following in their footsteps, he always had excellent teeth.

Mike attended Xavier College in Kew, a school famous for providing ‘a rough and ready education’ for Australia’s greatest fictional dignitary, Sir Les Patterson KBE, as well as educating many of the great names of the industry including Mike Walsh, Peter Landy, Jim Murphy, Michael ‘Countdown’ Shrimpton and Mike’s life-long friend and colleague, Philip Brady.

Television transformed Australia in 1956. Mike was instantly captivated, particularly by the live chaos of GTV9’s hit show, In Melbourne Tonight, hosted by a brilliant young star only three years older than Mike, Graham Kennedy.

Each night Mike sat spellbound in front of his parents’ television set, studying the rhythm and cadence of Kennedy’s uncanny comedic delivery. And then Mike carefully crafted and wrote a dozen or so topical jokes he imagined might work for Graham.

In early 1962 Mike got his big break when Brady, now working as a fledgling studio announcer and presenter at the GTV9 studios in Bendigo Street, Richmond, showed a couple of pages of Mike’s handwritten gags to the IMT producers. Before long Mike was selling the odd joke as a freelancer to In Melbourne Tonight for three guineas for each joke performed.

In August 1963, 25-year-old Mike was summoned to the studios to meet the station manager, Colin Bednall, who immediately offered the nervous, gawky writer full-time employment to write topical material for Kennedy, shook his hand, handed Mike a typewriter and ordered him straight to the IMT production offices to start typing gags for that night’s show.

So began Mike’s long professional career as a writer of comedy.

Live action hero

In the 1960s, if you wanted to learn about comedy and live television, there was no better place than Studio 9, GTV9, the home of IMT.

Television was the dazzling new medium just finding its feet and everyone involved came from somewhere else.

Greatest of all was Mike’s mentor Freddie Parsons, a generation older, who had written for Australia’s most brilliant pre-war comedian, Roy Rene, during the golden era of Tivoli and live vaudeville.

And then there was Graham Kennedy, a burgeoning master of comedic timing and innovation. All of them took young Mike under their wings and offered him a daily impromptu masterclass in live entertainment.

Over the next seven years Mike honed his craft writing thousands of gags and pieces for Graham and the IMT team, five days a week, until IMT ended in December 1969.

Following IMT, Mike wrote for The Graham Kennedy Show, and from 1975, for nine years Mike continued as head writer on what would become most awarded light entertainment show in Australian television history, The Don Lane Show. 

In later years Mike wrote for dozens more variety shows, including The Peter Couchman Show and for over 1000 episodes of Tonight Live with Steve Vizard.

Writing material for the top-rating shows of the day, Mike was constantly rubbing shoulders with the world’s greatest stars: Muhammad Ali, Sammy Davis Jr, Debbie Reynolds, Noel Coward, Bob Hope, David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Tony Curtis, Clint Eastwood, Kirk Douglas, Louis Armstrong, Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder and on and on.

Mike recalled how the visiting celebrities would sign the dressing room wall when they visited the GTV9 studios.

And how one summer holiday, management decided to spruce up the dressing rooms, and he returned from holidays to find the prized  autographs painted over.

Look and learn

To look at Mike McColl Jones there was almost no visible indication he was in any way funny. None. Putting aside his table manners.

Tall, dark, handsome, athletically built and always urbanely dressed, Mike was notoriously shy, softly spoken, almost gentle, and shunned the limelight, unless it was a cocktail. He preferred instead to stay in the background and observe.

Indeed it was his ability to quietly look and listen, really listen, to know people so intimately he could write for each of them in their own distinctive voice which was at the heart of his perennial success.

His other great ability as a comedy writer was to view the world in jarringly unexpected ways.

Freddie Parsons remarked that only Mike’s mind could have created gags like ‘Thirty thousand troops arrived in New York today to entertain Bob Hope’ or ‘The Leaning Tower of Pisa was straightened today…unfortunately Italy is now on a tilt.’

Mike fervently believed that the role of comedy was to ridicule and challenge the status quo, power, and sacred cows.

Good comedy, he was convinced, should not only create laughter but mayhem, controversy, even chaos.

Said Kennedy, Mike’s great talent was to ‘say publicly what the viewer thought but would never dare put into words’.

Mike’s expertise at writing insightful provocative material coupled with Graham’s persona as enfant terrible found Graham ‘apologising almost nightly, to caterers, airline magnates, politicians, car parking attendants, used car dealers and press barons’.

Mike loved the serendipity of live television – as the pulse of a network, the pulse of a nation. On live television anything, everything could go wrong, and audiences around the nation might at any moment be instantaneously bound in rapturous, transformational magic of shared chaos and unexpected laughter.

Live television was Mike’s life-long drug of addiction. And gin.

A quiet powerhouse

Each day Mike threw himself afresh into the relentless daily ritual of live variety television.

The shows for which he wrote were mainly broadcast at night, every night, yet each morning Mike religiously appeared at the studios at 9am, to begin scouring the daily newspapers in search of a headline, a news story, a tidbit of gossip from which he could quickly fashion today’s topical one-line gags.

Each night Mike positioned himself next to Camera 3, only metres in front of the host set, intently watching the show unfold, alert to any opportunities for fresh humour, for new chaos.

From there, Mike watched his gags performed for the first and only time, as they recorded a Moon landing, Nixon and Watergate, royal tours and presidential visits, a succession of Australian PMs from Robert Menzies to John Howard, and the evolution of technology from fixed phones and fax machines to mobile phones, from black-and-white television to colour, and a million other events that changed our lives.

From Camera 3, Mike watched as Kennedy uttered his infamous crow call, Farrrrrk, which saw him banned from television; and when he attacked Senator Doug McClelland; and when Don Lane threw water over his guest James Randi, the psychic exposer, and stormed off set; and when Bert Newton dressed as Demis Roussos confronted by the real Demis Roussos; and the night Rex Mossop and Julian Clary nearly came to blows; and when dozens of politicians and powerbrokers were maligned, called to account or brought down to earth.

Rivers of gold

Once in a blue moon Mike agreed to write for an overseas star.

Joan Rivers once asked Mike for some jokes about her age.

At the time Halley’s Comet was about to make one of its infrequent appearances and Mike sent Joan a gag “I’m so old I’ve seen Halley’s Comet come around three times!” Mike was surprised the next day when he turned on his television to see President Ronald Reagan at a Washington press conference repeating his Halley’s Comet gag. Turns out that the night before, Joan Rivers had been having dinner in Washington with her good friend, Nancy Reagan, who went home and passed the gag onto her husband.

Mike was proud that a gag he wrote for Newton to open the Logies, ‘Welcome to the Logies, affectionately known by some of us here as Star Wars’ was used weeks later by Bob Hope to open the Academy Awards.

Mike was often asked by visiting stars whether he would consider working overseas. Mike always replied that things were fine just as they were.

The truth was Mike had everything he needed in Australia. He had two loves, his television and his family.

Mike was at heart a villager.

He loved the certainty and familiarity of belonging to a small community. He loved the morning rituals and tiny patterns by which daily life is measured. He loved the same journey to work, along the same tram lines, seeing the same faces, and regularly catching up for lunch at the same old taverns with the same old showbiz journeymen.

Any man who happily resides his entire life, from birth to death, within the same couple of suburban blocks is at heart a villager.

In 2017 Mike was an awarded an OBE for his services to television, writing in particular, which he observed at the time was right up there with winning the Friday night meat tray at The Harp.

Funny business

Mike McColl Jones was a gentle, imaginative man who was a direct, vital, unbroken link to the age of vaudeville and the Tivoli greats, through the glorious era of radio, through the golden age of television when television was the only game in town and half the nation watched last night’s shows, through cable television and the dawn of the new millennium, to the age of streaming and digital media.

Mike saw it all, and though the means of delivery might have seismically shifted before his eyes, Mike still believed the fundamentals of entertainment and laughter were unfailing and timeless – funny is funny – and of the unchanging generative power of performance to bind a nation.

It is a rare thing to make someone laugh, particularly in the solitude of their living room, but Mike succeeded for 40 years, and in so doing not only gifted our nation a laugh track, but compellingly charted the daily ebbs and flows and absurdities of our nation’s unfolding journey.

Mike McColl Jones had a unique way of signing off and even in this he will be greatly missed.

Next week’s Powerball results: 3, 7, 23, 9, 12, 27. P/Ball: 12

Steve Vizard is a professor at Monash University, a former Gold Logie-winning Tonight Show host and a long-time colleague of Mike McColl Jones