Norman Gunston
fictional character
Norman Gunston is a satirical TV character performed by Australian actor and comedian Garry McDonald. Norman Gunston was primarily well known in his native Australia and, to a lesser extent, the United States during the mid- to late 1970s. He was the only Gold Logie–winning fictional character on Australian television, with McDonald collecting the 1976 Gold Logie and the George Wallace Memorial Logie for Best New Talent in character.
Early years
The Gunston character was originally conceived for a sketch by comedy writer Wendy Skelcher in the second series of the cult Australian TV comedy series The Aunty Jack Show in 1973. Cast member Garry McDonald portrayed Gunston as a dull and talentless local TV reporter from the industrial city of Wollongong – a locale that was the butt of many jokes throughout the series. McDonald later claimed that the Gunston character and his show were devised as a parody of an (unintentionally bad) late-night Sydney TV variety show of the early 1970s hosted by expatriate American club entertainer Tommy Leonetti. In 1975, when The Norman Gunston Show was established as a successful comedy program, McDonald said:
I think you can say that Garry McDonald created Norman Gunston, my writer, Bill Harding, filled Gunston out, and our director, John Eastway, put Gunston in the 'Tonight' show concept.
McDonald claimed he'd created the name 'Norman Gunston' from an air stewardess who'd told off David Frost in McDonald's presence, changing it from "Norma Gunston" to Norman Gunston. In 2022 McDonald admitted he'd misheard the name as Norma, and that in reality she was "Lorna Gunston".
The Gunston character made enough of an impression in Aunty Jack for him to be revived in a subsequent comedy mini-series made by the Aunty Jack team, Wollongong the Brave (1974), in which he starred in a satirical mock documentary Norman Gunston: The Golden Weeks.
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This entry incorporates text from “Norman Gunston” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.