The Aunty Jack Show

The Aunty Jack Show
Kid Eager, Aunty Jack and Thin Arthur from the cassette cover of Aunty Jack Sings Wollongong (1974) (cassette version)
Genre	Comedy
Directed by	Maurice Murphy
Starring	Grahame Bond Rory O'Donoghue Sandra McGregor John Derum (1972) Garry McDonald (1973)
Country of origin	Australia
Original language(s)	English
No. of seasons	2
No. of episodes	13 + 2 specials
Release
Original network	ABC
Original release	15 November 1972 – 29 November 1973 1 March 1975 (special)

The Aunty Jack Show was a Logie Award–winning Australian television comedy series that ran from 1972 to 1973. Produced by and broadcast on ABC-TV, the series attained an instant cult status that persists to the present day.

The lead character, Aunty Jack was a unique comic creation — an obese, moustachioed, gravel-voiced transvestite, part trucker and part pantomime dame — who habitually solved any problem by knocking people unconscious or threatening to 'rip their bloody arms off'. Visually, she was unmistakable, dressed in a huge, tent-like blue velvet dress, football socks, workboots, and a golden boxing glove on her right hand. She rode everywhere on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and referred to everyone as "me little lovelies" — when she was not uttering her familiar threat: "I'll rip yer bloody arms off!", a phrase which immediately passed into the vernacular. The character was devised and played by the multi-talented Grahame Bond and was partly inspired by his overbearing Uncle Jack, whom he had disliked as a child, his grandfather Ben Doyle and Dot Strong the ABC's last official tea lady.

An architecture graduate of Sydney University, Bond was already an accomplished writer, producer, comedian, singer, songwriter and guitarist by the time he graduated. He cut his teeth writing and performing as a founder member and leading light of the University's legendary Architecture Revues from 1964-69. It was here that he met and became friends with other Sydney students including Geoffrey Atherden, Maurice Murphy and Peter Weir, who became Australia's most internationally acclaimed film director. Through these stage revues Grahame also met his longtime musical, writing and acting partner Rory O'Donoghue, who had begun his performing career playing The Artful Dodger in a Sydney production of the musical Oliver! as well as being the lead singer and guitarist in the Sydney rock bands The Pogs and Oakapple Day. Rory was only 14 at the time he met Bond, when The Pogs were brought in to provide musical backing for one of the Architecture Revues.