Rory O'Donoghue (13 May 194913 December 2017) was an Australian actor, composer and musician, best known for playing the character "Thin Arthur" in the 1970s ABC Television sketch comedy series The Aunty Jack Show, and for playing the guitar solo on Kevin Johnson's biggest hit "Rock 'N' Roll (I Gave You the Best Years of My Life)". The Aunty Jack Show featured O'Donoghue's long-time creative partner Grahame Bond as the title character.
Early life
Born in London, O'Donoghue came from a theatrical and musical family—his parents were both involved with opera. He moved to Australia and began playing guitar when he was seven years old, and was soon proficient enough to appear on the Coca-Cola Bottler's Club Radio Show playing skiffle music. He was also a professional child actor, scoring roles in Oliver! at twelve and then The Sound of Music a year or so later.
Career
The Pogs
In his mid-teens O'Donoghue joined a band on lead guitar and vocals. They became known as The Pogs and became popular on the wealthy North Shore party circuit. The Pogs also played university architecture revues where they met Peter Best, who would help score them a record deal with Festival Records subsidiary label Leedon Records. Best wrote and produced the band's four singles with Leedon over 1966–67, the pick of which was the off-the-wall "The Pogs' Theme". The Pogs had a few lineup changes and gradually evolved into the psychedelic band Oak Apple Day who released one single on the Philips label in 1969 before breaking up in 1970.
Work with Grahame Bond
Rory met his lifelong creative partner Grahame Bond at age 17. In 1967, when O'Donoghue was an architecture student, the two collaborated on the University of Sydney student theatre revue The Great Wall of Porridge, for which the 17-year-old O'Donoghue acted as musical director. It was a profitable success and was performed in a theatre off the University campus, with the funds reportedly paying for a parquetry floor in the Sydney University architecture students' common room.
Rory's work on the university revues led to many further collaborations with members of the revue team including writer-actor-musician Grahame Bond, writer Geoffrey Atherden, future producer-director Maurice Murphy and future film director Peter Weir. The success the Architecture Revues led to a professional stage revue for the PACT Theatre Company, Balloon Dubloon (1969) with Peter Weir, which in turn led to an invitation from festival director Sir Robert Helpmann to stage a revue, Drip Dry Dreams at the Adelaide Festival and Richbrooke. During 1970 this team created and performed the revue Filth at the Phillip St Revue, followed by Hamlet On Ice at the Nimrod Theatre. Bond's friendship with Weir led to him and Rory co-writing the music for Weir's segment of the three-part AFI Award-winning 1970 film Three To Go (in which Bond also had a small acting role). Bond also provided the music and played a leading role in Weir's first film, the 1971 short feature Homesdale.
Grahame and Rory soon formed a close partnership and collaborated on numerous theatre, radio and TV projects. Their first joint TV credit was the Christmas-themed comedy-fantasy special Man on a Green Bike (1969). This was followed by the one-off TV comedy program Aunty Jack's Travelling Show (1971), which screened as an episode of the ABC's anthology series The Comedy Game. This episode led to the commissioning of a short series of six programs for the ABC under the aegis of producer Maurice Murphy. The immediate success of this series - the groundbreaking Australian sketch comedy The Aunty Jack Show (1972–73) - catapulted Bond and O'Donoghue to national prominence.
The Aunty Jack Show
In Season One, Grahame ("Aunty Jack") and Rory ("Thin Arthur") co-starred with actors Sandra MacGregor and John Derum (respectively playing the recurring characters "Flange Desire" and "Narrator Neville"). The four lead actors played the roles of Aunty Jack and her sidekicks in a series of sketches and link pieces, as well as playing many other unrelated characters. Derum left the show after Season 1 to pursue other work and he was replaced for Season 2 by actor-comedian-musician Garry McDonald ("Kid Eager"). McDonald subsequently enjoyed enormous solo success as Norman Gunston, an awkward and charmless regional TV presenter (created by series writer Wendy Skelcher) who made a brief first appearance in a Season 2 episode of Aunty Jack. In collaboration with writer Geoffrey Atherden, McDonald took the character to national stardom in Australia in the late 1970s.