Cartoonist Tom Scott frozen on the wall with author David McGill pointing bravely at this snafu, the wretched data processor system has seized. It is 7.30 on Tuesday night and the packed Paraparaumu Library audience are already looking at their watches, Downton Abbey starting in an hour.
Tom Scott is launching McGill’s comic novel Geyser in the Creek, its cover illustrated by his former Listener and present Dominion Post cartoonist colleague Trace Hodgson. On the right of the author are Tom Scott cartoons for a magazine McGill edited in the 1970s. Tom did the covers of the author’s first three Kiwi slang collections. In the audience is cartoonist Bob Brockie, who did the latest McGill collection A Dictionary of Noughties Kiwi Slang and illustrator Grant Tilly, who did the splendid owl logo for their publishing company Growlpress. It is planned to be a cartoon fest of a launch, if only Scott would unfreeze.
McGill says you have to expect this with an Irish MC and himself half-Irish, it is Murphy’s Law, if something can go wrong, it will. McGill recalled another occasion when he was on his way to the launch of his book about New Zealand prisoners of war at the officers’ mess at Trentham when his car broke down. He rang the Cabinet Minister who had that day asked if he could come and asked for a lift. No, was the abrupt response, Cabinet limousines are not for any old Joe public. His mother-in-law saved the day by giving him a lift. A mild ripple of interest. The computer experts in the audience were jabbing futilely at the laptop and the projector, Tom’s frozen image being overrode by Windows demanding registration and indicating systems errors.
Then there was the Mayor of Wellington, McGill continued, launching my Harbourscapes by firing a rocket in the days when you still could. Instead of heading skywards, the rocket went sideways into a council bus. This was not working. Then there was the Auckland policeman who was going to arrest the author for causing a commotion trying to get to the launch of his book about the Police Association.
No response. Blank faces.
There’s Errol Collier at the back. At the launch of his novel a few weeks ago at Waikanae’s Mahara Gallery, which I edited, everybody was assembled when the launch speaker Tariana Turia rang to say her daughter had lost the car keys and they were marooned in Porirua. But she did make it. And we do have Tom here too, except ...
David’s cartoonist friends from university in the sixties, Burton Silver, of the Listener comic strip Bogor and the international hit Why Cats Paint, pushes his way to the front and says perhaps he could help out.
Cartoonist Burton Silver(left) saves the launch, as Grant Tilly’s Growlpress owl looks on. McGill, he says, has written 47 books and should have a gong by now. I want to tell you why he hasn’t. He is a security risk. It happened back in the last days of the Muldoon administration. McGill was editing a local Wellington lifestyle magazine W5 and we cooked up this story of ambushing the Prime Minister on his way to work with cameras, to prove he had no diplomatic protection. Muldoon had a new Ford Mondeo and he drove from Vogel House in Lower Hutt to work along the motorway. We set up three cars to block him in and get the photos. Muldoon roared out of his driveway, taking us by surprise. We got the photos but he pulled away. We were back in McGill’s offices when Muldoon rang to tell us if his Diplomatic Protection Squad had been active we would both be in jail, and our associates. But, McGill says, they were not, Prime Minister.
There was this long pause. Then Muldoon barks: Whatdya want?
McGill asks for an interview. Muldoon tells us to present at the Beehive. He snaps at us to sit down and ask our questions. McGill enquires if he is the only prime minister in the world to drive himself to work.
Muldoon sits back. Ahh, yess, that appears to be the case. Burton does Muldoon to a T. The audience are in fits.
And then Tom unfreezes and he launches the book with an anecdote about McGill writing so many books, he’s like a New York cab, miss one and another is along shortly. He and Burton were at a Parliamentary launch of a McGill book and Tom spotted Ian Cross nearby, Ian editor of the Listener Tom, Burton and McGill worked under. Tom pulls out McGill’s book and runs down the list of previous publications. ‘Burton,’ he says loudly, ‘I didn’t know McGill wrote The God Boy.’ Cross demands to see the list. ‘Of course,’ Tom adds, ‘if Ian hadn’t written it, McGill would have had to. He did train to be a priest.’ Tom goes on to another anecdote about Lange, doing Lange superbly, saying he was not going to this wedding, he would go to the next one by the same person. McGill was like that. He was sorry he was not there, he had to go to Sydney to share a spa with all these Bondi babes. But he declared the book launched, to great applause.
Above - author David McGill on far left, next to Grant Tilly, Galya and Bob Brockie, special guests at the launch of his comic novel Geyser in the Creek, set in the fictional village of Kotuku in the Bay of Plenty, where a geyser attracts a tourist feeding frenzy and the locals and iwi have to repel the Crown grab for the tourist action. Think Blott on the Landscape meets Whisky Galore, the author suggested.