BOOK RELIVES 19 YEARS OF THE BEACHCOMBERS.
Series had lasting effect on B.C. films
Leafing through the new book Bruno and the Beach brings back memories of a less fragmented time, when whole families would watch TV together on a Sunday night.
One of the shows they watched was The Beachcombers, which starred former Stratford stage actor Bruno Gerussi as rollicking Gibsons, B.C., log salvager Nick Adonidas.
The show aired from 1971 to 1990, and many of its cast and crew went on to form the basis for the B.C. film industry that has flourished ever since.
“Over those 19 years, we had a solid base of the parents who would stick around — the kids would watch for three or four years and then move on,” said actor Jackson Davies, who joined the show in 1973 in a bit role as a nameless RCMP constable.
His knack for physical comedy kept him working, and the writers later named him Const. John Constable, and he stayed for the rest of the show’s run.
Gerussi has since passed away, as has actor Robert Clothier, who played his scruffy rival, Relic. Davies co-wrote the new book with the show’s late producerwriter Marc Strange, and it is a reminder both of those early film-industry days, when B.C. was less of a branch plant, and of the preInternet family-viewing era.
“Now we get parents who did that Sunday night thing with their parents, and they kind of miss that time when a family only had one television,” Davies said.
“It’s hard to find a show now that you could watch together as a family. The 18-to-30-year-olds aren’t really watching television — they’re driving it through their computers.”
The breezily written Bruno and the Beach (Harbour Publishing) has countless factoid nuggets for both longtime fans and Beachcomber newbies:
Clothier was a real-life hero who had broken his back while serving as a Royal Canadian Air Force bomber pilot in the Second World War. Despite that — or maybe because of that — he insisted on doing his own stunts in the show.
Nick’s onscreen boat, the Persephone, was a rental. Never knowing whether the show would be back for another season, the producers rented the same boat for 19 years, probably paying for it several times over.
The show ran in dozens of countries around the world, including in Germany, where its title translated as Beach Pirates.
Davies has had a busy stage and screen career since, with film roles including Bird on a Wire with Goldie Hawn and Mel Gibson, and a role as the captain of the Exxon Valdez in a TV movie about that tanker disaster. Now he teaches at Capilano University and is vice-president of the Union of B.C. Performers.
Some 360 Beachcombers episodes were filmed, of which maybe 60 are still on the air somewhere, he said. Davies wonders whether there could be a home for the show’s reruns somewhere in the multi-channel universe. “I get emails every day … there’s a petition in Winnipeg trying to get the CBC to either rerun the show or put them on DVD,” he said. “It’s probably a rights issue, but it’s certainly doable.”
If it’s a money issue, Davies noted that this year the CBC is saving a bundle on NHL broadcast rights.
That said, he acknowledged that the CBC in Vancouver has been supportive of the book, hosting launch events at the CBC headquarters, and CBC’s Torontobased archives helped the project with photos and information.
Davies produced and starred in a 2002 TV movie reboot, The New Beachcombers, with actor Dave Thomas joining the cast, and a 2004 TV Christmas movie. He also produced the 2003 documentary Welcome Back to Molly’s Reach.