Thingee still a legend
It’s 25 years since Jason Gunn (and Thingee) drew the curtain on the iconic Son of a Gunn. Gunn joins Shaun Bamber to reminisce.
The year was 1992. No Netflix, no YouTube, no smartphones – hardly any internet or cellphones at all really. It was a simpler time.
Bill Clinton was playing sax on the way to his first term in the White House, Kris Kross were gonna make you Jump, and here in New Zealand a young man by the name of Jason Gunn – then barely out of his teens – had a song and dance of his own going on in Christchurch.
It was 25 years ago now that The Son Of A Gunn Show first aired to children across the nation, screening somewhere in the vicinity of 3.30pm. (Unlike predecessors After 2 and 3:45 LIVE!, the show’s title wasn’t as helpful in recording its start time.)
Son Of A Gunn was far from the young Gunn’s first rodeo – he started in children’s television at age 18, co-hosting After School (later called After 2) with Annie Roach before eventually making it his own alongside everyone’s favourite iconic Kiwi puppet Thingee, he of the infamous eyepop that never actually happened on live TV.
(Apologies for dropping ‘the p-word’ there. Even now it seems almost sacrilegious to openly refer to Thingee as such, akin to telling children there is no Santa Claus.)
According to Gunn, his thenboss and future wife Janine Morrell, executive producer of TVNZ’s Children’s Unit – ‘‘who of course is still the boss of me,’’ he half-jokes – initially came up with the idea for Son Of A Gunn.
‘‘She’d been doing a wee bit of directing of After 2 and After School, and she said, ‘I want to make a show which you can sort of have some fun with and display your talents’, so we made The Son Of A Gunn Show.’’
Son Of A Gunn built on the proven After 2 chemistry between ‘Jase & Thingee’, a constant double-act back then, like our very own Ant & Dec.
‘‘It was like working with your best mate, it was just so funny,’’ recalls Gunn. ‘‘Never a bad day. The things we did and the places we got to go to, probably because of him, mainly.’’
Like the 1992 Cricket World Cup, for instance, when the West Indies played South Africa at Christchurch’s Lancaster Park.
‘‘These two teams hadn’t played together in I don’t know how long, because South Africa had been out of world cricket, so this was like a world event,’’ remembers Gunn. ‘‘All the news in the world were covering it.’’
‘‘They allowed three members of the world media to go out into the middle and meet the players and shake their hands. And I’m there with Thingee and a video camera, there’s people from the BBC, and South Africa, and all the Australian media – they’re all there.’’
‘‘And the guy from World Cup Cricket goes, ‘OK, we’ll have you, you’ – and he points to me and goes, ‘And you’. And I went, ‘Oh my God’. So we go out into the middle of the field, and there’s some guy from the BBC, with his very posh voice, there’s someone from Channel Nine Australia, and there’s Jason & Thingee. It was like, ‘what the hell is going on’?’’
‘‘But the players just loved it. They were talking to Thingee – they just could not leave him alone. Who’s going to take the BBC when you can talk to Thingee?’’
‘‘We were out there in front of a capacity crowd at Lancaster Park, the world was watching, the crowd was chanting ‘Thingee!’ – it was just one of those days where I thought, whatever I do with the rest of my career, I do not believe it’s going to get better than this. I should have stopped right there, you know?’’
The Son Of A Gunn Show ran for another three years after that and finished in 1995 when TVNZ moved its children’s TV production from Christchurch to Wellington and Gunn went on to bigger and brighter things, although in his own opinion not necessarily always better. ALDEN WILLIAMS/STUFF
‘‘I remember on the last Son Of A Gunn I thought, ‘This is going to be really sad’. And it was worse than I thought,’’ he adds with a quiet laugh.
‘‘At the end of each show we used to sing this song - ‘Happy trails to you, until we meet again…’ and the music started, which always meant you had about 18 seconds to talk before you sang the song. And as soon as that music played for the last time I thought, ‘B.....d! I really don’t want this to end’.’’
‘‘I remember all the thoughts that went through my head in those 18 seconds, like what if I just want to stay here with the slide and the couch and Thingee, you know? Could I not just stay here? And I remember just having a moment to look down the camera and thank everyone and wish them all the best in their lives.’’
‘‘Now they’re all 25 years older and have grown up to be far more successful than me, and a few of them stop me in the street and say g’day – I just love that.’’
I remember on the last Son Of A Gunn I thought, ‘This is going to be really sad’. And it was worse than I thought.’ JASON GUNN