TO HEAR Jamie Dunn shifting to Agro’s voice sends generations straight back to sitting cross-legged in the lounge room waiting to go to school.
That’s what brought Dunn back, 40 years after Agro first appeared on Channel 7 children’s shows, to tour his show Agro Up Late in 2022.
With spontaneous, cheeky humour and use of the puppet’s one technical addition – a moveable eyebrow – Dunn managed to create an iconic character that has lasted well beyond the lifespan of the television shows he appeared on.
The children that watched Agro on morning television are now in their ’30s and ’40s.
“Yes,” Dunn said. “Some in their ’80s I think.
“Agro seemed to go through the kids to the adults and the grandparents. The eyebrow thing that you are talking about … I think it was the eyebrow that brought the grandmas.”
Agro was a character on Boris’ Breakfast Show and Wombat in the 1980s and Agro’s Cartoon Connection in the 1990s but Dunn said the Up Late show was bringing crowds of adults across all generations.
“Someone, somewhere in Australia, I don’t know who it was, put up the outtakes of Agro’s Cartoon Connection. The outtakes are very adults only, because YouTube wasn’t invented back then and I was possibly overly relaxed. Those clips have had four and a half million hits and created a new audience for Agro,” he said.
HOW AGRO BEGAN
Dunn was discovered by Channel 7 after he recorded a song for children’s show presenter Fiona MacDonald and Agro.
“It was an accident. Another guy used to do Agro before me and Channel 7 called me on a Friday night because they heard a song that I wrote. I used to be a songwriter, and I wrote a song for Fiona and Agro and I copied the guy’s voice in the middle for the monologue. They rang me on Friday night and said can you do the character tomorrow morning on live TV?
“In my business you say yes first and then work out how to do it later.
“I said yes and I turned up. I got the voice perfect overnight. I’d been working on it, working on it, working on it. I got up to Channel 7 and I laid down and put my hands in the puppet and put him up. I was going (in Agro’s voice) ‘Oh Fiona, we’ve got the Smurfs, giving away a trampoline …’ and then the executive producer crawled across the floor and held up a handwritten sign to me, because it was live television, and the sign said ‘Can you please make the puppet’s mouth move when he speaks.’ So that was the start to Agro.
“That’s Australian puppets though. I was at the Logies with Dickie Knee. I was talking to Mark (McGahan), who did Dickie Knee and I said ‘So what’s the go with Dickie Knee? And he said, ‘Well, Jamie, when John Blackman speaks, I shake the stick.’ And I thought that’s Australian isn’t it? You can make a character out of a sock with buttons.”
Agro has become an iconic part of Australian entertainment but it’s the man under the desk that brings him to life that made him such a memorable character.
A START IN IPSWICH’S PA HOTEL
Jamie Dunn started out as a singer-songwriter and played drums for a Brisbane band.
It was Ipswich that gave him his first break as a solo artist, playing a cabaret show at the Prince Alfred Hotel at Booval.
“The owner of the hotel back then was not impressed,” Dunn said.
“I charged 60 bucks for that and he didn’t pay me. Twenty years later, I did Easy Street in Ipswich as Agro and it was the same guy that owned the Prince Alfred back in those days. Twenty years later, I charged him $2,060 for the show. Afterwards I went downstairs to get the money and he’s going 2000, 20, 40, 60 … and I got in my van and I drove out and I go ‘Ha, ha. I got it!’”
‘AGRO CAN BE BRUTAL’
Dunn’s cheeky sense of humour hasn’t changed but given today’s political correctness and conventions with cultural and gender diversity, has he felt the need to change his show?
“Not at all,” Dunn said.
“You won’t ever see me in children’s television again, that’s for sure. Agro can be brutal.
“But it’s been the easiest job in the world. Agro used to say on television ‘Take a close up of my hand. You see the wire coming through, kids aren’t going to believe this.’ It was just relaxed and I think I’d be in trouble these days with the constraints that are on everything, yeah.
“It’s a million miles from where we used to be. I guess it is a good thing in one way. I suppose I like Ricky Gervais for that very reason, you know, a joke is a joke.”
Dunn said he had played to some tough crowds over the years and knew how to read the room.
He said a show he did as the stand-in comic at the Bakehouse Steakhouse in Ipswich was one of the toughest.
“Oh, you want to work in front of a tough audience, I can tell ya. When the regular guy couldn’t make it, then he’d ring me and I’d go up to Ipswich and do it. You can only imagine, people were expecting Agro and they get me, it’s a bit of an ooh and an ah, a modicum of disappointment.
“I remember from those days, Ipswich crowds, if you don’t entertain you’re gone.
“I’ve had a long association with Ipswich, good, bad and indifferent.”
AGRO TO THE RESCUE
One of the good memories was when B105 brought Agro in for a segment Agro to the Rescue, a segment designed to give people a helping hand.
“When you hear Agro, you grew up with him. It brings it straight back. It created a certain sort of loyalty,” Dunn said.
“We did an Agro to the Rescue at Booval. We rang a lady and she’d been nominated by one of her family and we gave her a year’s groceries from Woolworths.
“This lovely lady, she opened the fridge while she was on the radio and said ‘I don’t have anything.’ It was just a silly voice but you made a difference to someone’s life.”
- Agro Up Late is on at the Ipswich Civic Centre on July 22.