Influenca: CLANCY OF THE OVERBLOW

I loved Clancy.

I still do.

So, I'll say it that way.

I love Clancy.

When I say Clancy, I don't mean Liza Goddard.

This is Liza Goddard. She got the Skippy gig when her family moved o'er from the UK in the sixties. She moved back after Skippy and had a respectable acting career in Blighty. By that time this is what she thought of Skippy. I hope she now lives a happy life as a nanna growing cumquats and roses in a cottage garden in ..... Surrey. But I wasn't talking about her. She's a real person. Clancy is better than that; she's an imaginary one.

Skippy was finished already on a loop when I first saw it. See also Get Smart, Gilligan's Island, Lost in Space and my favourite, The Bucaneers. But Skippy was ours, looked and sounded like us.

I can't remember how old I was when I was dispatched with a handful of siblings and cousins to see Skippy and the Intruders. The cinema was packed. In one scene a chest was opened to reveal gold bars. A kid in the row behind mine responded with a highly audible: G-g-gold. It almost had a speech balloon around it. I didn't turn and look but laughed easily with everyone else who'd heard it. This was an under-ten aspirant adult, a wannabe, a collaborator with the adult occupying forces, the type whose doughy cynicism always sounded like the kind of indoctrinating instruction suffered by children in dictatorships (or even our own in Queensland). He was nevertheless, for all our sniggering, experiencing  this movie the way it was intended.

To watch Skippy was to walk around inside it, to be resting, gumnut baby style, on a eucalypt leaf or one of the deadly rotors of the Waratah's chopper. If I was ever lodged in one of my loungeroom's 70s chic beanbags I was also there in the endless light of Skippy's paradise. And there, too, was Clancy.

I'm not going to go into the memory of a prepubescent near sex experience (those who know me personally would be in counselling for months). An instant nuclear grade sexual attraction was in effect every time she was onscreen but that's not my point. When Clancy entered the screen she walked into my imagination, strolling lightly among the Lost in Space set of red dangling bioforms that I imagined my brain to be, touching, here and there a stray hanging tongue-like protuberance from either idle curiosity or hard fascination.

On screen she might have had her foot caught the muck under the rising tide as Sonny provided her with ever longer improvised straws to use as snorkels (a real episode) or joining in some goofily choreographed fighting in the mud with a rock band dressed as the Kelly Gang (another real episode) -- actually, both of those examples are getting me all hot and bothered so I'll close up the thought with: on screen she might well have been the good looking female prop around which action took place (unlike the good looking male props like Ken James or Tony Bonner who usually came in to act directly after Sonny and Skippy had solved the mystery and needed variously adult and human assistance). ANYWAY, that's what she might have been on screen but as I watched she was in the room with me watching and being, sipping from the same family-size bottle of Coke that I was (and could never finish by myself so it would go like all the others into the fridge to flatten and be forgotten), selecting petite sized twisties from my packet and watching Skippy.

She was an odd (ie exciting ) mix of demure and cheerful and even to my still forming sexuality seemed to drive all the boys around her to hard competitive action. Skippy him/herself was meant to do this but not if you were male and around nine years old. It was her, it was Clancy doing all that. She wasn't in many scenes per episode but didn't have to be. All the action returned to her magnetic centre. Well, that's what happened when I watched it!

All the world loved Skippy. It was translated for Cuban and Conquistador alike, into Czech for the other side of the iron curtain. Carthage might have fallen for Skippy. Only Sweden resisted. The show was deemed irresponsible for depicting an animal capable of doing so much (eg. operating speed boats and literally disarming villains but, curiously, never mowing the lawn).  But I loved Clancy more. As soon as I was old enough for a girlfriend it would be she. I imagined this done by Royal Decree. We would receive a white envelope at our Aitkenvale home. It bore the blobby red seal of The House of Windsor and contained a card with guilded borders which, when opened, was thus inscribed: It is our pleasure to command that Clarissa Merrick hereafter called Clancy be the sole companion of one Peter James Jetnikoff of Aitkenvale, Townsville, North Queensland, Australia. The Queen. I'm filling out the language there, but that's how I saw it. I didn't call it fantasy then. Didn't have to. At nine, who does?

But the world of Skippy was as real as Mr Squiggle (I'll get to him later and explain that). We even had things in our kitchen from his home (no, not the kangaroo paw bottle opener). Waratah Cheddar was a kind of dairy flavoured pliable plastic that came in a package the same shape as a pack of Golden Crumpets (fellow entries in the greater Australian electoral roll, this is how you ruin a toaster). It was very salty, just the kind of cheese that would keep you going through days of being lost i' the bush. There it was, as close as the fridge.

But Clancy remains central to me as I write and draw this story of mine. Because if Gail ever did resemble someone it was she. Liza Goddard was too old to be Gail and too young to be her mum. Big sister subtracts too much from the concept. So it's Clancy, Clancy as an Irish Queenslander (Gail's name is Byrne) from the manager classes, but really Clancy all the same, grown up and aware of the powers of her physicality, Clancy whose backchat and frowning observations were those of a teenager who had to compete with an entire family good at both, a Clancy who would get sick of the boys running at windmills of solutions and do something more practical.

It's Clancy, demure but developing, who gets what she wants, sharp minded and boxing gloved like Liza Goddard against all the bullshit she's known so far and all the bullshit that is to come. It's Clancy in the big, haunted silence of the final scene with Meg and the weirding events of the middle act. Clancy in an episode of Skippy so serious and challenging that even the kangaroo wranglers refused to step forward. She won't need those gloves. Skippy won't be there. This is the episode of Clancy: Monster Hunter, Ghost Caller, Conqueror of Chaos. Only her name's Gail.