Bud in Brackets
It’s been several weeks since the death of Charles (Bud) Tingwell, the great Australian actor (and writer, and producer, and director, and fighter pilot), and people are still stopping me in the street to see what I think about it.
‘You know, I hardly knew the man,’ I protested to a woman on the number 67 who was wearing a man’s suit. ‘I only met him about three times.’
‘But what about “Charlie the Wonder Dog”?’ she said. ‘That was you, wasn’t it?
In fact, I had nothing to do with ‘Charlie’, save for laughing like a drain at the rushes as they arrived back at the Late Show production office. I didn’t actually meet Bud until three years later, on the set of The Castle, in which I played, for about five-and-a-half seconds, his son. I remember thinking at the time it was unlikely casting, and I was dreading the moment when I’d have to introduce myself. How on earth had Inspector Reg Lawson from Homicide fathered the guy from the Computers For Dummies logo? But Bud was fine with it. ‘My son!’ he bellowed, with just the right measure of ham, as he toddled across the cold lino in the soon-to-be-famous kitchen. There followed a theatrical hug and an unnecessary introduction.
‘Is it Bud in quotation marks, or parentheses?’ I immediately asked, having been irritated for twenty-five years by this inconsistency in his on-screen credit.
‘It’s Bud in brackets,’ he replied, seemingly nonplussed by such a nerdish inquiry. ‘Or, at least, it’s supposed to be.’
‘Really? So, it’s wrong then, most of the time?’
‘I get sick of asking them to correct it.’
‘So it’s always been Bud in brackets?’
‘Back in the early days, that’s what they called me. “Bud in Brackets”. Some even shortened it to just “Brackets”.’
‘“Brackets”? Would you mind if I called you “Brackets”?’
‘I’d rather you didn’t.’
In addition to containing Charles (Bud) Tingwell’s most famous role, The Castle marks one of the few times where his name is formatted correctly in the credits.
***
When I was a kid, Charles (Bud),‘Bud’, or sometimes just Bud, Tingwell was Inspector Craddock in the Miss Marple films. Every second Sunday afternoon, it seemed, New Zealand television would run another of these unfailingly cheerful murder mysteries (one was titled Murder Ahoy!), in which a gimlet-eyed spinster would run rings around the local plod. ‘But, Miss Marple,’ Bud in brackets would intone. ‘Why don’t you leave the police work to the professionals?’ But in the end, it would be the wily old bird who uncovered the murderer, leaving the ever-marvelling Craddock with the job of beaning him with a tea tray as he made a futile dash for the French doors. Since then I’ve always hankered to play the role of the skeptical but admiring sidekick to a crimefighting genius, and came closest when I got to play the Brigadier in a ramshackle Dr Who parody on The Late Show.
‘But, Doctor,’ I blustered, impersonating the Brigadier, but channelling pure Tingwell. ‘Why don’t you leave saving the world to the professionals?’ (Or words to that effect).
When I heard that Rob, Tom, Jane and Santo had cast Bud as ‘Gramps’ in the ludicrously low-budget ‘Charlie’, I was amazed. Recent obituaries have suggested that Bud was in some kind of career slump during that period, but have a look at the bloke’s IMDb page. You’ll never stop scrolling. And for every Breaker Morant, Evil Angels, Puberty Blues or Malcolm, there are a dozen roles you’ve probably forgotten, like that of vicious crime boss Jack Henderson in the still shockingly violent Money Movers. ‘Bring in the nail clippers’, says lovable old Bud Tingwell, moments before he has Terry Donovan’s toes chopped off with bolt cutters (having first laid down clear polythene on the fine white carpets in his suburban dining room).
Bud was superb in ‘Charlie’, dragging Tom’s golden retriever round on a rope, cracking wise with the Pissweak Kids, playing his own evil twin brother, and, shortly before Charlie’s assassination in a motorcade, astonishing us all with his unique reading of the line ‘He truly is…a wonder dog’, still my favourite moment in all of The Late Show.
Bud would often be directed to play comedy broad (see WillFull), but he was at his funniest playing it straight, as can be seen in a brief but brilliant sketch (by Visiting Scrivener, Gary McCaffrie) on the sometimes justifiably maligned Totally Full Frontal. He plays an old-school barber who has taken to wearing hot pants and playing Pet Shop Boys in the shop in order to ‘move with the times’. Bud keeps the acting small and lets the costume do the work. ‘Chardonnay?’ he enquires courteously, as he tilts another red-faced old bugger back in the chair.
Remember when Bud won the AFI Award for Best Supporting Actor for The Castle? Of course you don’t, because that year it was won by Andrew S. Gilbert in Kiss or Kill. Now, Andrew S. Gilbert is excellent in everything, including his ‘Hang on, isn’t he only in that scene with the old joke about the bacon?’ appearance in Kiss or Kill, but what the fuck, AFI? Is that their worst call ever? (No, that would be Russian Doll for Best Screenplay.)
In the years following The Castle, Bud was busier than ever, and even scored his very first sex scene – at age 77 – in Paul Cox’s acclaimed slice of pensioner porn, Innocence. Around this time I bumped into him at a ‘Bring Your Dog to Lunch’ barbecue at the offices of Working Dog. He’d heard that I was a film buff and was keen to present his own credentials, speaking knowledgeably of Jack Cardiff’s work with Powell and Pressburger (all of whom he’d, of course, met). I countered by attempting to sound like an expert on the Boulting brothers.
‘Ah, but did you know there was a third one?’ said Bud. ‘Sydney Boulting. Directed the first production of The Mousetrap.’
‘Are you sure?’ I said, clearly on shaky ground. ‘I’ve never heard of any Sydney Boulting.’
‘That’s because he worked under the name Peter Cotes.’
‘Peter Cotes? Why would he do that?’
‘I don’t know,’ replied Bud, ‘He never told me.’
After this, I would occasionally receive a Sunday afternoon phone call from Bud, in which he would speak of the frustrations of trying to raise money to direct his first film, at age 80. ‘I may have to get someone younger,’ he joked. ‘Like Peter O’Toole.’
Sadly, the film was never made, and neither was another one he mentioned to me. A young first-time director from the US had contacted him about an obscure British sci-fi film Bud had made back in the early fifties, ‘in the Quatermass era,’ as he put it. The kid’s idea was to remake the film and cast Bud in the same role he’d played some 60 years earlier, possibly breaking some kind of record in the process. I can find no mention of the original film on the IMDb, suggesting that Bud’s page may still be incomplete.
And still Bud kept working. He has several projects awaiting release, and since his death I have seen no less than three filmmakers claim to have directed his last film.
***
I was on-air, co-hosting 3RRR’s On the Blower with Tony Wilson, when I heard the news that Bud had passed on. ‘Pink Frost’ by The Chills was already fading when the station manager burst into the studio with this bombshell. Consequently, I found myself processing the news in front of a live microphone.
All I could think to do was tell the story of what happened when Charlie – the real Charlie – died, shockingly, of a snakebite. At the time, I was co-hosting Martin/Molloy and in tribute we decided to write a mournful, slowed-down version of the ‘Charlie’ theme and get Bud to recite it like it was a poem, ending, of course, with the line, ‘He truly was…a wonder dog.’ Bud delivered it to perfection and the next day the Herald Sun ran two pages of obituaries for Charlie.
And later that afternoon, I got a call from Bud.
‘I’m dead,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘I’m dead, in Brisbane apparently.’
Somehow, someone must have half-heard our segment and gotten it into their head that it was Bud Tingwell who’d been killed by a snake. This version of events actually went out on a Brisbane radio station, causing momentary panic, and Bud’s phone to explode.
‘Can you set things right on your show this afternoon,’ he requested. ‘Let people know I’m still available.’
Tony Martin is the Melbourne-based author of ‘A Nest of Occasionals’ and ‘Lolly Scramble’. Podcasts of his radio show ‘Get This’ are still available for free download at iTunes (type in: ‘Get This: Richard Marsland Lives’). He is currently directing new episodes of ABCTV's ‘The Librarians’.
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