After a faltering start, the Norman Gunston Show rapidly gained a huge national audience and the series became the pre-eminent Australian TV comedy program of its day, with McDonald winning a Gold Logie and having several pop hits.
McDonald is in real life an accomplished blues harmonica player (he jammed with Frank Zappa in an interview recording during Zappa's second Australian tour) and many of Norman's musical performances were regularly punctuated by poorly executed and inappropriate harmonica playing, such as in his rendition of the Billy Joel signature tune "Piano Man".
In his debut show he repeatedly referred to wealthy Sydney socialite Lady Fairfax as "Mrs Lady Fairfax" and in a later show he introduced progressive union leader Jack Mundey as "Mister Jack Mondaay" – a satirical inversion of the Australian habit of pronouncing the morphograph '-day' as '-dee' in the days of the week (e.g. "Sat'dee" for "Saturday").
As the series developed McDonald and his team introduced additional live and pre-taped segments including: Stage settings were defiantly downmarket and rooted in Australian suburbia and kitsch RSL club stylings – after being introduced, bemused guests were offered their choice of dubious delicacies (such as pineapple doughnuts or the infamous Chiko Roll) from Norman's hot food bar, before being invited to sit on his vinyl-clad "night-and-day" (an Australian term for sofa bed).
Gunston's personal appearance satirised club performers and TV interviewers of the time – for the studio segments he wore an ill-fitting blue lurex tuxedo jacket (wrongly buttoned) and the fly on his (too short) trousers was habitually left undone, with the shirt-tail poking out through the zip.
One of his visual trademarks was the small pieces of tissue paper applied to his pasty white face to cover supposed shaving cuts.
Gunston performed subversive TV interviews with many major celebrities – during a Wings press conference he quipped to Linda McCartney: 'That's funny, you don't look Japanese.'
(referencing Yoko Ono);[1] other famous victims included Mick Jagger, Warren Beatty, Charlton Heston, and Muhammad Ali.
McDonald was one of the pioneers of the satirical "ambush" interview technique, which was founded on his considerable improvisational acting skills and precise comic timing.
Thus, he was successfully able to hide behind the guise of a fully rounded and highly plausible character who appears to be stupid in order to throw his otherwise media-savvy quarry off their guard.
This caused various results, from hilarity (Sally Struthers and Cheech and Chong), to clever play-alongs like Muhammad Ali ("I'm punchy – what's your excuse?")
The Australian satirical comedy team The Chaser have also frequently used the Gunston Method to ambush unwitting targets—examples include the Julian Morrow character the "Citizens' Infringment Officer", and the team's now-legendary stunt in which they managed to penetrate a tight security cordon around the APEC Forum, despite the fact that Chas Licciardello was masquerading as Osama bin Laden.
Through sheer good luck, Gunston was immortalised in Australian political history when, on the morning of 11 November 1975, McDonald and his film crew – who happened to be in Canberra at the time – found out that the Labor government led by Gough Whitlam had just been dismissed by the Governor-General Sir John Kerr.
Wearing a safari jacket and shorts, Gunston travelled around outback Australia, interfering and adventuring in high and low places in his usual cack-handed manner.
This sketch, a send-up of melodramatic soap operas set in a supermarket, mostly featured former cast members of the then-popular serial Number 96: Abigail, Vivienne Garrett, Candy Raymond, Philippa Baker, Judy Lynne, Anne Louise Lambert.