Rory O'Donoghue (13 May 1949 – 13 December 2017)[1] was an Australian actor, composer and musician, best known for playing the character "Thin Arthur" in the 1970s ABC Television sketch comedy series The Aunty Jack Show,[2] and for playing the guitar solo on Kevin Johnson's biggest hit "Rock 'N' Roll (I Gave You the Best Years of My Life)".
The Pogs had a few lineup changes and gradually evolved into the psychedelic band Oak Apple Day who released one single on the Philips label in 1969 before breaking up in 1970.
The immediate success of this series - the groundbreaking Australian sketch comedy The Aunty Jack Show (1972–73) - catapulted Bond and O'Donoghue to national prominence.
In Season One, Grahame ("Aunty Jack") and Rory ("Thin Arthur") co-starred with actors Sandra MacGregor and John Derum (respectively playing the recurring characters "Flange Desire" and "Narrator Neville").
McDonald subsequently enjoyed enormous solo success as Norman Gunston, an awkward and charmless regional TV presenter (created by series writer Wendy Skelcher) who made a brief first appearance in a Season 2 episode of Aunty Jack.
Concurrent with his work in Aunty Jack in 1972, O'Donoghue had a regular featured role (as the apostle Peter) in the original Australian stage production of Jesus Christ Superstar (1972) – a production he and Grahame also sent up in the Aunty Jack sketch "Tarzan Super-Ape" (a musical parody of 'Superstar' billed as a "five-minute origami rock opera").
Rory's other musical credits in this period included playing the lead guitar solo on the hit 1974 Kevin Johnson single "Rock 'N' Roll (I Gave You the Best Years of My Life)" and session contributions to an album by renowned jazz/folk performer Margret RoadKnight.
Bond and O'Donoghue co-starred and collaborated extensively on performance, sketch writing and music for The Aunty Jack Show and its various spin-offs.
However he, O'Donoghue and McDonald reunited to reprise their roles as Thin Arthur, Aunty Jack, and Kid Eager for a five-minute TV special Aunty Jack Introduces Colour, which was broadcast just before midnight on 1 March 1975, to mark the ABC's official transition to colour TV broadcasting.
Grahame and Rory's unhappiness with their treatment by the ABC led to their estrangement from the network; after a final short-lived TV series - The Of Show (directed by Ric Birch of Olympic Ceremonies and other major event fame… a reworking of the ill-fated Off Show) the duo severed their relationship with the ABC for many years and Bond did not appear on the network again until the late 1980s.
The tension between the parties was further exacerbated by persistent rumours that the ABC had erased all or major parts of the master tapes of the duo's various Aunty Jack-era projects.
Although these two programs were fully restored for DVD (including previously unseen colour footage), it is believed that the master tapes of Flash Nick From Jindavik did not survive and that some or all of the series was erased by the ABC in the late 1970s as part of an internal economy drive.
Following the success of The Aunty Jack Show, the team undertook a national concert tour on which they were backed by an all-star group that included members of the 'Superstar' house band, and guest vocalist Stevie Wright, former lead singer of The Easybeats, with whom O'Donoghue had worked in 'Superstar'.
[9] During the late 1970s and early 1980s O'Donoghue continued to collaborate with Bond on their advertising work, and they enjoyed renewed success on the stage with another Shakespeare parody - the popular production Boys Own McBeth, a musical send-up of the Shakespeare play, set in a private boys' school, which toured nationally around Australia to considerable acclaim.
In 1980 he and Bond collaborated on the score for the Australian movie Fatty Finn, directed by their former ABC colleague Maurice Murphy, and for which Rory won the AFI Award for best music.
He seldom rode with the WTC training group, preferring to ride his Cervélo on his bike trainer set up outside his house in Davidson and later in Manly.