person or book cover
Gordon Chater as Dominic McGooley in the opening credits for My Name's McGooley (screen cap)
form y separately published work icon My Name's McGooley - What's Yours? series - publisher   film/TV  
Issue Details: First known date: 1966-1968... 1966-1968 My Name's McGooley - What's Yours?
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

Australia's first successful sit-com, My Name's McGooley's - What's Yours? blended domestic and social realism in an exploration of working-class Australian life.

According to Don Storey's summation of the program in his Classic Australian Television, My Name's McGooley - What's Yours? focused on

working class battler Wally Stiller and his wife Rita, who live with Rita's father Dominic McGooley, a crusty old pensioner. Their house is in Balmain, an inner suburb of Sydney that was then still largely working class. In classic sit-com tradition, early episodes centred on the farcical situations that McGooley blundered into, which were exploited for their comedy potential. As the series progressed, Wally Stiller became the protagonist, and the emphasis shifted to social issues within the family structure, with McGooley reacting to Wally's middle-aged ocker outlook on life.

Created by Ralph Peterson, who originally intended the program for British commerical network ITV, My Name's McGooley made use of actors who were already under contract to ATN-7 (both Gordon Chater and Noeline Brown, for example, had been working on The Mavis Bramston Show), as well as attracting John Meillon back from England to take the role of Wally.

Highly successful with audiences from the outset, My Name's McGooley ran for nearly ninety episodes before Gordon Chater left the program (and moved to a new vehicle, The Gordon Chater Show, still on ATN-7). With McGooley absent, the program was heavily re-tooled and re-invented as Rita and Wally.

Notes

  • Some episodes of My Name's McGooley are available to watch on YouTube. See, for example, episode two, 'The New House'. (Sighted: 16/12/2011)
  • Australian Women's Weekly columnist Nan Musgrove, critices three Australian television series from the ear, including The Private World of Miss Prim. Under the sub-heading 'Is Burlesque Really Necessary?," she writes:

    ATN7's new domestic comedy, My Name's McGooley - What's Yours?, a series specially devised for the talents of Gordon Chater, leaves me disappointed. The three main characters, Chater as McGooley, John Meillon as Wally Stiller, and Judi Farr as his wife, Rita, are splendid - real talking, walking Australians - but the stories don't match the characters. McGooley is Australian TV's third attempt at domestic comedy, or life with laughs, as it is known here. The first was Barley Charlie, a travesty of life in a service station on the Hume Highway. The second was The Private World of Miss Prim, the unfortunate comedy which starred Dawn Lake. Dawn as Miss Prim escaped into a world of fan- tasy (in dream sequences) from her real life in a Sydney office. Her office life was such a burlesque of the real thing that it made the whole show ridiculous. Both these lamentable shows were written by visiting Englishmen - Barley Charley by the creators of The Rag Trade, Ronald Chesney and Wolfe, and Miss Prim by Stan Mars. All of them apparently see life in Australia as a burlesque. I thought Ralph Petersen, a native of Adelaide, might do better for the local scene (14 September 1966, p.30.).

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • Sydney, New South Wales,: Channel 7 , 1966-1968 .
      person or book cover
      Title screen for My Names McGooley (screen cap)
      Extent: 88x30min. episodesp.
      Description: Produced on videotape; black-and-white

Works about this Work

Class Acts : TV Larrikins and the Advent of the Ocker, 1957–1984 Lindsay Barrett , Peter Kirkpatrick , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Australian Studies , 2 vol. 47 no. 2023; (p. 344-359)

'Stephen Fry has described the typical American comic hero as a freewheeling “wisecracker” compared to the English type, who is apt to be an aspirational lower-middle-class failure. With Fry as a prompt, we consider humour and class in the evolution—or devolution—of that representative local hero, the larrikin, during Australian television’s first three decades. This was a period that saw a realignment of the nation’s political, economic and cultural affiliations away from Britain towards the US, and in which the ocker came into sudden prominence as a less benign version of rowdy male identity. If media larrikins such as Graham Kennedy and Paul Hogan excelled at the kind of sketch-based humour that had its origins in vaudeville and were unsuited to sitcoms, ocker characters such as Wally Stiller from My Name’s McGooley and Ted Bullpitt from Kingswood Country found a home there. Our analysis of larrikin and ocker humour is triangulated with that of Norman Gunston, as played by Garry McDonald: a desperately aspirational failure with his own mock variety show who emerged from the dialogue between these two comic types. We conclude with some thoughts on post-ockerism and the emergence of the bogan.' (Publication abstract)

Class Acts : TV Larrikins and the Advent of the Ocker, 1957–1984 Lindsay Barrett , Peter Kirkpatrick , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Australian Studies , 2 vol. 47 no. 2023; (p. 344-359)

'Stephen Fry has described the typical American comic hero as a freewheeling “wisecracker” compared to the English type, who is apt to be an aspirational lower-middle-class failure. With Fry as a prompt, we consider humour and class in the evolution—or devolution—of that representative local hero, the larrikin, during Australian television’s first three decades. This was a period that saw a realignment of the nation’s political, economic and cultural affiliations away from Britain towards the US, and in which the ocker came into sudden prominence as a less benign version of rowdy male identity. If media larrikins such as Graham Kennedy and Paul Hogan excelled at the kind of sketch-based humour that had its origins in vaudeville and were unsuited to sitcoms, ocker characters such as Wally Stiller from My Name’s McGooley and Ted Bullpitt from Kingswood Country found a home there. Our analysis of larrikin and ocker humour is triangulated with that of Norman Gunston, as played by Garry McDonald: a desperately aspirational failure with his own mock variety show who emerged from the dialogue between these two comic types. We conclude with some thoughts on post-ockerism and the emergence of the bogan.' (Publication abstract)

Last amended 13 Mar 2015 10:07:51
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  • Balmain, Glebe - Leichhardt - Balmain area, Sydney Inner West, Sydney, New South Wales,
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