Link: First review of BUS, The Age 1981

Link: BUS video 1988

BUS SON OF TRAM

A moving experience

(1981 - ?)

Stage Left Review 2006 by Tim Richards

It’s best to not think too hard when taking part in Rod Quantock’s “Bus”. Just go with the flow.

For the uninitiated, “Bus” is Quantock’s comic brainchild, perhaps his quirkiest and best-known show. The audience takes part in an unconventional bus ride, with Quantock as tour leader-cum-anarchist extraordinaire.

He carries a rubber chicken on a pole. The audience wears plastic glasses and noses. And the tour consists, in the comedian’s words, of "a busload of people who don't know where they're going, visiting a group of people who don't know they're coming".

On the night I took part, the 25 of us sang Happy Birthday to people in the Sheraton’s dining room, learned about packaging from a Chicago businessman, were thrown out of a fitness club, serenaded a visitor and her niece in a compact room at the Duxton, occupied a 7-11, invaded the Australian Club’s foyer, and escorted two Adelaide tourists from William street to the Casino, forming a guard of honour as they entered.

We also did a bit of busking to bemused foreign visitors as we went, and gave the proceeds to the Adelaide women to spend on the pokies.

It may sound silly and light-hearted, but there’s a certain thrill in being given the licence to trespass and act up. There’s also a strange freedom in following Quantock on his escapades, knowing he’s the lightning rod for any trouble that may come our way. That, and the anonymity of the fake nose and glasses.

It’s an instructive example of followers giving up their decision-making rights to a charismatic leader, along with any responsibility for the consequences.

Of course, Quantock breezes through it all with his wit, though it’s interesting to note people’s reactions. Some people know exactly who he is and welcome him with open arms, others don’t but get caught up in the fun. Some become bemused, defensive or even hostile.

There’s also a “pied piper” effect at work. Along the way we picked up followers, including a group of young people (“homeless kiddies” to Quantock) who tagged along from McDonald’s for a few blocks, and the aforementioned Adelaiders: “Those lights we just passed were traffic lights girls, you probably haven’t seen them before”.

Of course he gets away with it all, a “wise fool” challenging the everyday order of things for his audience and the people we encounter. At the end, we have indeed seen Melbourne in a different way, and felt the exhilaration of breaking the rules of normal behaviour. “Bus” is entertaining, edgy and a load of fun.

Back on the buses

(The Age December 6 2002)

By Stephanie Bunbury

It is nearly 10 years since Rod Quantock stopped doing his bus tours of Melbourne, Edinburgh and any other town he could reasonably disturb. He's back now, he says, partly to remind himself that, despite what we tell each other, we are not really living with the enemy. In fact, strangers we meet are quite likely to chuckle along with us, especially if we face them with a rubber chook on a stick and a lot of people wearing false noses.

"It's important, because people constantly move in their own circles, withdrawing from each other more and more." Not that it is anyone's own fault, he adds. It used to be that we knew the local shopkeepers, sometimes all our lives. "You built up relationships. And now those relationships have disappeared."

Bus, as he calls his evening tours of surprise visits to Melbourne locations, is not going to change the face of society, but it can certainly give people a few laughs. "It's a great feeling to have gone two hours or so, perhaps gone to eight different places as disparate as a laundromat and a five-star restaurant and have people at the end say it was the best fun they'd ever had," he says.

And he has never had any difficulty finding new places to go. "So much goes on in Melbourne in little rooms and scout halls, down back alleys," he says. "I mean, I didn't know we had a very active budgerigar society in Australia that meets very regularly. People who breed them put them in cages and bring them to meetings once a month and talk about them in fine detail and they are really interesting people. That was a fascinating thing to see."

The show stopped when Quantock felt he had become too familiar, at least in the inner city. "Once people know, they have made up their minds before you get to the door," he says. This was not good for theatre. The element of surprise had to be there.

 The surprise is not always exciting, of course. There was the bloke who had just got a baby to sleep when Quantock's chook knocked on his door.

Then there were the young bucks at a Greek wedding who decided to bounce their unexpected visitors, even though the old folks had hooted with laughter when they gave them a song. Several of Bus's passengers sustained minor bruising, which worried Quantock until he saw how thoroughly elated they were when they got back on board.

And there was the Carlton Football Club when the group found their way into the dinner in honor of Perce Jones.

He doesn't remember the corporate gigs or the night someone smashed a plate at the Comedy Cafe, his Fitzroy venue where Bus started in 1981. "When people say 'I came with you the night we went to the Southern Cross Hotel to the testimonial dinner for Perce Jones and somebody threw their dessert at you and Lou Richards was on the stage telling us to bugger off and all hell broke loose' - I remember that very well."

Bus has been back on the road for a couple of weeks now. When I got on this week, we headed straight for the boatsheds by the Yarra and set about a large-scale incursion into riverside life. The youngest Bus passenger, Sarah, gained a seat on the Chinese Youth Association's dragon boat, now in training for Moomba. The boat's crew giggled with delight.

Quantock, armed with his megaphone, then bailed up a big bloke in a small kayak. "Are you in training?" he asked. "Yep," said the Bloke, surprisingly. "For what?" "The Murray River marathon." Again, this seemed aspirational, but unlikely. "Have you ever won?" asked Quantock. "Yep," said Bloke, voice flat as a tack. "Last year." The Bus passengers burst into spontaneous applause.

Meeting Kayak Bloke was our decisive moment of bonding. There was something so essentially Australian about the whole encounter: we were all who we were, even though most of us were wearing the false noses Quantock uses as tickets. It stood us in excellent stead when we stormed the Windsor Hotel Dining Room later on. After Quantock had a covert look at the reservations book and a more open chat with the maitresse d', we were able to sing a confident Happy Birthday to someone called Annie.

"I think you have the wrong person!" she gasped as her friends took pictures of her with the assembled masked singers. "It's not my birthday!" Quantock fixed her with his teacher's hard gaze. "I don't care," he said. Everyone hooted, especially Annie's friends.

"Most people are very sad when you leave," says Quantock, "because you have sort of broken the rhythm of their day-to-day existence."

Bus, however, lifts everything in its path from the rut. "I have met people who were very reluctant to get involved with us, who at the end of it would actually lock the door to keep us inside," says Quantock.

Before he started this season, he said it would be interesting to find out how much the culture of fear had closed doors that once would have been open. "We've got gated communities; we've got car alarms; we've got people putting steel shutters over their windows at night. People are frightened - of other people taking what they've got, of being killed, I suppose - so the thing I am going to find most interesting is how severe security has become."

In fact, the 30-odd people on my tour had no difficulty getting up to the swimming pool in one of Melbourne's most prestigious blocks of flats. I stuck my head in the fifth-floor laundry room nearby. With all that prestige, I must say I'd want the dryer to work.

This season, he thinks, will be the last outing for Bus. But can an institution simply wither? As we accompany a woman walking her dog down a laneway in Melbourne, supposedly on the way to her loft, we pass a rock venue hosting a trivia night. Several of the noses lead the charge to the window. The voice that rings out is unmistakeable. "Oh my God, it's my worst nightmare!" shrieks Helen Razer. "It's Rod Quantock!"

She launches into a stream of insults for his tired, superannuated act, contrived Australian persona and heaven knows what else, stuff you can shout at unshakeable instititutions. He yells back, then leads us back up the lane. The top of our crocodile is turning towards The Windsor as she appears at the venue's door. "Come in!" she shouts after us. "Come on!" Quantock doesn't look back. We've got things to do, places to go, happy birthdays to sing. We've got a Bus to catch.

LIFE WITH TREVOR THE CHOOK

(The Herald Sun - 2008)

It’s forty years this year since I made my show biz debut in the Melbourne University Architects’ Revue. Over those forty years I have worked with the biggest names in the entertainment industry and performed on the great stages of the nation. I’ve been in TV Week and Vogue.

After all those years and people and places it is a matter of some embarrassment to say that my most enduring professional relationship was with a rubber chook named Trevor. (I called him Trevor after a primary school hero of mine who was really good at British Bulldogs, an antique game of speed and brute force.)

I met Trevor in Bernard’s Magic Shop in Elizabeth Street one November Saturday morning years ago.

I was looking for a comic accoutrement to a new show I was doing. The show involved me taking a bus load of dinners from the Comedy Café in Fitzroy on a tour to the Mecca of Melbourne at Christmas, the Myers Christmas windows.

I’d taken a bus in the night before and two of my flock got on the wrong bus and ended up in Rosebud with an elderly citizens club after their annual Christmas windows outing. They had a lovely time, but that wasn’t the point. Audiences are hard to get at the best of times and to lose them is just not cricket.

I needed a flag or a banner, a rallying point so those who wandered from the flock could find their way back again. That’s why I was in Bernard’s.

I told Bernard what I was after and he introduced me to Trevor. Trevor was hanging upside-down between ‘The Amazing Severed Finger in a Matchbox Illusion’ and the ‘Surprising Banana Water-Pistol’. As soon as I saw him I knew my quest was over.

Bernard offered to put Trevor in a bag but I said, ‘No thanks, I’ll wear him home.’ And I did. (If you’ve never walked through the city with a rubber chook you should. People like people with rubber chooks. In fact the world would be a better place if everybody had a rubber chook.)

After that Trevor and I were inseparable. We did hundreds of bus tours together all over Australia, even in Edinburgh. We were on television and in the press. Total strangers would come up to me on the street and say, ‘You’re that guy with the chook’, or they’d say to Trevor, ‘You’re that chook with the guy.’ We were fabulously famous and it was first class all the way. Except for Trevor. He travelled in a suit case.

We did our last show not long ago and after that Trevor retired to a box in the climate-controlled bowels of The Performing Arts Museum - and he used to complain about a suitcase.  We haven’t seen a lot of each other since then and Trevor says that suits him fine.

When I asked him if he’d like to say a few words for this, my 40th anniversary year he said, “Bugger off.” That’s the side of Trevor the public never saw. I think I can say now Trevor and I had a somewhat strained show-biz ‘marriage’ and we didn’t part on the best of terms.

We didn’t even start on the best of terms. The first thing I did when I got him home was to stick him on a six foot long stick, parson’s nose-first. He never forgave me for that. (Trivia: The stick’s name was Ian.)

And he’s never forgiven me for calling him ‘Trevor’. His real name is Maria Pollo and he is a she and she’s from Italy. (Trivia: Italian rubber chooks are the Stradivarius’s of rubber chooks. Accept no substitutes. Especially substitutes from Taiwan. Taiwanese rubber chooks have none of the refined styling or comic elegance of the Italian chook.)

With Trevor on board the bus tours were a triumph. Everyone was laughing, everyone was happy and, thanks to Trevor on his stick, no-one was ending up in Rosebud.

We had a hiccup when the Christmas windows came down in January but we adapted and evolved. We took the audience to other places - police graduations, the Logies, budgerigar judgings, Percy Jones’ testimonial dinner, private homes, boarding schools, massage parlours.

When we weren’t performing Trevor spent his time on top of a cupboard in the lounge room where my cricket and football trophies would have gone had I won any.

Despite Trevor’s grumbles about suitcases and names and sticks Rod and Trevor was the longest partnership in Australian show biz history, longer than Bert and Newton, longer than Graham and Kennedy and here’s hoping, longer than Kyle and Jackie O.

Well, that’s my side of the story. It would be only fair to hear what Trevor has to say about me. Fortunately rubber chooks can’t talk and I’ve got an injunction against Penguin stopping them publishing the memoir he wrote so hopefully you’ll never know.

1988 - BUS GOES TO THE EDINBURGH FESTIVAL

And gets a Perrier Award nomination

‘For sheer cheek and inventiveness, the amazing Rod Quantock must take the honours. Bizarre, fresh, theatrically dangerous, unpredictable’

The Guardian (U.K.)

Excerpt from Comics: A Decade of Comedy at the Assembly Rooms by John Connor, 1990

Things had been getting a trifle cosy in Edinburgh but luckily two hundred years before 1988 Australia had been founded. To celebrate the bicentenary a whole boatload (well, not everyone likes to fly) of Aussie comics came a visiting under the reasonably witty title of 'Oznost'. It was a pretty mixed pouchful and some 'rooed' (sorry) the day they decided to come. But there was one performer who really did bring the spirit of adventure with him. In fact he epitomised what the Fringe should be - mad, bad and quite fun to know. His name was Rod Quantock and his audience, the performers, and the stage he set for them was the City of Edinburgh. It was the one empty space that no one had thought of using.

Quantock had a bus, and in that bus he'd get forty people to put on Groucho Marx masks and read a song sheet. After that the rest of the trip would take in whatever took his fancy -one involved everyone bending down and sneaking past the security guard at the main post office sorting centre. What could the guard do? Say, 'Halt, who goes there -friend or foe?' to a bunch of people wearing Groucho masks and singing?

Quantock became an infamous character. On his first night out he visited a massage parlour which was not used to such rough treatment.

Bill Burdet-Coutts (Director of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival): 'The woman in charge wasn't at all happy. She got on to the police. Quantock was miked up because a TV crew were shooting him and the police caught up with him in the street. He inveigled himself into someone's flat and took the police with him because they wanted a quiet word. They cautioned him and it was broadcast.

'I went on a tour with him in Australia. One guy who was drunk got on board because he thought it was the bus to Gringuid. He woke up fifteen minutes later and he was surrounded by all these people wearing Groucho masks singing away merrily. Later when we got into someone's house he phoned up his wife and tried to explain what was going on. I don't think she believed him.'

A G'night out with Rod

Way beyond the Fringe on a bus ride into bedlam

The Daily Express

August 18 1988

It is a moving experience on board Rod Quantock's coach tour of Edinburgh and it can reduce you to tears ... of laughter.

He's got to be the loopiest guy in a city full of Fringe extroverts. No one but the tall, gangling Aussie - his only props a bush hat, loud-hailer and a rubber chicken on the end of a pole - could get away with it.

For Melbourne-born Rod doesn't give XXXXs for pomp and circumstance, and his go-anywhere "G 'Day" bonhomie creates embarrassing situations every five minutes or so on his tour of the city.

I write, exhausted, from a two-hour experience on this one-man show BUS which hits the road nightly during the Festival. Behind the big-nosed anonymity of Groucho Marx disguises and plastic glasses, 40 of trooped like a bunch of schoolkid pranksters.

The tour began with us posing as animal liberationists in a crowded Whimpy bar in Princes Street.

In posh Landsdowne Crescent, off-duty librarian Alex Cain made the mistake of asking, “What’s going on?” Two minutes later we were listening to him give a poetry reading.

Worse was to come.

Uninvited, the coachload strolled into the Scottish Congregational College in Roseberry Crescent singing “Puff the Magic Dragon’, picked up four Italian girl tourists outside a funeral parlour after coaxing them to sing Volare, then drew into Torphicen Place.

We were refused entry to the Old Bill Bar but hit the police station opposite with Rod declaring: “We’ve come to confess to 3,000 parking fines.”

Across the road, we blustered our way into the Riviera Massage and Sauna Parlour.

After that gate-crashing a dinner party at the Caledonian Hotel on our way home was mere child’s play.

GO FOR FUN ON THE SILLY BUS

By Raymond Ross

The Scotsman

Keep your eyes peeled tonight and every week night for the next three weeks for a bearded gentleman armed with a megaphone and a rubber chicken leading bus parties - all wearing Groucho Marx noses - around the city. Or, alternatively, sign up for one of the most unique and bizarre bus trips· you're ever likely to go on "Rod Quantock's BUS."

When you step on the bus, you won't know where you're going. Neither will the driver. Rod Quantock, your tour guide, might. It depends on the mood he's in and the mood he thinks you're in. You're quite likely to land up at an exclusive restaurant, a political gathering, a police station and a graveyard - or any possible combination ·you can think of - all on the same night.

Famed in his native Melbourne, Australia, Quantock's bus trips have in their time visited brothels to sing "Onward Christian Soldiers," dog tracks to cheer on the electric hare and have even burst on stage at the end of someone else's perform­ance to take their bow for them and to win an encore.

Not only will you not know where you're going, but the places you arrive at will not be expecting you. "Anyone who leaves their door open," says Rod "is vulnerable."

But it's not quite a case of hav­ing to lock up your daughters and your cutlery. "I never force my way in anywhere. I leave if asked. But, you know, even security men trained to deal with drunks and all sorts, usually don't know what to do with a busload of people wearing funny noses. There's no threat involved. We're not out to cause distress. It's like a nature study tour. We're out to observe.

"I once took a party into Australia's most exclusive restaurant. We were given a glass of wine and sat down to chat to the customers for ten minutes. On another occasion we went to a restaurant which had pretentions to being the best. They threw buckets of water at us. But most people take it well.

"I like to get people into places they would not normally dream of going to. It can be confusing and confusion's part of the fun. The most frequent comment from passengers at the end of the evening is 'Did you see the look on that person's face'. It puts people on the spot. Some try to dismiss it because it's silly. They see no place for silliness in life. I think that shows a lack of humanity."

So, what's the point behind the BUS?

"There's no point," says Rod. "It is an exercise in human rela­tions, that's all. I do it because I like ad-libbing for two and a half hours. A TV psychiatrist - in Australia - said that BUS's popularity was such because by putting funny noses on people I broke down their inhibitions and allowed them to do things they wouldn't normally do.

"I've had 11-year-old children and· a 94-year-old lady on these trips. It allows people to come out of themselves. On the other hand, I once had a bunch of macho drunks out to cause a bit of bother. I took them to a gay disco and let the gay bouncers eye them up. That soon quietened them down. I do have a sense of justice although I don't like con­frontation.

"But it's generally pretty rollicking and very good humoured. It injects the unusual into people's lives."

The megaphone could obviously come in handy. But why carry a rubber chicken?

"In Australia it's called a 'chook'. I use it as a rallying point for the party because it's the height of silliness. Its real name is Trevor. Trevor has a liking for women in their late forties on­wards - you know, the ones you call 'no spring chickens' because they're the ones who know what to do with a 'chook' when the moment comes."

For the adventurous the moment comes every night at 7pm at the Assembly Rooms. The BUS leaves sharp and visits entirely different places each night.