Friday Flashback: The Games
1n 1998 John Clarke, Bryan Dawe & Gina Riley became the Sydney Organising Committee for the 2000 Olympics.
- Published by David Knox
- on
A number of readers have suggested it’s time for a new version of The Games.
The series on planning the Sydney 2000 Games screened on ABC in 1998 and 2000 with the great John Clarke, Bryan Dawe and Gina Riley as the Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games. One of our first mockumentaries, the trio even used their own names.
Nicholas Bell played the Secretary to the Minister for the Olympics and guests included John Farnham, Ugly Dave Gray, Frank Woodley, Barrie Cassidy, Maxine McKew, and Sam Neill.
The series was said to be the ‘inspiration’ for Britain’s Twenty Twelve and plagiarism accusations were a sore long-held point to John Clarke and co-creator, 3AW’s Ross Stevenson.
With Brisbane 2032 on the way…. maybe the Utopia team could carry the baton?
Share
- Tagged with The Games, Twenty Twelve, Utopia
3 Responses
Love this at the time, and again every time I’ve re-watched it thanks to repeats and it being on iView. Others have tried and failed to recreate this (cough cough BBC)… and now that we’ve lost the great John Clarke, you couldn’t do a remake / new series etc without him, or Gina / Bryan / Nicholas.
That being said, Utopia has filled the void perfectly – same piss-take government-type style, but different enough to carry itself without feeling like it’s trying to do the same thing. There are two types of audience for Utopia – those who think it’s a mockumentary / comedy taking the piss out of how people thing government departments & organisations function… and those who work within government and see this as a spot-on documentary of how things actually are (such as myself – Utopia couldn’t be closer to the truth if it tried).
nah, leave it, some shows are too perfect to remake, i’ve been enjoying the repeats on Iview of late….
I wonder who would write a sequel to The Games in ten years’ time…?