History
Zig and Zag were the clown duo of Jack Perry and Doug McKenzie and began performing together in the 1950s in Melbourne. Before 1939, McKenzie was a junior announcer on radio station 3XY. By 1952, he was voicing advertisements dressed as a clown with a young Bert Newton. This led to Zig and Zag regularly appearing on a Saturday morning children's show with Frank Thring Snr. They worked alongside disc jockey Stan Rofe and Newton. In March 1956, they drove a toy car at their first Moomba parade and were crowd favourites at the annual festival. On 10 November, local TV station HSV7 broadcast the first episode of Peters Fun Fair, with the duo as its stars, it was the first children's session televised in Australia. They dressed in costumes advertising Peters Ice Cream, with the slogan, "the health food of a nation", and used the catchphrase "No-o-o trouble". Zig and Zag added their theme song, "You and Me", to their act in the late 1950s. Written by Tommy Steele, it was originally performed by Steele and Jimmy Edwards in the 1958 London pantomime production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella. Peters Fun Fair also featured Roy Lyons as Cousin Roy and continued for 13 years.
To the TV generation of impressionable children, they are remembered as the slightly naughty duo who broke the King Street Bridge: after a structural failure in July 1962 they filmed a segment for their show where they dropped a coconut and pretended to crack the bridge accidentally.
Zig and Zag appeared on the annual HSV7 Good Friday Appeal, a telethon for Royal Children's Hospital, for more than forty years.
In February 1999, Zig and Zag were named as Moomba Monarchs, a festival that they had been associated with for 44 years, but they were stood down before being crowned in March. Revelations of Perry's indecent assaults on his granddaughter, from his 1994 trial, were broadcast on current affairs show Today Tonight. Since the duo's act was always aimed at children, it was irreparably ruined, and after the scandal, the pair never spoke to each other.
Read more about this topic: Zig And Zag (Australian Performers)
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