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Fame and Misfortune
When the Lemmings Motorcycle
Club (briefly) hit the big time
Or how a casual lunch
resulted in TV fame, a misjudged compensation
claim and adding one more victim to the
unemployment statistics
(Travels with Guido 377, August 2024, Guy 'Guido'
Allen)
Once upon a time the Lemmings
Motorcycle Club, which had all of three members back then,
was briefly made famous by the biggest TV soap opera in
Australia (and was huge in the UK). It was called Neighbours.
Then we killed the casual
script-writer...well, not literally. But he was living on
baked beans and toast for a fair while.
So here's what happened: back some time
in the early 1990s, Groff got this idea into his head that
he and I and Morley should form a gang called the Lemmings
Motorcycle Club. The latter was just getting into riding
and Groff saw this as a way of keeping Mr M motivated and
us all amused. Good call.
And the motto? Well, every club has to
have one. The tongue-in-cheek 'Death before Courtesy' was
just edgy enough to make the uninformed wonder if we were
serious or taking the mickey.
Somewhere along the way, we got into the
habit of having/running/hosting a weekly Friday lunch at
Sandy's noodle palace in Richmond, Melbourne. As I may have mentioned in other
columns, Mistress Sandy ruled the joint with an iron
corkscrew.
Smart, funny, and often dictatorial, she
would occasionally ask what we would like to eat. Only as
a matter of curiosity, as it rarely had any relationship
to what turned up on the table.
Given the crew were journos working
mostly in motoring/motorcycling media, the event kind of
turned into a specialist media and friends lunch. Some of
us also had long-term tertiary teaching gigs, which added
another layer to the network.
Friends came along and so did colleagues.
And it kept going across decades and is now reaching
something like 30-plus years. Table sizes vary from a core
group of three to four to a dozen, to 40-ish at Christmas.
Anyway, it's long been a tradition that
friends and family are welcome to bring guests who might
not normally hear of, or fit in with, a Lemmings
Motorcycle Club knees-up. That's resulted in a few
interesting interludes, including another we wrote about,
called Vlad and the
Irony of Lunch.
Arguably the most weird was when a nice
young man turned up at the table – not sure who introduced
him. He was polite, knew how to use chopsticks, and
generally tried to fit in. He was also highly amused by
the whole situation and was making mental notes while
asking for explanations of whatever he didn't at first
understand. Which was a lot.
Now we're talking 1995, so before most
people were using internet and email. And even those of us
who did were working with a pretty sketchy network. Social
media didn't exist in Australia. I'm laying down that
background because when I say we heard a rumour the
Lemmings Motorcycle Club had appeared on the biggest TV
drama in Australia, it was just that. A rumour.
Someone swore they saw it on Network 7
TV. Then we heard other reports. In those pre-social media
days, there was no sharing and Neighbours as sure
as hell didn't plonk its expensive episodes up on the
internet for all to see. Even if you could convince the
then slow dial-up network to carry it.
Next thing, we heard the Lemmings MC had
appeared in a string of episodes or episurds (take your
pick) with one of the lead characters called Gruff rather
than Groff. However they'd kept the 'Death before
Courtesy' motto. Bless them.
Here's a snatch of script and dialogue
from episode 2461:
Gruff
emerges from the bar and hands Sam a beer. Sam beams
that he'd forgotten what a buzz a long ride can be. He
then asks Gruff about the club he belongs to, and
Gruff explains that it's The Lemmings; it's very
exclusive. They sit down and Gruff goes on that they
take weekend trips... they ride bikes... talk about
bikes...
Sam asks how come no one has asked *him* to join. Gruff replies that he seems tied up all the time. Sam asks where he signs, but Gruff tells him that they have rules and initiation tasks - just like any normal gang. He adds:
GRUFF:
Look, meet me at Doobie's tonight and be prepared
to...; well, just be prepared. That's if you want to
be a Lemming!
He
then proposes a toast:
GRUFF:
Death before Courtesy!
Gruff, aka Groff, turns out to be a teasing
trouble-maker across four episurds, which
comprehensively proved our script-writer friend had
listened and observed very carefully at that lunch.
Fantastic. What really got our attention was the show
had made up a set of corny Lemmings MC shoulder patches
and...well...we wanted them.
So I wrote a somewhat forceful if tongue-in-cheek and
ill-considered letter (sent via fax - remember them?) to
the producer in charge of Neighbours. Dated 28
August, 1995, it began: "The Lemmings MC congratulates
you on having the good taste to depict this organisation
on your social documentary series, entitled Neighbours."
It went on to demand compensation, mostly in the form of
the club patches, and perhaps a nice lunch somewhere.
Apparently whoever read the screed didn't get irony,
sarcasm, a wind-up, or any of that other stuff we're
pretty good at. We got no response. Worse, a somewhat
crestfallen freelance script writer turned up for lunch
again some weeks later to reveal he'd been sacked from
the high-pressure daily soap. Bugger...that wasn't meant
to happen.
Neighbours has moved networks and been reinvented
a few times over the intervening 30-ish years. I'm
hoping our script-writer was forgiven and re-hired, took
up riding and, just quietly, has one of those patches
sewn on to his jacket...
***
Postscript from Groff: "The
thing that annoyed me about it the most was spending
years explaining that we hadn't copied the club from an
episode of Neighbours but had, in fact,
pre-existed it!"
A side note: Neighbours was an incredibly high-pressure school for local TV production, with daily episodes five days a week for several decades, and has now amassed 9095 shows. See its Wikipedia entry.
There is of
course a Neighbours fan site which has a
summary of every episurd. Put 'lemmings' into the search
window and you'll find four listed.
They are: 2461, 2462, 2464 and 2485.
More Travels with Guido columns
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