August 2000 Volume 81 Number 8 "serving the protectors"
By Brett Williams

MERCILESS
Beginnings

young Brian Wenzel woke in a Victorian remand home one morning to see only the dangling legs of a dead boy who had hanged himself. It was the late 1930s, and Wenzel - who admits to a rebellious childhood - knew well the misery of orphanages and reformatories.

He ended up in remand with his brother for continually running away from a Geelong boys’ home, in which they had been placed to “get some education”. They simply wouldn’t attend a regular school.

Wenzel’s father - who with the outbreak of WWII had joined the air force - sometimes had to request special leave to retrieve his missing son. And a determined Wenzel had sometimes fled as far as New South Wales.

But captured boys’ home escapees faced swift retribution: a head-shave and a flogging, followed by outfitting with dungarees and a shirt with “escapee” blazoned across its back.

And as their German surname aroused suspicion in wartime Australia, the two brothers endured taunts of “Hun”, “Kraut” and “Fritz”. To Wenzel, however, the names were meaningless. He shrugged them off as “water off a duck’s back”. Years later, he would describe his childhood as “a good grounding for an actor”.

The Wenzel clan had moved to Victoria from Adelaide in 1934, but returned just after the war. Then a teenager with his misspent childhood behind him, Wenzel was set to complete a year’s schooling - and then realize his dream of an acting career.

Inspired by his father, a grocer-cum-actor, Wenzel joined the circus at the age of 14. Then, seemingly worlds away from a lead role in a television drama, he lay on sawdust in the circus ring as an elephant stepped over him. Proudly, he thought: “This is acting!”

With little education and no formal acting lessons, his first stage performance came as a 17-year-old at the Norwood Town Hall. His small part was contained in just two pages of the script. So when the actors on stage accidentally missed those pages on opening night, Wenzel “never got on”.

But the boy who had been born in Mile End, and always play-acted as a child, was beginning to make his way. He was still to work in many non-acting jobs around Adelaide, but soon won parts in early Crawford productions such as Homicide, Division 4 and Matlock Police.

To take those parts, however, he was burdened with continual trips to Melbourne for filming. And each trip required time off from his job as an inspector at Fairfax Newspapers in Currie St. So in 1972 he moved to Sydney, where opportunities for actors were far greater.

In 1981, a Channel 7 executive - who had seen Wenzel in an earlier ABC drama, Certain Women - offered him the part of a small-town police sergeant in a series pilot. Neither was certain how long this new series - A Country Practice - would last. Wenzel predicted four years; the executive suggested it would “give us a couple of years’ eating”.

“We were both wrong,” says Wenzel. “It went for 12 years. It was a wonderful job to get at the age of 52, and then going through until I was 64 was great. It finished up in 48 countries, and residuals that came in allowed me to buy a house.”

By the time Wenzel took on his Sgt Frank Gilroy part, he was a seasoned actor who, through his career, had played a range of cops. But to his concern, he found the Gilroy character had been written as “a bit of a dope”.

Says Wenzel of his approach to the role: “I had to play against what they’d written for years. I said: ‘With this character I want to get to the kids. He’s got to be a role model: no smoking; no drinking’.”

Wenzel once argued stridently with a director who felt a particular scene called for Gilroy to take a drink. He (Wenzel) didn’t think the idea of middle-aged Gilroy resorting to the bottle after an emotional upheaval made sense.

And to keep the Gilroy character believable, Wenzel frequently mixed with Sydney police - on the job and socially. “I went out a few times in the squad cars just to see what was going on,” he says.

“One of the toughest parts of it all - and I think all police would agree - is domestics. Up to a point, they (police) can deal with kids and hardened crims, but things always seem to get out of hand in domestics. I think, to a policeman, that’s the toughest job.”

Wenzel also listened to many cops’ stories, which he considered the perfect bases for scripts. He pleaded with those cops to “send the stories in”, but says they never did.

He became highly regarded by the NSW police. He joined them at their Christmas parties every year of the 12-year run of A Country Practice. And former commissioner, John Avery, presented him with a leather police jacket at a morning-tea gathering of senior commissioned officers.

Police advisers were always available to A Country Practice, and Wenzel frequently consulted them. “They vetted every script,” he says, “every script that had anything to do with police work. I always deviated (from the script) for realism. I would rewrite stuff and the director would say: ‘Okay’.”

Although A Country Practice centred on a small-town medical practice, Wenzel says police themes will always remain at the heart of television drama. He rates today’s best police and courtroom shows as Channel 9’s Stingers, the ABC’s Wildside and The Bill, Channel 10’s Law and Order and Channel 7’s The Practice.

But Wenzel highlights the budget disparity between Australian and American productions. “One of those American shows would probably cost $2m to make,” he says. “What can we make a show for?

“A Country Practice was made on a budget of about $200,000 a week, and people say: ‘Wow, it’s a lot of money’. And Peter Falk, who played Columbo, was getting $900,000 an episode.”

At 71, Wenzel says he’s too old to play another cop part, except for a commissioner or other older member of what he calls the white-shirt brigade. But always the actor, he would happily take more work in television.

“Otherwise, you just stagnate,” he says. “I don’t want to grow old too quickly. I’m only 71, after all.”

Meanwhile, Wenzel stays busy with the annual Tasmanian Variety Bash and his work as an Australia Day ambassador in Victoria, where he now lives. “I go out every Australia Day and make speeches to try to convince people to remain Australian,” he says.

“I tell them I’ll come down and take that Chicago Bulls shirt off them and throw it away, because this is Australia Day. Wear something Australian.”

As a Carlton Football Club life member, Wenzel loves the football-fever atmosphere of Victoria. But he would gladly return to life in Adelaide, where last month he appeared at the Arts Theatre in the David Williamson play, Travelling North.

The role - which he found demanding - was only his second theatre performance in 30 years. He insists that television work, with its capacity for retakes, is much easier.

But of his preference between the two, he says: “Well, I prefer the money that television pays.”

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