THE GREAT ENTERTAINER
Australia, 2025, 81 minutes, Colour.
Brian Walsh.
Directed by Borce Damcevski.
A memoir, a tribute to media entrepreneur, Brian Walsh.
This documentary offers two perspectives. There is a story Brian Walsh himself, Sydney born, Irish Catholic background, school and university, showing films to students while at school, wanting a job on radio to SM, then the biggest radio station with music in Sydney, I by John Brennan, tourism boss, becoming more and more involved in the 1970s into the 1980s with production of certain films and distribution, becoming interested in sport, the links with the National B can legally, the famous Tina Turner, Only the Best campaign for the NRL.
Brian Walsh is a very private man but there are many testimonies, opening closing with Hugh Jackman, praising Walsh for encouragement of talent and openings for their careers. Quite a deal of Australian talent praising Walsh, highlighting that he was not after any kind of acclamation himself. His life was private, his companion to and died, only when he won a final life award did he acknowledge, on stage, his sexual orientation.
This film has been produced by Fox tell, the company which he lived for many years, always alert to trends, even anticipating them, especially for streaming television channels. It was also successful in the UK, with the Murdochs, with sports functions. (Although there is the sequence of the cast of 42nd Street ready to perform at half time at a match and the electrical engineer failing and their having to march off.)
But, the documentary is also an overview of Australian media from the 1950s, the coming of television, the range of campaigns and advertising, whilst encouraging a variety of television shows, the moving of Neighbours from Channel 7 to channel 10 and its ultimate worldwide success, camera and edited with The Perfect Match, and miniseries up to Colin from the Office, he interviews with Patrick Bramble and.
Many of the witnesses acknowledge that Brian Walsh could be very direct, jokes about his freezing people, then reconciliations. But, the wide range of television executives, the NRL, stars of cinema and television, a full sum in their acknowledgement of him as a person and his abilities and vision.
