Ask the Leyland Brothers

After early success with documentaries covering their travels along the Darling River (in Down the Darling, 1963) and across Australia (in Wheels Across the Wilderness, 1967), brothers Mike and Mal Leyland – unlikely TV personalities who looked like they dressed in K-Mart cast-offs –  transformed themselves into a brand, complete with T-shirts, a catchy theme song and eventually, in the early 90s, a Sunshine Coast theme park called ‘Leyland Brothers World’.

The theme park turned out to be an unhappy swan song, sending the pair bankrupt.

At their peak, however, Ask the Leyland Brothers was watched by around 2.5 million viewers a week.

Mike and Mal and the Mrs Leylands – Pat and Laraine – jointly filled the roles of presenters, camera and sound crew. There were never more than two of these four on-screen at one time – presumably the others must have been running the equipment.

The remaining team members were in post-production: video editor Mike Newling and soundtrack artist Horrie Dargie. The feel was of a particularly well-executed home movie.

While Ask the Leyland Brothers appears entertainingly dated several decades later, its lo-fi qualities were not typical of television shows of its time, either. Channel 9 had specifically asked the brothers not to make the series too slick and liked its amateur quality.

Their accents assaulted the ear, the language was frequently massacred and invariably the commentary was naive.

Accompanied by a brood of sprogs and some assorted dogs, the Leylands drifted around Australia in response to queries by viewers interested in such topics as people who built houses made of bottles, throwing stones which bounced, a woodcarver who made swans from Huon pine or going on “camera safari” in New Guinea.

But somehow – as the Leylands droned on relentlessly like a bush fly on a summer afternoon – the trite formula had viewers hooked. We became, in effect, armchair adventurers transported to places we always meant to visit but never got around to.

The Leyland Brothers were followed by an ever-burgeoning number of intrepid explorers, like Alby Mangels and Steve Irwin, and the show’s format has something in common with later magazine-style travel shows, whose episodes consist of several short segments on different subjects.

The failure of Leyland Brothers World led to a personal and professional rift between the two brothers and they went their separate ways, dissolving their 31-year filmmaking partnership.

Mike Leyland died from Parkinson’s disease on 14 September 2009. Mal Leyland’s wife, Laraine, died in Tasmania on 22 November 2018 aged 75.

Mike Leyland
Mal Leyland
Pat Leyland
Laraine Leyland

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