Gordon Greig PickhaverAM (born 10 February 1948)[1] is an actor, comedian and writer, who forms one half of the Australian satirical sports comedy duo Roy and HG as the excitable sports announcer HG Nelson.[a] The award-winning duo teamed up in 1986 for the Triple J radio comedy program This Sporting Life, and were broadcast nationwide for 22 years, leading to several successful television spinoffs.[2]
Pickhaver was born at Walwa private hospital,[1]Myrtle Bank, South Australia, to parents Gordon Samuel Pickhaver,[3] and Beryl Marion Rebecca Pickhaver née Skuce. His father was a World War II veteran who saw action in the Middle East and on the Kokoda Track and whose career was in the South Australian dairy industry.[b] Pickhaver has three sisters (Jane, Anne and Mary) and a brother, Mark. Pickhaver lived on Morphett Road, Warradale, South Australia[4] up to the age of 15, and then the family moved to the suburb of Prospect, where he lived until the age of 22. He attended Oaklands Park Primary school, Brighton Secondary School, and for the last two years of high school Adelaide High School. He graduated from Flinders University and describes himself as dyslexic, having always relied heavily on memory and recall to achieve any academic results.
Pickhaver performed in plays at school and at university. After a stint as a roadie for Australian rocker Billy Thorpe in the early 1970s, he became involved in the Melbourne theatre co-operative The Pram Factory. He moved into radio broadcasting on 3RRR in Melbourne and developed the HG Nelson character while performing in the Melbourne radio sports comedy show Punter To Punter in the early 1980s.
Pickhaver met John Doyle in 1985 while both were playing minor characters in an SBS TV show, and they teamed up as Roy (aka Rampaging Roy Slaven) and HG in 1986. Their radio comedy program This Sporting Life was broadcast initially in Sydney and later nationally on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Triple J youth radio network. It was continuously on-air for a 22-year period till 2008. This Sporting Life was added to the National Film and Sound Archive's Sounds of Australia registry in 2013.[5] Since March 2020, the Roy and HG characters have broadcast 'Bludging on the Blindside', on ABC radio on Saturdays through the football season, a sports program whose main focus is both celebrating and lampooning the culture and business of rugby league in Australia.[6][7]
1989: Pants off, this sporting life, by Roy Slaven and H. G. Nelson[9]
1994: Where it all went wrong [sound recording] : address delivered by H. G. Nelson, anti-smoking activist, to the National Press Club, Canberra on World No Tobacco Day, 1 June 1994[10]
1994: Boys and balls, by Brian Nankervis; in the press box: Roy Slaven and H. G. Nelson[11]
1996: Petrol, bait, ammo & ice, by H. G. Nelson, with a foreword by Roy Slaven; illustrated by Reg Mombassa[12]
1999: It's yours for a sawn-off! : Sameranch's Sydney, by H. G. Nelson; illustrations by James de Vries[13]
2006: The really stuffed guide to good food 2006, edited by H. G. Nelson[14]
^Pickhaver is adamant in pronouncing the "H" in "HG" as "haitch". This is contrary to the "aitch" as generally accepted in his home state of South Australia.
^Gordon S. Pickhaver was co-author (with James Dez Marshall) of People, Places and Cheese in South Australia 1842–1984 Pagel Books 1986
^ ab"Family Notices". The Chronicle (Adelaide). Vol. 90, no. 5, 122. South Australia. 19 February 1948. p. 32. Retrieved 10 July 2023 – via National Library of Australia.
