a hat on and jump up and down on beds and you can have that semi-trailer full of money". But I think it made me a bit less ambitious in terms of comedy. I mean I won’t go into the details, but we’ve had a lot of medical problems in our family, so that money took a lot of pressure off working professionally as a comedian. So I regret it at that level. I think I probably would be a better comedian, doing more interesting things if I hadn't have had that in my life. Bus Quantock conducted various evening bus tours of Melbourne and other parts of Victoria since the early '80s, a concept called Bus, Son of Tram or just Bus, where a group of people would travel on a bus with him to a surprise location to meet other people who had no idea of their coming. The success of the bus tour depended largely on the element of surprise and the results were almost always comical. Quantock saw it as a way of seeing how frightened people have become:We've got gated communities; we've got car alarms; we've got people putting steel shutters over their windows at night. People are frightened – of other people taking what they've got, of being killed, I suppose – so the thing I am going to find most interesting is how severe security has become but also as a way of introduc[ing] unsuspecting people to this idea that the world's not such a frightening place and you can have fun with strangers." The audience members were all given Groucho Marx masks and Rod carried a rubber chicken on a stick, named Trevor. Political activism Quantock supports left-wing politics and was the host of the 1997, 1998 and 2004 Ska-TV Activist awards which were broadcast on community television around Australia. He gave a speech at 17 January 2010 rally at the closure of The Tote Hotel. He was MC at a number of rallies and public meetings in the campaign to stop the East-West Link. . In 2014, Quantock became a research associate at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, University of Melbourne, working on the presentation of climate change impacts and resource crises. Double Disillusion From 1989–1994, Quantock was a weekly columnist for the Sunday Age and in September 1999, Double Disillusion, a compilation book of these columns and some of his