insult to his work, Seidler promptly sued Cook for defamation, but famously lost both the initial case and the subsequent appeal, and (to Seidler's great chagrin) the publicity surrounding the case saw the cartoon reproduced widely. Impact and significance The Gillies Report marked a notable revival of the weekly topical satire sketch format, a genre that had rarely been attempted on Australian TV since the demise of Australia's first and best-known series in this field, The Mavis Bramston Show, in the 1960s. TGR spawned a number of successful sequels including The Gillies Republic (1986), The Dingo Principle (1987), Gillies and Company (1992). Its success also paved the way for other subsequent topical satire series, including BackBerner (1999-2002), the various incarnations of The Chaser (2001–present), and Shaun Micallef's Newstopia (2007-2008) and Mad As Hell (2012–present), and on radio How Green was my Cactus (1986–present). The Gillies Report also established or greatly furthered the screen careers of many of the cast, including Gillies, Harmer, Kelso, Clarke, and Harvey. John Clarke - whose regular reports on the fictional Australian sport of "Farnarkling" were another popular segment - carried on the Gillies Report tradition with the successful mockumentary series The Games (1998-2000), and continued with Clarke & Dawe, the long-running weekly satirical political commentary he wrote and performed with Bryan Dawe on ABC-TV until his untimely death at age 68 on 9 April 2017. Phillip Scott went on to co-write, musically direct and perform in the Sydney Theatre Company's annual Wharf Revue from 2000 through until 2017 (a live show of political satire, co-created by and co-starring Jonathan Biggins and Drew Forsythe). Scott, Patrick Cook and Wendy Harmer also worked on the ABC series The Big Gig, of which Ted Robinson was the producer (as he was on The Gillies Report), and Scott and Cook were later employed as writers on the ABC and Channel 10 series Good News Week. The central feature of the series was Gillies' uncanny ability to perform scathingly accurate satirical impersonations of a wide range of public, media and political figures. These included Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, B.A. Santamaria, Don Chipp, Andrew Peacock, Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, morbidly obese Queensland politician Russ Hinze (whom Gillies portrayed in a costume fashioned from a beanbag chair), brewing magnate and conservative political figure John Elliott - whose regular exclamation "Pig's arse!" became a popular catchphrase - and especially for his famous impression