The Sydney Morning Herald - The Guide May 20-26th 2002- Cover Story
Here, there and Everywhere
TV, radio, stand-up... comedian Wil Anderson has been spreading himself thin lately and something had to give. Bernard Zuel talks to Australia's busiest entertainer.
It was the opening night of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, one of the big three comedy festivals in the world, and Wil Anderson - Victorian by birth, Sydneysider by relocation and comedian by inclination - was hosting the gala, a parade of festival comics doing five-minute spots for a national television audience of about a million people.
In two nights he would open his own show for the festival - a six show-a-week, two-week run that woould sell out every performance, much as it had during its pre-festival run through Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide. Tomorrow morning he would be up before dawn to host his national radio show on Triple J, and later that day he would record two episodes of his ABC-TV chat/comedy show, The Glass House, before a large live audience.
At 28, the farmer's son from rural Victoria could have been excused a small, satisfied smile. A stand-up comedian without the gimmick hit record, franchised stage show or big movie, he was in demand, in work, in deep. Maybe too deep. Because far from smiling, Anderson was on the floor of his bathroom in his underpants, crying.
"My body just broke," Anderson recalls. He isn't embarrassed to reveal this. It's neither a boast nor a guilty secret; just the way things went after four months of, on average, less than five hours sleep a night, and the concurrent pressure of being here, there and everywhere. Maybe he could have passed up the festival's opening night gala - it wasn't a high-paying gig; it wasn't like hosting the Logies. But as he sees it, "I couldn't say no to hosting the gala." For a comedian, particularly one whose career began in Melbourne, it's right up there as prestigious gigs go. But something had to give, and it was his body.
If you're reading this thinking, 'Stop whingeing, Anderson, you're bloody lucky - nobody's making you do these things,' you'd get no argument from the man some see as the next golden child of Australian entertainment. And his answer says a lot about his priorities, odd in an industry where it's assumed there is only one way to do things - as fast, as attention grabbing and as ambitiously as possible.
"I'm not complaining about being busy," Anderson says. "I like being busy, I'd like some of those things not to be happening at the same time, but what do you do? Do you give up the oppurtunity to do your TV show, to do your radio show? The one that people would say is, you could do your stand-up any other time. But the thing is, that's what I do; that's my thing. All this other stuff is fun stuff, but if I had to choose only one of them, [stand-up] is what I'd be doing.
"I've always thought that if I stop doing that so I can do these other things then you're not a stand-up comedian anymore - you're a radio or TV guy who occasionally does gigs. And I've never wanted to be that person."
This is heresy enough, but what of Anderson's declaration that maybe, just maybe, radio and television comedians need a dose of reality every so often?
"I did three months of basically working six nights a week and it was great. I've never felt that I'd done better work on the radio; I was invigorated and sharp," he says. "The thing with radio - the TV is harder, but radio - you can fool yourself into believing you're being funny. You sit in that studio and make the other person laugh and you can fool yourself that you're making other people laugh at home. But you can't lie in front of an audience, so it sharpens up your other work because you find again what a good joke is."
It's not as though doing too much is new for Anderson. Nine years ago, while studying journalism full time in Canberra, he also had a full-time job with The Australian Financial Review's Canberra bureau. "People wonder why I became a comedian. Well, I had no life before then," he laughs dismissively, though he does manage to slip in that he finished first in his year.
"I can't think of anyone who's wasted a career more than me. I think that if you graduate first you get your name on a board at the press club or something, and I'm sure my name's been Liquid Papered out and replaced by Adam Harvey or someone who went on to be a proper journalist."
Maybe it's not such a wasted career. Not when you consider that in the past year alone, Anderson has fielded offers from several TV networks and has been asked to join Triple M's Sydney breakfast team of Amanda Keller and Mikey Robins. He said no to them all. Is he a fool? The money, not to mention the audience, would be significantly better at Triple M, for a start.
“[The audience would be bigger] in Sydney but it’s not all about Sydney,” he says pointedly. “It’s much more important to me that we serve areas that aren’t served [by major networks]. I grew up in the country and I wish we had had Triple J where I was, where we were listening to Billy Joel. And we get out to places with ideas. In the city you’re exposed to a lot of ideas: if you’re a goth in the city you can find people who are like you; if you’re a punk in the city you can find people like you; if you’re gay in the city you can find people. If you’re a gay goth in a country town you can feel so alienated from the world because you don’t play footy and wear flannel and like chicks, and I’m glad that we reach out there and give it a bit of ‘you’re not alone’.”
But was he tempted, or at least flattered, by the Triple M offer? After all, he’s more than happy to praise Keller and Robins (“Mikey Robins made what I do at Triple J; there wasn’t a job before Mikey Robins”) and his admiration for Andrew Denton, who was in the chair at Triple M for four years and began his TV career on the ABC, is unabashed.
“Shit, yeah,” he laughs. “It’s one of those things where I imagine if I keep working in radio I will work at commercial radio. And the way (Triple M) conduct their business is extraordinary. I may make fun of what they do on air occasionally, but the way they go about talking to you about what they want you to do, they’re so professional and so upfront about what they’re doing that I wasn’t just flattered, I thought, ‘If I ever go to work in commercial radio, if you want me to work for you, you’re certainly the first people I would have meetings with’.”
Well, he must have been interested in commercial television at least?
“Nuh. Except that the ABC isn’t what it used to be,” he says. “I’ve only ever wanted to work for the ABC. The reason I work with Ted Robinson [executive producer of The Glass House and, before that, Good News Week] is that Ted Robinson has made pretty much all the shows I like on television. I was a kid in the country and the first stand-up comic I saw was Jimeoin on The Big Gig. I remember catching a train down to Melbourne with fake ID to see Jimeoin at The Last Laugh because I saw him do his seagull routine on The Big Gig. And Ted made that. If someone at the ABC said, ‘We love you’ – which no-one at the ABC has ever said – ‘what do you want to do’, I would say ‘The Money or the Gun is the TV show I have always wanted to do’. For mine, that was the sort of television I would love to make if they let me. But they won’t these days.
“It costs a bit, and I get the impression that while the ABC says, “We’d love Denton to do something with us, we’d love John Clarke to do something with us’, over the years when they were doing things [with the ABC] they didn’t get much support. I find that a bit with our show.
“I may be completely wrong, but I felt on Friday night we made the the best episode of our TV show. It’s become the show that we’ve always wanted it to be but I get the impression that 10 years from now someone at the ABC will say, ‘I wish [fellow Glass House panellist] Dave Hughes would come to us, I wish [Glass house panellist] Corrine Grant would come to us’. And they won’t, because when they were there, no-one said that.”
His mention of Grant and Hughes is not accidental. For all his love of the solo work of a stand-up comedian, one significant element in Anderson’s TV and radio work – and in his decision to knock back all those offers – is his preference for working in a team. And, yes, that includes breakfast-show partner Adam Spencer, despite rumours of their supposed feuding that circulate within the industry from time to time.
“I hear all the rumours about Adam and me hating each other, too. It’s just not true. I really like him,” Anderson says. “Part of the reason I stayed with the Jays was how much I like Adam and going to work with him. It’s actually really good fun. I think he’s fabulous.
“See, I like doing my own thing on stage. But on radio and TV, I don’t. I didn’t want to host the TV show. When Ted first came to me and said, ‘Do you want to do something’, I said, ‘Yeah, I’d love to, but I don’t want to host’. A lot of things I’d been offered had been hosting and I wanted to do comedy, and I’ve always found that hosting gets in the way of being funny. Also, my natural style is to f--- with things.
“So I said, ‘I’ll be in it, just get someone else to host.’ He asked me who I wanted to work with and I gave him three names, two of whom I am working with [the third, Adam Hills, his first choice as host, was in the UK at the time]. But eventually it came down to, ‘If you want this arrangement of people, you’ll have to host’. So I said, ‘If I host I have to be able to play, too, and it has to look like Hughsie’s and Corrine’s show, too’, and that’s why we started the three of us doing [the opening monologues]. I can’t imagine doing the show without one of the three people, and if one of the three wanted to leave, I certainly wouldn’t do the show.”
Anderson absentmindedly brushes his purple-tipped black hair back with a finger sporting aqua nail polish. It’s 11 am – two hours since he came off air, six hours since he crawled out of bed – and he’s just beginning to flag a little. The post-show adrenaline is wearing off and the multiple coffees haven’t kicked in yet but he heads back to Triple J. There’s some Material to Write for tomorrow’s show and then a few ideas to consider for this week’s The Glass House. Hmmm, Ian Thorpe and his angels, must be a joke or three in there…
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