‘There's nothing that I've made that will last': Shaun Micallef refuses to be sentimental

The Age

3 hours ago

Shaun Micallef's long-time collaborator Michael Ward – aka the green-faced Kraken from Mad as Hell – is standing backstage at the ABC studios in Melbourne giving me advice on what not to ask Micallef.
The comedian – and newly minted runner-up on Dancing with the Stars with dance partner Ash-Leigh Hunter – is not sentimental, Ward warns, so don't ask him what he would save if his house was going to be destroyed tomorrow, which is the premise of his chat show, Shaun Micallef's Eve of Destruction.
'Well, I'm certainly not sentimental about my work,' confirms Micallef shortly afterwards, jokingly describing Ward as 'that idiot you met'.
'I become very disenchanted, very quickly, with anything I've done. You're in love with it when you do it, but then afterwards, I can look at it reasonably objectively, and go, 'I could have been better'. I mean, it's television, so who cares. It's nothing, you know? And most of the stuff is disposable that I've done over the years. There's nothing that I've made that will last.'
It's a surprising admission from 63-year-old Micallef, who has long been considered a national comedy treasure (sorry, I know he'd cringe at the description) and one of our sharpest political satirists after his 10-year run on Mad As Hell. To many his work does last: it's why I'm here, very keen to talk to someone I have watched ever since I was teenager; it's why my husband continually pulls out his Milo Kerrigan impression and it's why so many of the young comedians he featured on his recent SBS show, Shaun Micallef's Origin Odyssey, were in awe of him.
But it also explains why Micallef has lasted nearly 40 years in the business, especially when most of his comedy is done with a bomb thrower's anarchic glee. He isn't precious, and while his work is sharp and exacting, he'll also try anything. David Byrne parody? Yep. German cabaret? Yep. Documentary about religion? Yep. Taika Waititi TV series? Yep. Dancing with the Stars? Incredibly, yes.
'I just keep looking for things I haven't done and see where that takes me,' he says.
That try-anything-attitude also explains Shaun Micallef's Eve of Destruction, which begins its second season this month. On the surface, it seems almost easy, a bit soft and cuddly, with Micallef talking to two guests about their two most treasured possessions, the things they would save if their house was about to be destroyed.
'Well, maybe, after Mad As Hell, that's right,' he says. 'It's not political, it's not acerbic, it's not, even Talkin' 'Bout Your Generation. When I did that, it was overly complicated … But we've done the opposite on this one, it's more in the conversation. And that's harder. I remember when the show came out and the idea was announced … I think somebody had said, 'Well, what the hell is this? This is such a dumb idea' – and it is, but that's not the point. It's just the starting-off point.'
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Micallef cooked up Eve of Destruction because he wanted to try something different after Mad As Hell, which ended in 2022. Still much missed, the weekly satire skewered politics like nothing before it, but it also meant Micallef was plugged into the news cycle 24/7, constantly turning jokes over in his head. Eve of Destruction, on the other hand, offered a gentler way forward.
'I had wanted to do more of Mad as Hell with somebody else in the chair, and I could just produce, but that didn't work out that way,' he says. 'So this was the next – maybe better – thing to do, because it's a different animal. And maybe it wouldn't have been fair to a younger performer to have to inherit something that had been made by somebody else ...
'I was quite interested in just talking to people, having conversations. And I wasn't – and I'm not – an interviewer, but I was just interested in helping other people tell whatever story they wanted to tell.
'Because I'd had the good fortune of being in the spotlight for a long time, I thought I might as well use whatever ability that I had to maybe open doors and to usher in younger talent, or different talent, or more diverse talent, or people I hadn't worked with before. I just wanted to play with some other people, essentially, and not be the one doing the schtick, as I'm, you know, getting on.'
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Guests this season include comedians Frank Woodley and Rhys Nicholson, Olympic gold medal-winning swimmer Ariarne Titmus, footballer Josh Cavallo, actor Lisa McCune and writer John Safran. Unlike Mad As Hell, which was tightly scripted and in which Micallef read everything off an autocue, on Eve of Destruction he has no notes and instead just follows the conversation where it needs to go.
'It's not a five-minute anecdote fest,' he says. 'Andrew Denton is the best recent example of someone who knew how to do an interview show. And he always used to say to me, the secret is just listening, so your next question is informed by the answer they give to the previous one.'
In person, Micallef is much more softly spoken than he is on television. He has spent the last couple of months messing with the glitzy, shiny-floor format that is Dancing With the Stars. He left the show's co-host Dr Chris Brown lost for words when he kissed him on the lips during Monday night's final. It's all great fun, but I do wonder if we are finally witnessing the great softening of Shaun Micallef.
'I don't know,' he says. 'I don't have a great, or, I suspect, accurate understanding of how I'm perceived. So for me, performance is always the third thing on my list. It's the writing, it's the producing, and if it makes it easier if I act it, I'm the centre of it, or the person who's sitting behind a desk and reading the lines that have been written.'
I'm keen to know what he thinks of the cancellation of US talk show The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, a decision, it is widely believed, was heavily influenced by US President Donald Trump.
'We were allowed to do anything,' he says of Mad As Hell. 'There was never any expectation that, politically, we'd be on one side or the other. So that's one of the benefits of this country and this network [the ABC], the public broadcaster.
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'I guess, over in the United States at the moment, it's so crazy that people are worried about how the Mad King will respond. I always think Trump's a bit like a modern version of that Austrian king who built those beautiful castles [Ludwig II of Bavaria], but they were just insane.
'Rather than raise his ire, they may well pull a show, or appear to have pulled a show, or indicate they will pull a show. We're never going to be in that world here, Australians are too cynical anyway. And they wouldn't stand for it.'
Does he think we're missing the kind of sharp political satire that Mad As Hell once delivered?
'It's good to have it,' he says. 'I wouldn't like to think that there's just some huge unhealable gash in the fabric of satire. People are allowed to say what they want. And I suppose what Mad As Hell did was combine it with a whole bunch of other things … We had a lot of young writers, and they were angry, too, about the housing market and everything. So it was an angry show. Maybe what's missing is the anger, because it's all a bit jolly [now].
'I don't know whether that makes a difference, ultimately, to anything, but it's more satisfying for an audience to feel like their frustrations, their anger, are being expressed or acknowledged or reflected back to them. Sometimes it's quite satisfying.'
Our time is nearly up, but I am still keen to find out if he is sentimental about anything. A nything.
'I mean, I've tried,' he says. 'I'm lucky enough to be in this profession where you have lots of downtime, so when the kids [Micallef has three sons] were growing up, I could live in the moment a bit, or not.
'So I look back on that and think, 'Oh, thank god that happened'. Thank goodness I was around enough, because I remember my parents saying, 'Oh, it'll be over pretty soon'. And I said, 'Yeah, sure, it will. This is going to last forever'. But you turn around and they're 27 and driving away, and you're waving goodbye to them, and that's it. So if the memories are important, I'm very sentimental about that. I don't forget anything.'