Shaun Micallef’s agrees the timing of his new ABC sitcom, centring on a former Australian prime minister grappling with life after public office, was fortuitous.
Micallef says he wouldn’t be surprised to learn if Mark Scott, the outgoing ABC managing director, had somehow arranged Monday’s dramatic Liberal party coup as a “parting gesture” for the show, called The Ex-PM.
Watching the leadership spill unfold, Micallef says he was struck by a question that once plagued him and the writers on his other television comedy show, Mad as Hell: how do you make Malcolm Turnbull funny?
“At the moment there are no obvious tics you can pick on. He seems like a rational, reasonable human being, and they’re very hard to make fun of,” he says.
Micallef suspects comedy will arise naturally once Turnbull settles into life as PM, and all the qualities that make him distinct and likeable are “knocked off” as he is forced to become the “hamburger that pleases everybody”.
“He’s obviously a bright, intelligent and thoughtful man and I wonder how he’s going to survive the process,” Micallef says.
At the moment Turnbull is a “very, very good speaker” with an “instinctive, natural way of communicating”. But the comedian has witnessed each of Australia’s recent PMs (Tony Abbott, Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd and John Howard) slow their oration as their mind frantically grappled for what they’d been told to say and not to say.
“Howard used to speak like he was a lawyer, worried about how things were going to read in the transcript the next day,” he says. Former Labor leader Kim Beazley, he says, had a “loquacious way of speaking and often rather obscure references. And it was his undoing because the people looking after image said ‘your reference to medieval church art is probably not going to play that well in Punchbowl’.”
“It will be interesting to see how [Turnbull] handles that sort of crap advice.”
In The Ex-PM, Micallef plays Andrew Dugdale who, having recently lost an election, presumably did not handle well the “crap advice”. In the midst of financial strife, Dugdale is forced to pen his memoir. A young ghostwriter (described derisively by Dugdale as someone who “probably writes gaming reviews for the Guardian”) moves into his dysfunctional family home.
Dugdale is not so much a send-up of any one particular Australian prime minister as much as an amalgam of them all. Nonetheless, the keen-eyed will spot small tributes: Dugdale’s glasses look not dissimilar to a certain Mr Rudd’s, and he is occasionally seen in a Howardesque green and gold Commonwealth Games tracksuit.
Otherwise, Micallef says the character embodies a “gradual emptying out of personality” that comes with PM territory. There is a beautiful line in the opening episode in which Dugdale’s chief of staff reassures his boss he has made a good first impression on the writer: “You’ve double-bluffed her – she thinks you’re not as bad as you’re contriving not to appear.”
As a comedian, Micallef not only has an eye for political comedy, but for the comedic skills (or lack thereof) of a politician. Turnbull, he says, “can come up with an actual joke on the run”, whereas opposition leader Bill Shorten’s ability to “pretend to be in the moment is so lacking that it just sounds like a plodding regurgitation of something he’s been told to say”.
Shorten was apparently once left “scratching his head” over the zingers segment in Mad as Hell (which Micallef confirms will return in 2016). “He said ‘is this an affectionate thing? Is it a dad joke thing?’ Because he wants it to be nice. He wants it to be to be fondly thought of, and it’s not really. It’s a joke about how ineffective it is to decide to communicate in that way.”
Who has been Australia’s funniest prime minister?
“I think Keating. Whitlam was probably the wittiest, but Keating could be cruel and make me laugh a lot.”
Taking a leaf out of British sitcom Yes Minister, the political direction Dugdale leans is kept masked. Micallef says this is not just to avoid disenchanting half the audience, but also because the show is not so much about politics “with a capital P” than about political animals.
“You know how easy it was?” says Micallef. “We just never showed [Dugdale] in a blue tie, never showed him in a red tie. That was all we really had to do.”
In examining why Abbott was such a prime target for comedy, Micallef places the blame on all the “ignoble, inglorious, annoying things you have to do to appear to be a reasonable bloke or person in Australian politics”.
As for how he thinks the recently deposed prime minister will spend his ex-PM days, Micallef hopes Abbott might take a look at his new six-part sitcom. “Because it might be palliative. Perhaps.”
-
The Ex-PM airs on the ABC and premieres 14 October at 9pm
