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The bromance between comedians Hamish Blake and Andy Lee has burned brightly since the jokesters discovered their mutual admiration over pots at the pub
The next step for popular comedy duo Hamish Blake and Andy Lee
You’ve got to meet this guy Hamish!” It was this glowing endorsement from a bloke named Peter Nowlan that brought together one of Australian television’s best-loved comedy duos. If not for Nowlan’s intervention, Gold Logiewinner Hamish Blake may have spent his days bent over a computer making tech support guys giggle with his office banter. And one-time Bachelor-of-the-Year Andy Lee might have worked tirelessly in another office, trying to bring smiles to the faces of clients by presenting them with impressive tax refunds.
The young Lee, then studying commerce/arts at Melbourne University, was intrigued by his pal Nowlan’s insistence that he must become friends with Hamish. After all, teenage guys don’t usually try to set-up friendships between two strangers. Lee knew that, somehow, this Hamish character must be something special.
When Lee and Blake finally met up four months later they hit it off straight away, with Lee quickly suggesting they skip class and head to the pub. “Looking back at it, it was a really strange thing for Pete to have done. He must have sensed it [the chemistry],” Lee says with a laugh.
“I would never say that about anyone,” Blake interjects. “I know that if I said to Andy, ‘You’ve got to meet this guy’, immediately in Andy’s head he’d be thinking this guy better do a quadruple backflip in the first few minutes or I am walking. So Pete put me in a terrible position because Ando just does not have time for anyone’s hype.”
Thankfully, no physical gymnastics were needed to impress Lee. Blake’s banter was sufficient.
The laconic Lee also made a huge impression. “I went to uni with high expectations,” Blake says. “I had been promised O week is so fun and you’re going to meet all these great people and, look no offence to the rest of the alumni, but I was looking around those first few days and I’ve got to say I was underwhelmed.
“So, when I met Andy I was like, ‘This is more like it. I might just cash in now and make one friend and that’s it.’ I hung in there for a few more years but I didn’t get my degree. But I did get one good thing out of Melbourne Uni and that was Andy.”
Nowlan recalls the first meeting between the boys was like an “awkward blind date” because he had “built it up a bit”. “But in an instant, they were laughing and disappeared for what turned out to be a pretty life-changing first beer,” he says.
They downed $1 pots at a Carlton pub, played pool and ate pizza. And, over the course of the year, the duo started hatching a plan to turn their jocular chatter into something more. Blake entered a university stand-up competition and came third. He later won the state-wide final.
But like Graham Kennedy and Bert Newton or Roy and HG, Blake and Lee soon realised that their greatest comic strength lay in their partnership.
Blake’s wife, Wrong Girl creator Zoe Foster-Blake, has had a front-row seat to the boys’ unique relationship for more than a decade. “I’ve had the pleasure (and laughter) of knowing the boys since they were 21. They have not changed a whisker,” she says.
“Despite their success they remain unaffected, driven by a singular desire to make people laugh and have fun. That’s their superpower, I think, having fun. It’s authentic, it’s a delight to witness and it’s deeply contagious.”
While both have taken on independent projects – Blake in the New Zealand film Two Little Boys and Lee as the author of the kids’ story Do Not Open this Book – they clearly prefer working together. Their latest project, True Story with Hamish and Andy, for Channel Nine, also sees them join forces with some of their A-list