Old school host
‘I’LL RIDE ON THE COAT-TAILS OF SOME YOUTH’ SAYS SHAUN MICALLEF OF HIS NEW SHOW
As much as Shaun Micallef may lament that Australians can be suspicious of smart people, with the brain power of the students on his new quiz show, he’s confident our future is in good hands.
“There’s a bit of a sniffy attitude that Australia has about people who know stuff,” he says. “You know, that they’re putting on airs or a bit too big for their britches, or whatever. I think it’s reassuring to see those students are quite young and absolutely, positively know more than I do.”
The Logie-winning comedian and TV host says the intention of Shaun Micallef’s Brain Eisteddfod – in which three year 11 students from two opposing schools go head-to-head in a format inspired by revered UK quiz show University Challenge – was to create a show brimming with positivity and joy and appealing to the whole family.
“The original idea was to just genuinely celebrate something other than dancing and sports and whatever The Bachelor is about,” he says.
There was also an opportunity to show an age group rarely represented on screen outside of soap operas and provide a “natural, genuine representation of what schools look like now”.
“I thought that’s probably a sensible and enjoyable thing to try and participate in, especially given I am so old,” says Micallef with a laugh, “to try and just ride on the coat-tails of some youth.
“You can watch it just to be impressed with the fact that the future is hopeful and there’s some smart, young people coming up through the ranks to look after us when we’re old and undo some of the problems that we’ve caused.”
Micallef initially conceived the program during Covid, reasoning that it could be made cheaply and remotely before realising that teams could potentially be disadvantaged by different time delays for the mix of public, private and Catholic high schools from around the country. In the end, being able to film them in the same room created a more dynamic environment and not having a live audience during taping allowed them to be more authentic.
“We ended up with a level of conversation … that you don’t see very often because no one’s playing to the gallery or showing off or even feeling a little bit
intimidated by the audience,” he says. “It got more and more relaxed – and therefore more and more stupid from me – as time went by. But I made myself promise that I’m not going to try to make myself the point of watching the show. I think as long as I don’t get in the way of the actual idea of the show, then that’s a success.”
Micallef says he’s long been a fan of the comedy quiz show format – going way back to You Bet Your Life, hosted by Groucho Marx in the 1950s – and has plenty of form behind him thanks to Talkin’ ’Bout Your Generation. On reflection, he feels it would have made more sense to do the more conventional Brain Eisteddfod first before tackling the celebritystacked one that broke all the quiz show rules and was more about getting a big laugh rather than the correct answer.
“The scoring didn’t matter and the questions were pop cultural and it was all about putting people into cages with hats made of birdseed that we’re going to attack and that sort of thing.
“It was a lovely blend of Japanese quiz/game show and the Australian notion of a celebrity panel show, but I didn’t really have to achieve anything other than being silly and entertaining the audience, which I think it did. But this time round, the scoring does matter. The questions do have to make sense and the answers do have to be right so I had to be a little straighter.”
When Brain Eisteddfod goes to air next Wednesday, Micallef will find himself in the unusual situation of having two shows on the same night on rival networks, with his long-running, Logiewinning satirical news program Mad As Hell returning for its 15th, and apparently final, season.
In its 10 years on air, Mad As Hell as seen six prime ministers and has come full circle. Two
weeks into its first season, Kevin Rudd reclaimed his old job from Julia Gillard and lost the federal election shortly thereafter and a decade on, the ALP is back on top.
He’s not sure how much fun he’s going to be able to have at the expense of a government still in its honeymoon period but says that 10 years of volatility in the Australian halls of power made Mad As Hell more political than it was ever intended to be.
“Well, you have to wait a little while for them to start being ineffective,” he says of the new government. “I don’t wish that on the country, but it would be helpful for us definitely.
“I wonder whether it might kind of revert to being what it was originally, which was more of a magazine show that dealt with a bunch of topics rather than just exclusively politics.”