Barbs locked and loaded
THE AD INDUSTRY SHOULD BE NERVOUS, WITH GRUEN TAKING OFF THE GLOVES
While Gruen host Wil Anderson was fortuitous last year, moving to Byron and escaping Melbourne’s lockdown, he hasn’t been so lucky in 2021.
He jokes he’s not moved far from the chair in his office at the back of his Sydney house for three months.
In fact, he’s sitting in said chair for our Zoom interview.
While the 47-year-old had exemptions to go between his home in Northern NSW and Sydney, where his new ABC show Question Everything and Gruen are filmed, he chose to stay put.
“I’m the key man on my projects – I’m the host and the executive producer,” Anderson says. “If I go down, the show goes down, so I’m super paranoid.
“If you go to the wrong Coles or whatever, you can take down production for the fortnight.
“I’m trying to live a life that is super respectful of the sacrifices people are making to make the shows.”
The comedian says living like this has been “a lot”, but it’s important he sets the example.
He’s been keen to find the silver linings in the pandemic, but shares he’s been feeling the “overwhelming existential angst of, am I doing the right thing with my life?”
And not only about being separated from his loved ones for three months, but also about whether to plan for stand-up shows next year. Anderson hasn’t done a new show since 2019.
“I’ve cancelled more gigs than I have done,” he says.
“I’m talking with my management whether to do it or not. The negatives are – can I dedicate six months of my life writing something that you don’t know whether it will happen or not?
“And also it’s worse to cancel a show than to not have a show – that’s what I’ve found.
“You start to think a lot about your life and where you’re at and what it is you can control and what you can’t.”
Anderson decided to focus on helping younger comedians, featuring them on Question Everything and his podcasts.
“Two years off for me – it is, what it is, it hasn’t really changed my career in a substantial way.
“It will recover and bounce back,” he says.
“But for someone at the emerging point of their career, two years is like 20 years.
“So what made me feel good was to provide opportunities for newer voices.
You can control that. Control what you can control. That’s my silver lining.”
Some comedians have worried they’d lose match-fitness with so much time out of the live comedy game. Is Anderson among them?
“I guess the audience will be the judge of that when I go back,” he says with a laugh.
“But, really, I imagine it’s the same as when you see good sportsmen come back from injury.
“It’s not like they’ve suddenly forgotten how to play football.
“They’re just getting 16 touches instead of 30.
“They’re just a little bit off. That’s probably more like it.”
Speaking of football, Andersen is philosophical when I ask if I should broach the subject, given we are chatting in the week after the AFL grand final where his beloved Western Bulldogs were defeated by Melbourne.
“Look, I’m 47 and it wasn’t until I was 42 that I even saw them play in a grand final, so if you said to me five years ago, ‘you can see your team in a grand final and halfway through the third quarter they’ll be three goals up’, that would have seemed like winning the lottery to me,” he says. “Obviously we got killed in the end, but you know, who cares? It didn’t feel like a disaster, it felt like, ‘ah well, we were beaten by a better team on the day’.”
Gruen has returned for its 13th season and in the past 12 months we’ve seen a lot to keep advertisers busy, so there’s plenty for the team to decode and expose.
Going into the 2021 season, Gruen still doesn’t have a studio audience.
Or Russel Howcroft in the studio, thanks to border closures. While the rest of the team – including Todd Sampson, Dee Madigan, Karen Ferry and Christina Aventi – are back, Anderson will especially miss Howcroft’s presence. “Russel and I have such a unique relationship,” he says. “(We are) two people who could not have two more diametrically opposed ideas about the world.
“But we have a really unlikely and close friendship.
“He’s a comedic foil, too. “You can make fun of him in a way that he is completely impervious to.”
Last year it felt like a very hard time to be particularly critical in our traditional overly cynical way
In 2020, most TV shows had to navigate new rules to get to air. For Gruen, the adjustments involved more than empty seats for the much-missed audience.
“Last year it felt like a very hard time to be particularly critical in our traditional overly cynical way,” Anderson says.
“We were very gentle to advertisers in a way we haven’t been previously.”
He’s looking forward to having that cynicism back now the industry has rebounded and is “exploiting us at our weakest”.
“I think perhaps we might ramp it back up and this year we’ve got more permission to
go a bit harder again.”
Gruen, Wednesday, 8.30PM, ABC