Despite the shtick, Micallef’s new chat show is brilliantly simple

Shaun Micallef’s Eve of Destruction
★★★
ABC, Wednesdays at 8pm

Once upon a time there was a show called Micallef Tonight. Touted as a bid to return to the days when variety ruled the airwaves, it was a bold, absurd, warped version of a chat show, with Shaun Micallef, Australia’s greatest ever comedy product – you can fight me if you disagree – delivering sketches, satirical deconstructions of the format, and segments of bizarre genius like “Shaun on His High Horse” in which he donned a cowboy hat, sat on a gymnastics vault, and ranted about the irritating minutiae of life. It was a spectacularly funny show, its only weakness being the “chat” segments. Forced by commercial imperatives to conduct puff interviews with mostly uninterested celebrities plugging their latest project, the comic genius struggled to derive great amounts of either humour or insight from the cross-promotion game.

Micallef Tonight was gone too soon, though there were echoes of its approach in Mad As Hell. But in the years since, Micallef himself has proven a far better interrogator than that show demonstrated. Anyone who’s seen his documentaries On The Sauce, about Australian drinking culture, or Stairway to Heaven, about religion, will know that he possesses both a questing, curious mind and a sensitively understated way with an interview.

And so to the new Shaun Micallef’s Eve of Destruction, which the ABC publicity department promotes as “one question, two guests and the man everyone agrees is this country’s least experienced interviewer”. This is a mostly untrue pitch: Micallef, though he may be better known for other things, definitely isn’t this country’s least experienced interviewer, and thankfully for the sake of the public broadcaster’s need to fill airtime, there is more than one question being asked. But the two guests bit is true: every episode will have a pair of famous people quizzed on the two possessions they would save if their home was about to be destroyed by some unforeseen catastrophe. That’s the “eve of destruction” bit covered off, then.

There is an obvious element of playing it safe about the production of this show. After Mad As Hell went out in a blaze of glory two years ago, its star suggested that fronting TV shows might be a thing of the past for him: better to step aside for new talent. The promo for Eve of Destruction features Micallef joking that “there wasn’t any”, but from the ABC’s point of view, bringing him back is not so much a case of there not being any new talent as of a need for a “banker”. It’s always nice to have someone around who can be relied on to produce great content, and the executives know that Micallef is possessed not only of extravagant talent, but also a readymade audience. And a chat show, vitally, isn’t going to be an expensive creation. None of which is to say it’s a bad idea – in fact, in the simplicity of “let’s get a great performer chatting to interesting people”, it’s a brilliant one.

The publicity suggests something a little wackier than the reality of Eve of Destruction. Though Micallef’s trademark whimsical sense of humour is ever-present, it’s much more an evocation of the thirst for knowledge and drive to keep learning evident in his more recent forays into documentary. Guests including Stephen Curry, Usman Khawaja and Mary Coustas cover a wide range of ground, with plenty of stories to tell, and Micallef is a sympathetic and generous host – as in his comedic exploits, he is no spotlight hog and is always eager to let the other shine. To those who’ve only been accustomed to his bloviating comedy personas, it might be surprising to see a more grounded Micallef, albeit as suave and quick-witted as ever.

Perhaps the show’s weakness is its insistence on a gimmick. Shaun Micallef interviewing celebrity guests would be quite enough for a good show, but perhaps not enough for an advertising hook. And so the “two possessions” shtick enters, ostensibly as part of the search to find “what’s truly important”, but presumably mostly to give the PR folks something more to hold on to than just “here’s a chat show”. It’s a minor quibble: the gimmick is simply there to give the conversation a launching point and, once launched, it’s really just interesting people talking about life, the universe and everything – without cross-promotion.

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