How a Zoom spelling bee with friends became a TV comedy hit

There are those of us for whom the advent of Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee is the first time that we truly feel seen by television program makers: the first time that spelling has been elevated to a position of prestige. Anyone who prided themselves on their talent for spelling at school, only to find that as a life skill, it wasn’t one of the most lucrative, must rejoice that Montgomery, the long, lean Kiwi dynamo latterly storming every beachhead in the comedy world, has finally made spelling, if not exactly “cool”, at least entertaining.

“Spelling, I thought, was an interesting thing,” says Montgomery, musing on the show’s origins, “because everyone’s got [a] connection to spelling, everyone has had to spell or still has to spell in some form. It is a false representation of intelligence, it’s not actually correlative to what you know. It’s a delightful microcosm of something that people value that isn’t relevant. So there are immediate stakes, but also, there’s no genuine impact or ramifications for anything in the world. It exists in a really lovely vacuum.”

It’s even easier to understand the appeal of a show with no stakes or ramifications when you learn the idea for the spelling bee came to Montgomery during the COVID lockdown, when the world was weighed down by ramifications and everything seemed to have horribly major stakes. Everyone was craving something inconsequential to occupy the mind, and a comedy spelling bee was manna from heaven.

“I was missing performing,” says Montgomery of that darkest period for entertainers. “All of my work had been wiped out. I’d just come home to New Zealand from America, and so I had a lot of friends in America. I had friends in the United Kingdom, I had friends in Australia and at home, comedian friends, and I knew that no one had anything on. The initial grand vision was, what if I set up, what if I use these friendships I’ve made, what if I use these connections I’ve made through comedy to try to set up some sort of global comedy spelling competition – that was one of the original thoughts.”

From little things, big things grow, and from humble Zoom sessions with friends eventually came the undeniable glamour of the TV version – first in New Zealand and now the Australian edition kicking off on the ABC – but at the time, it was more a coping strategy than a career move. “I never knew it would get this far, that it would become a proper TV show or anything. I was just trying to get through COVID lockdown. And in the early days of the lockdown, there was no knowing how long it would last.” The graduation from online to real life came next. “At the end of the year I put on five live shows in a week at the Basement Studio in Auckland, and had different lineups on. People came to that, and they got a good response. That’s probably the point when I was thinking; this could be bigger than just what I was doing on Zoom. It all kind of flowed from there.”

On it flowed, from more sold-out shows at the Melbourne Comedy Festival, and then on to the small screen with Guy Mont’s Spelling Bee, a show that carries the vivid aesthetic of the golden era of 1970s and ’80s game shows – watching it could induce nostalgia for Blankety Blanks and Sale of the Century in viewers of a certain vintage. “I wanted to pre-date it because I want people to be confused as to when it happens. I think the current aesthetic of modern panel shows is going to age quickly. If you pre-date the show, I think you kind of oddly immunise yourself against that. Also, I remember watching TV as a kid and really wanting to walk around the set and I wanted to pick everything up. So I wanted to recreate that feeling.”

The look is just the backdrop, though, for a show dominated by Montgomery’s gleefully skewed take on the quizmaster persona, giving the comedian contestants opportunities to show off their own chops, but also gaining endless amusement from showing up their spelling shortcomings.

“Every word you have in a spelling bee is an opportunity for jokes,” he notes, “because every single word that’s presented, you’ve got three joke formats basically presented for you – you’ve got language of origin, definition and hear the word in a sentence.” Those opportunities are expanded in strange new directions in this spelling bee, though – apart from the opening “Spelling Round”, in which contestants select a level of difficulty of words to spell, the closing “Buzz Round” in which they must be quick on the buzzer as well as good with the letters, the show’s slightly surreal roster of rounds include “The Hat Hat” (contestants draw a hat from a bigger hat and must wear it until they spell a word correctly) and “Social Media” (contestants have their old social media posts dredged up and must correct the spelling mistakes therein). There is an atmosphere of free-ranging silliness present, but there’s also an edge of true pressure.