This year, Shaun Micallef’s Mad As Hell on the ABC will be celebrating 10 years on air, and as a birthday present, they’ve been gifted an election year – and all the chaos that comes with it.
Mediaweek spoke to Shaun Micallef about how the characters come and go, the best parts of an election campaign, and whether or not Milo Kerrigan will be making a return.
Shaun Micallef
As with all shows, some changes have had to be made to work around Covid restrictions. For Mad as Hell, that has meant two years of almost no live studio audience. Micallef says that the lack of audience has meant that sometimes the material comes off as a bit more brutal than it might otherwise do if it had the softening effect of an audience laughing.
“Francis Greenslade in the cast, he likes it better not having an audience in the studio because you can be more of a pure actor in those circumstances, rather than having to ignore the studio audience.
“Personally speaking, I actually prefer to have a studio audience there, because there’s a bit more of an instant validation of what you’ve done. They’re helpful for me personally as a performer, and for some of the other cast, because you get a sense of what’s funny and what isn’t. We don’t get to try any of this stuff out. Without a studio audience, we’re left going well, we think it’s funny, let’s put it on and see.”
The 10 years that the show has been on the air has seen any number of characters being played by the Mad As Hell cast. Micallef says that they come and go naturally.
“The regular ones have grown organically. We don’t sit down and think, ‘Oh, what’s a funny character?’, we usually start with a joke and go, ‘what character would best serve this material?’”
There is one character in particular though, who will be going back into his cupboard this year.
“We thought we’d retire the Kraken. It was a bizarre thing, I can’t even remember whether it actually made any sense when we did it originally, or whether we just had no punch line and thought we’d do that instead. I think that was probably the case. One of our writers used to dress up in the costume, and even when he left the writer’s room and was doing another show, he came back just to dress up as the Kraken and come out of the cupboard all the time. But we decided to retire him this year.
“The other thing was that the Kraken was more of an audience pleaser in the studio, it’s a bit weird having him come on in a cold studio. Weirder than normal, anyway.”
The Kraken
Last season saw the brief return of Micallef’s much loved Full Frontal character, Milo Kerrigan. Fortunately for Kerrigan’s fans, that may not have been the last audiences saw of him.
“We did trot him out last year as a spokesperson for Craig Kelly, and I can’t think of any reason why he can’t now speak also for Clive Palmer. If the United Australia Party is deserving of a headline, then I think the person to speak on behalf of the United Australia Party would be Milo Kerrigan. So yes, he will. He will come back if the situation seems fitting.”
With an election just around the corner, the Mad As Hell team has got their work cut out for them. There is a silver lining to the timing, however.
“We’re happy because it has to be called in May, and if it’s in May then we’ve already finished,” says Micallef. “So we get the fun of the election campaign, but not the horror of actually having to write two shows over the weekend, which is often what happens. We’ve had this a couple of times where the election has been right in the middle of a season. The last couple of elections have been pretty tight, so it’s double the work.
“We have to record two shows usually, because we record on Tuesday but we have to write it all by Sunday. It’s not just a cut and paste of the Liberal Party for the Labor Party, it actually completely alters the emphasis of the show.”
Tosh Greenslade as Brion Pegmatite, Senior Hair Removalist in the Defence Department
Unfortunately for Micallef, the Mad As Hell team doesn’t have a crystal ball when it comes to election outcomes. As with everything, there is usually a wrong prediction for every right one.
“I remember the last election, we were coming on the next week. I thought, ‘Labor is going to win, so let’s make this huge portrait of Napoleon with Bill Shorten’s head on it. That’d be funny, we’ll do that’. It cost a bit of money, we had it all set up – it was huge. It ended up being the door that the Kraken used to come through, it was that big. Then, of course, Bill Shorten didn’t win.
“We had this picture of Bill Shorten – who was no longer the opposition leader – up on the wall for a couple of weeks. I think eventually we just swapped the head around for Peter Dutton and thought, ‘that will do, that looks like a vague satirical point there’. So you can get it wrong, and you don’t want to get something like that too wrong.”
With political careers rising and falling on optics, the Australian public loves a good gaffe – and they’re in no short supply during election campaigns. Satire isn’t dead, however, and Micallef says that political stunts gone wrong tend to make the team think harder about jokes for the show.
“We when we started we had radio to contend with, and that was about it. There were jokes on social media, but not as many as there are now – everybody’s a comedian now, everybody’s got a take because it’s all so immediate. Many of those knee-jerk reactions to things have already been explored by the time we go to air.
“Because we’re on once a week, we get to process the information a bit and maybe connect it with things that happen the next day or a week later.”
Emily Taheny as Mary-Brett Punish from the Attorney-General’s cupboard
Mad As Hell is a consistent ratings winner for the ABC, and alongside Tom Gleeson’s Hard Quiz, helps make up the spine of the ABC’s Wednesday night comedy lineup.
“I don’t really have a good antenna for that sort of thing. I just tend to write what I think is funny, and I get to choose all the material and everything being the script editor and the EP,” says Micallef.
“I think people like the disregard that we have for politics – and it has become a more political show than it was when it started out. When it started out it was really just about media and news programs, we were making as much fun of the way news is delivered as what was being delivered. Then over time, we ran out of those parody jokes and started looking at the news properly, and started trying to make jokes out of the news. That’s all we’re doing.”
Shaun Micallef’s Mad As Hell, Wednesdays at 8.30pm on ABC iview and ABC TV