Sorry, only just got home from school.
[i:post_uid0]The Sydney Morning Herald - The Guide May 20-26th 2002- Cover Story[/i:post_uid0]
[b:post_uid0]Here, there and Everywhere[/b:post_uid0]
[i:post_uid0]TV, radio, stand-up... comedian Wil Anderson has been spreading himself thin lately and something had to give. Bernard Zuel talks to Australia's busiest entertainer.[/i:post_uid0]
It was the opening night of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, one of the big three comedy festivals in the world, and Wil Anderson - Victorian by birth, Sydneysider by relocation and comedian by inclination - was hosting the gala, a parade of festival comics doing five-minute spots for a national television audience of about a million people.
In two nights he would open his own show for the festival - a six show-a-week, two-week run that woould sell out every performance, much as it had during its pre-festival run through Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide. Tommorrow morning he would be up before dawn to host his national radio show on Triple J, and later that day he would record two episodes of his ABC-TV chat/comedy show, *[i:post_uid0]The Glass House[/i:post_uid0], before a large live audience.
At 28, the farmer's son from rural Victoria could have been excused a small, satisfied smile. A stand-up comedian without the gimmick hit record, franchised stage show or big movie, he was in demand, in work, in deep. Maybe too deep. Because far from smiling, Anderson was on the floor of his bathroom in his underpants, crying.
"My body just broke," Anderson recalls. He isn't embarrassed to reveal this. It's neither a boast nor a guilty secret; just the way things went after four months of, on average, less than five hours sleep a night, and the concurrent pressure of being here, there and everywhere. Maybe he could have passed up the festival's opening night gala - it wasn't a high-paying gig; it wasn't like hosting the Logies. But as he sees it, "I couldn't say no to hosting the gala." For a comedian, particularly one whose career began in Melbourne, it's right up there as prestigious gigs go. But something had to give, and it was his body.
If you're reading this thinking, 'Stop whingeing, Anderson, you're bloody lucky - nobody's making you do these things,' you'd get no argument from the man some see as the next golden child of Australian entertainment. And his answer says a lot about his priorities, odd in an industry where it's assumed there is only one way to do things - as fast, as attention grabbing and as ambitiously as possible.
"I'm not complaining about being busy," Anderson says. "I like being busy, I'd like some of those things not to be happening at the same time, but what do you do? Do you give up the oppurtunity to do your TV show, to do your radio show? The one that people would say is, you could do your satnd-up any other time. But the thing is, that's what I do; that's my thing. All this other stuff is fun stuff, but if I had to choose only one of them, [stand-up] is what I'd be doing.
"I've *always thought that if I stop doing that so I can do these other things then you're not a stand-up comedian anymore - you're a radio or TV guy who occasionally does gigs. And I've never wanted to be that person."
This is heresy enough, but what of Anderson's declaration that maybe, just maybe, radio and television comedians need a dose of reality every so often?
"I did three months of basically working six nights a week and it was great. I've never felt that I'd done better work on the radio; I was invigorated and sharp," he says. "The thing with radio - the TV is harder, but radio - you can fool yourself into believing you're being funny. You sit in that studio and make the other person laugh and you can fool yourself that you're making other people laugh at home. But you can't lie in front of an audience, so it sharpens up your other work because you find again what a good joke is."
It's not as though doing too much is new for Anderson. Nine years ago, while studying journalism full time in Canberra, he also had a full-time job with [i:post_uid0] The Australian Financial Review's [/i:post_uid0] Canberra bureau. "People wonder why I became a comedian. Well, I had no life before then," he laughs dismissively, though he does manage to slip in that he finished first in his year.
"I can't think of anyone who's wasted a career more than me. I think that if you graduate first you get your name on a board at the press club or something, and I'm sure my name's been Liquid Papered out and replaced by Adam Harvey or someone who went on to be a proper journalist."
Maybe it's not such a wasted career. Not when you consider that in the past year alone, Anderson has fielded offers from several TV networks and has been asked to join Triple M's Sydney breakfast team of Amanda Keller and Mikey Robins. He said no to them all. Is he a fool? The money, not to mention the audience, would be significantly better at Triple M, for a start.
...... to be continued (because this post is getting pretty long and there's still a page to go)!!
Edited By veronica the glass house fan on May 20 2002 at 17:56