If you saw Shaun Micallef over the last month or so, chances are he was promoting his latest novel, De’Ath Takes a Holiday. If you’re seeing Shaun Micallef this week, odds are you’re watching his newest ABC documentary series, Shaun Micallef’s Going For Broke. And if you see him later this year, most likely it’ll have something to do with the second season of his SBS travel series, Shaun Micallef’s Origin Odyssey. Even for one of Australia’s most-loved figures, that’s a lot. So how much Shaun Micallef is too much?
Normally as questions go that’d be a bit of a non-starter. Australia is awash with media personalities who just keep on turning up. Just this week, Dave Hughes was on both The Assembly and Glenn and Mick’s Celebrity Intervention. But for the first decade or so of his career, Micallef’s public persona was built in part on scarcity. He wasn’t around all the time, and when he was it was something special.
Shaun Micallef’s Going for Broke – quick links
A career in comedy
Right from the start, Shaun Micallef has been the name you can trust when it comes to quality comedy. From his days on Full Frontal through to The Micallef P(r)ogram(me) to Welcher & Welcher (it’s better than you remember), then the increasingly surreal game show Talkin’ ‘bout Your Generation and news satires like Newstopia and Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell, he was consistently fronting seriously funny comedy that didn’t talk down to the audience.
When he brought Mad as Hell to a close in 2022, he said he was stepping down in part to create a space for new comedians. As he said on then-Twitter at the time, ‘After 11 years and 15 seasons, I just felt it was time for someone younger to take advantage of the resources and opportunities on offer.’
It was a rare example of a comedy figure not just talking about helping a new generation, but actively stepping aside to make room for them. And then a year later he was back on the ABC fronting an interview show, Shaun Micallef’s Eve of Destruction.
Eve of Destruction ran for two seasons (and a Christmas special). Since the end of Mad as Hell, Micallef has also fronted Shaun Micallef’s On the Sauce, a documentary series on alcohol for the ABC, hosted the first season of Shaun Micallef’s Origin Odyssey on SBS, published a memoir, a separate collection of written articles and fiction, De’Ath Takes a Holiday and this week’s Shaun Micallef’s Going For Broke.
Going for broke
Going for Broke is, like On the Sauce, built around the hook that Micallef himself knows next to nothing about the subject but is keen to find out. He’s a charming, genial host, and his slight awkwardness around something generally seen as being central to this great brown land helps to highlight just how unusual and extreme our national attitudes can be.
While at a stretch it could be read as a series of sketches in which a well-meaning naif wanders into a seedy world and survives through the power of innocence, it’s mostly just a well-made and informative overview of a massive industry that we should probably be more critical of. There are some decent jokes. There are also a lot of interviews with experts, politicians and people who’ve had their lives ruined by gambling.
Like everything Micallef has taken on since Mad as Hell, it’s not unfunny, but it’s not straight comedy either. He’s not taking opportunities away from the next generation of comedians; it’s more that the ABC doesn’t seem especially interested in giving the opportunities he received to anyone coming up.
And none of the series he’s been involved with since Mad as Hell would have happened with someone else at the helm. It’s not like he’s turning up hosting Grand Designs Australia (or The Block). He’s using his fame to bring new things to the cultural landscape, rather than merely hosting programs bound to happen anyway.
The Mad as Hell-shaped hole in the schedule
Micallef has always been a bit of a workaholic. (He admits as much in his memoir.) His output has been remarkably consistent over the last few decades. Even while Mad as Hell was airing, he hosted a children’s game show for Ten (Shaun Micallef’s Brain Eisteddfod), a documentary on religion for SBS (Shaun Micallef’s Stairway to Heaven), a reboot of Talkin’ ‘Bout Your Generation, two seasons of his sitcom The Ex-PM, and a mystery series for Ten (Mr & Mrs Murder).
While having Micallef all over our screens is nothing new, the difference now is that nothing he’s currently working on for television is a comedy. The fact that the ABC has seemingly made zero effort to come up with anything to fill the Mad as Hell-shaped hole in their schedule only makes it worse. When it comes to political satire – or just decent jokes about the current political and media landscape – it’s the audience that’s left feeling mad as hell.
Usually when comedians depart a long running series, they drop out of sight. After Mad as Hell, Micallef kept on doing what he’d always been doing: a whole lot of projects that weren’t Mad as Hell.
When he was out there doing comedy on a regular basis, all those other projects were a bonus. Now that we’re not getting the comedy – and after a decade of Mad as Hell, the man definitely deserved a break – those other projects can sometimes feel like a reminder of what we’re missing.
Maybe it’s not that he’s doing too much, it’s that he’s not doing enough of what he does best.
