Shaun Micallef’s Eve of Destruction Season 2 review: yes please

Shaun Micallef is one of Australian television’s great talents, and a big part of what makes him such a great talent is that he’s always out there trying something new.

Over the years he’s built up a sizeable and loyal audience willing to follow him down whatever path he chooses to explore; even at the peak of their success it’s hard to imagine, say, Daryl Somers or Chris Lilley getting audiences to sit still for a three-episode documentary on the dodgy side of drinking like 2020’s Shaun Micallef’s On The Sauce.

So when Eve of Destruction arrived last year, it felt closer to one of Micallef’s many experiments than the next big thing – more Shaun Micallef’s Stairway to Heaven or his children’s books than a real follow-up to his work on Mad as Hell. A low budget interview show built around a show-and-tell gimmick where Micallef just chatted away to (often) his mates? Just add it to the list next to Shaun Micallef’s Brain Eisteddfod.

Watch the Sean Micallef’s Eve of Destruction S2 trailer.

But now it’s back for a second season, which means it’s no longer just a chance to see a much-loved television personality having a nice time being sociable. Nor is it an easy way for the ABC to keep Micallef on-air, or even just a low-budget time-filler to gloss over the fact that the ABC’s light entertainment stable is for all intents and purposes just Hard Quiz, The Weekly and Gruen on endless rotation. It’s a serious interview program, even when the interviews themselves are just a bit of messing around.

Micallef’s Eve: the obvious flaws

The flaws in this are obvious: a quarter of the way into the 21st century, broadcast television is not where audiences turn to when they want to see a couple of people sitting around talking to each other. The ABC no longer makes sitcoms filmed in a studio because they believe they look cheap and old fashioned, but a podcast with pictures is still prime-time viewing for the national broadcaster.

Fortunately, the not-so-secret ingredient here is Micallef himself, who quietly has become one of this country’s best on-camera interviewers. Partly that’s down to a guest roster made up entirely of people he’s friends with or who he’s interested in. Future guests in this comedy-heavy season include John Safran, Tony Martin, Lisa McCune, and Rhys Nicholson; celebrities with new projects to plug are nowhere in sight.

But he’s also clearly engaged with what his guests have to say, and he works with them to create a conversation instead of just lobbing questions at them in the hope they’ll say something that’ll go viral. It’s unlikely that anything anyone says here will make headlines the next day; if you don’t think that’s a good thing, this is not the celebrity-driven chat show for you.

Micallef’s Eve: dead possom song

What we do get is comedian Frank Woodley playing a song he wrote when he was fourteen about a dead possum (‘dead possum, dead possum, dead possum at the bottom of a tree’) and the influence Laurel and Hardy had on Lano and Woodley (it seems for Woodley playing a bumbling child-man is ‘not a stretch’). Entertaining and enlightening in equal measure, it’s exactly what you want from a long – well, around 20 minutes – interview.

Woodley sticks around for second guest, Olympic gold medal-winning swimmer Ariarne Titmus, who reveals her gold medal lives in a sock (and not on display) because after 40 hours training a week she just doesn’t want to think about swimming. Woodley later asks a thoughtful question about how actually achieving all her goals early on affected her career; Micallef, knowing exactly what kind of show he’s hosting, follows up with ‘is it like heroin?’

Micallef’s Eve: a very funny man

The fact that Micallef is a very funny man who can’t help but cram comedy into every available space doesn’t hurt proceedings in the slightest. The show’s gimmick – the guests bring in the two items they would save from their house if it was being destroyed, and then talk about them – usually turns into an end-of-episode sketch as it turns out being brought in didn’t secure their safety after all.

For the first episode back they don’t even bother with that, instead ending on a jam session (Titmus plays tambourine) that underlines just how disposable the format is. Which again, is for the best.

When Micallef early on calls for the camera to zoom in tight on Woodley as he asks a sensitive question in the hope he’ll burst into tears – as used to happen pretty much weekly on Andrew Denton’s Enough Rope – it’s a reminder that the real path to authenticity with a format as artificial as a talk show is to not take things too seriously.

Shaun Micallef’s had 30 years’ worth of practice doing just that.

Shaun Micallef’s Eve of Destruction airs weekly at 8.30pm on ABC TV, with All episodes available to stream on ABC iview.

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