Merrick Watts: ‘Yes, I miss radio’
Comedian and former radio host Merrick Watts opens up on nearly missing his first date with now-wife Georgie, his enduring friendship with Tim “Rosso” Ross and why he had to go on the dole for six months.
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Sitting in a cosy armchair surrounded by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and his two cats, Ponyo and Kiki, comedian Merrick Watts is in his element.
The home he has built in Sydney with wife Georgie and their two children is a source of great pride, even if it is “under the flight path”.
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Yet life could have looked very different for the former radio host. The day he was meant to first meet Georgie — on a blind date set up by their mutual hairdresser — Watts was nursing a severe hangover.
“I’d been out with some friends the night before and I was really hungover and I didn’t want to go out on this date,” Watts tells Stellar, somewhat sheepishly.
“But I went out and met Georgie... I just remember thinking, ‘Wow, she’s very, very good-looking. This probably won’t work because she’s too attractive for me.’”
For her part, Georgie thought Watts was “very handsome and very funny”. The couple met at Sydney’s Home nightclub.
“I was wearing Singapore national service army pants and a Kookaï boob tube,” recalls Georgie with a laugh. Both she and Watts happily concur that she looked like a Spice Girl.
Twenty years later, they are married (they wed in 2006) and have a nine-year-old son, Wolfe, and a seven-year-old daughter, Kinga.
“They are very well-behaved kids, strangely. I say strangely because I was such a horror,” admits Watts.
“My grandfather used to say, ‘Going to or coming from?’ which meant ‘What are you about to do, or what have you just done?’ I was a real handful.”
During his childhood in Victoria’s Eltham, Watts says he was an underachiever, but that changed when he transferred late in high school to a college with a heavy focus on the arts.
A love of comedy drove him to a career in stand-up, but it wasn’t until he met Tim “Rosso” Ross at a music gig and they performed in their first show together in 1996 that things began to take off. Even then, it didn’t happen all at once.
“Rosso and I were really poor, like really poor. In ’96, I was on the dole for about six months because I couldn’t find any work,” says the 45-year-old.
“Both of us said we would give [our comedy partnership] a period of time, and if it works, it works and if it doesn’t, we would get real jobs, as it were.”
Their partnership not only worked — it exploded. In 1998, they began hosting their eponymous radio show on Triple J, a role that still humbles Watts.
“We went from being poor to not being rich necessarily, but all of a sudden we had full-time jobs. That was the first job we’d ever had — where you got a regular salary, where you had a HR department, you had managers.”
After only a few years of honing their skills, the duo was hired by the newly launched radio station Nova 96.9 in 2001. Suddenly they were earning commercial- radio dollars in a highly competitive field.
Their show dominated airwaves for almost a decade until, in 2009, Ross decided he wanted to pursue other creative endeavours.
Many saw his farewell as a break-up of one of the most powerful comedic duos in Australia, and in a lot of ways it was. But the two still parted as nothing less than firm friends.
“I’ll find a letter or some kind of archival thing and I’ll send it to Rosso and we’ll talk about it and laugh about it over the phone,” Watts tells Stellar.
“Rosso and I have always said we are very different people with the same sense of humour. Which meant as a duo, we had an amazing shorthand because we would both be able to gauge what the funny part was. But we’re very different people.
“[That time] was such a huge portion of my life, it’s hard to reflect on one part of it. But fondly. Very, very fondly.”
While Ross has since found his second wind in the field of architecture, Watts, who left radio in 2017, has embraced a mix of comedy and wine in his latest venture, Grapes Of Mirth.
Ostensibly a comedy festival held in regional areas around the country, Grapes Of Mirth brings together “high-quality comedians”, equally high-quality wine and a high proportion of parents who have left their kids with babysitters for a good day out.
“They just want to have a whole day of entertainment, but they want to go home at a responsible hour. We’re a long way from needing pill-testing kits,” he says.
Besides managing Grapes Of Mirth, Watts hopes to take on more screen roles. He has dabbled in acting in the past, appearing in TV shows such as 2008’s The Hollowmen and 2009’s Underbelly: A Tale Of Two Cities, and just last month featured in an episode of Get Krack!n.
But he would not take up the craft full-time, unless “I got a job that I loved, and it was a really good role and it went for years and years and years.”
And radio is beckoning once again. “I think I will [return], at some stage. I’ve had discussions about it and talked to people recently about taking on some radio work. I love radio. I do miss it,” he says.
“At some stage, something will come up and I’ll do it when it’s the right thing to do.”
In the meantime, much of Watts’s time these days is spent travelling around regional Australia, looking for venues to hold his comedy festival.
“It’s a bit like not having a real job. But then again, that suits the rest of my career, which has never been a real job. I’m 45, I’ve done pretty well!”
And with that, Watts grins. “I’ve never really done any work in my life.”
For more information on Grapes Of Mirth, visit grapesofmirth.com.au.
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