Hamish Blake and Andy Lee: Where to from here?
AS they prepare to launch their podcast in the US, Hamish Blake and Andy Lee talk family, friendship and streaking when they’re 80.
Stellar
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HAMISH Blake and Andy Lee like that they don’t know what they will be doing next. Plans — and long-term contracts — do not suit the self-proclaimed jumble of concepts that they bring to their work in the worlds of radio, TV and podcasts. As an added bonus, their dilly-dallying really upsets their manager.
The only certainty, the popular comedy duo reveal, will take place 44 years from now when they, as octogenarians, will take off their clothes and streak on to Melbourne’s MCG.
They have given this scheme a lot of thought. Hopefully it will happen at a Melbourne-Carlton Grand Final. They figure the fines for streaking by 2062 will be about nine billion bitcoin. Which they are willing to pay — because that’s the price of fun.
“It’ll just be arthritic, old men falling naked over the boundary line,” Blake, 36, tells Stellar. “And some security guards graciously putting trench coats over us, and saying, ‘Wait here, you’ve hurt your neck, we’re getting an ambulance.’”
If between now and then remains open, one thing is clear: Blake and Lee will continue to focus on the friendship that has always been the bedrock of their work — and helped them find an audience. They’ve been the biggest thing in radio, but claim that’s only a “happy by-product” of getting to be “two idiots”. It’s easier to pin down what they don’t want to do as opposed to what they do.
Today, they’re keen to talk about their Hamish & Andy podcast program, which will soon be available to US audiences via a local platform in a move that will presumably push up their already soaring downloads from one million a week. For them, it’s just another reason to crack jokes. “Obviously Americans didn’t know about the internet so there was no way of getting our show until now,” says Blake, who compares their podcast to “a warm pub with no dress code” — one straight from the ’80s, where kids can run around unsupervised.
Already, about five per cent of their audience is Americans who have discovered the program randomly. They like Americans — they have lived in New York and travelled across the country in a caravan for a TV show. They agree that Americans love showing off and being involved. Such a vast country of so many odd interests fits their knack for tapping the quirky. So too does their platform of choice. Says Lee of podcasting, “That’s what’s great: you don’t have to be within a frequency. The internet has changed the way comedy works; it used to be back in the day, ‘That’s a very British humour... that’s a very American humour... that’s very Australian.’ That still has its place. [But] now everyone has such strong access to everybody. You don’t set out to do this show for this territory. You just do your show and see how it goes.”
Closer to home, Lee speaks of an email from a bloke who listens to the podcasts while hunting goanna in Western Australia. Another listener banks podcasts for his missions, which run at 40 days at a time. He is a sniper in the Afghan hills, and giggling is not encouraged in his line of work. “We do recommend that if you are in the armed forces or emergency services, listen to your official radio channel,” Blake says. “The podcast will always be there for you when you get back to base.”
The pair has worked together on air for 15 years. They were friends before they worked together, and bounce off one another as smoothly off air as they do on. They speak with unguarded affection for the other; their off-handed lightness belies the private schooling and high grades of their youth.
“You both end up at a place that you never envisaged when you started talking five minutes ago,” Blake says of their rapport. “After having done this for a long, long time, I now realise that’s your once-in-a-lifetime partner that can do that, because it’s just so rare.”
This chemistry partly explains their lack of set goals. Together or apart — they do side projects that appeal — the abiding proviso is adventure. A few years ago,
in-between contracts, each feared the other might end the relationship. They deliberately held off having the chat. Neither wanted a work break-up, but each respected the other too much to force the issue. Things got sorted at a Chilean spa. Lee recalls, “I knew it wasn’t going to be for me, but you had that moment: ‘Well, who wants to go first?’”
Blake cherishes spending his newly free days with son Sonny, four, and 11-month-old daughter Rudy, his children with wife Zoë Foster Blake. “I get to roll around in the backyard pretending to be Ghostbusters,” he tells Stellar of a time he knows will not last forever. “I’m sure there will be a time in the not-too-distant future where I’ll give anything to be back on the couch cooking pretend cupcakes.”
On air, the same kind of bliss is achieved when things come together in collaboration, not just with each other but listeners. They are particularly proud of their surfing song, ‘Two Foot Tony’, for people who know little about surfing and to which the likes of Layne Beachley and Mick Fanning contributed. “Four geniuses and two idiots made a kind of song that’s pretty catchy,” Lee says.
And they snigger at the things that don’t quite work. Like cat racing, or the girl who quacked like a duck. When she went to a park to attract ducks, it was realised she was quacking at Eurasian coots instead. Bird experts were displeased; Blake and Lee are still putting that fire out. Then again, that’s the fun: turning up, turning on the microphones and seeing what happens on a show that Blake likens to “the glowing thing that Iron Man puts in his chest that powers the whole suit”.
They now say they want to work together for the next 50 years. The only chance they will bust apart could be when a nameless executive gives them the news they dread.
“We’ve been convinced for years that someone will come up, tap us on the shoulder and say, ‘Guys, no-one’s listening,’” Lee admits. “We’ll say, ‘OK, we’ll get our clothes.’” They would remain friends, telling stories about how they made each other — and other people — laugh.
The Hamish & Andy podcast is available via podcastone.com.au or can be downloaded via the App Store.
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