The one person Wil Anderson doesn’t want to offend

HE doesn’t care if he stirs up controversy — but as the comedian breaks his silence about that arrest, he reveals there is one person whose opinion matters.

Wil Anderson: “Today I’m more live and let live.” (Pic: James Demitri)

THE police officer who arrested Wil Anderson will be in the audience when the comic turns his brush with the law into stand-up gold.

Like most of Australia, he is keen to hear Anderson’s take on what happened in the skies above Wagga Wagga last year — and he won’t be the only one waiting with bated breath, given Anderson has not broached the topic since.

The publicity-shy comic made national headlines in June of last year after a Qantas flight attendant complained about his “disruptive” behaviour during the short flight between Sydney and the regional NSW city where he was set to perform a stand-up show. When the plane landed, the police turned up to meet him.

He likely hobbled across the tarmac to face his fate: Anderson, 44, suffers from osteoarthritis, a condition that leaves him in constant pain thanks to years of playing backyard footy as a kid with a dodgy hip. He has to regularly stretch to keep the pain at bay, and tells Stellar the attendant had never seen people exercising on a one-hour flight and got the wrong end of the stick.

Although the popular TV presenter insists he couldn’t give a fig about setting the record straight, he has still written his latest comedy show — which he’ll tour around the country — with the incident as its subject. It will, Anderson says, help him process the “post-traumatic stress” he suffered in the aftermath.

“I don’t want my mum to think I behaved like a dickhead on the plane.” (Pic: James Demitri)

“I think I did a lot of assigning myself guilt for things that I probably shouldn’t have felt guilty about,” he says. “The show has been really healing. Even when you’ve been cleared by the police, even when you’ve been cleared by a witness — a justice of the peace happened to be sitting on the plane and wrote a letter-to-the-editor in detail explaining what had happened... I was glad he wrote the letter, so I could send it to my mum. I don’t want my mum to think that I’ve suddenly behaved like a dickhead on the plane.”

Even as his arrest hit the news and he was stuck in the police station, Anderson says he wasn’t worried about how it was being received. “I don’t care what people think of me. Why would I?” he asks. “I am not running for parliament. I don’t need everyone to like me. You would drive yourself crazy trying to please everybody. I’ve always been of the opinion that if you try to please everybody, you’ll please nobody.” Still, he owns up to one urgent mission on the day: “I had to call Mum.”

For a man with a reputation for being stridently anti-authority, Anderson’s deep respect for his parents is a sweet surprise. An eagerness to prove his commitment to them drove Anderson to finish top of his journalism course at the University of Canberra while holding down a job in the press gallery at the Australian Financial Review, even though his heart was never in it.

“My parents were fantastic,” he says. “I was the first person in my family to finish high school and the first, obviously, to go to university. So, they were just really proud. I think a lot of my university experience was about honouring them. I was very aware they had made a whole bunch of sacrifices in their lives to give me a great opportunity. I didn’t want to be one of those people who did six weeks of uni and chucked it all in to drink wine.”

The eldest of three children, Anderson grew up on the family dairy farm in regional Victoria, on a road named after his grandfather. But Anderson says he was never pressured to spend his life there. “If I’m going to get up at five to do a job then I would prefer it be one where I get to talk about sh*t from the paper and interview Ian Botham, rather than to milk cows for two hours,” he laughs.

Showing “some love for Mum” on Instagram.

He wasn’t necessarily the class clown, but Anderson recalls secretly rewriting portions of school plays to take witty pot shots at his teachers. “These days you’ve got YouTube and podcasts; back then the only comedy you’d hear was stuff on the telly, or like Rodney Rude albums. So it wasn’t until I saw The Money Or The Gun, Andrew Denton on the TV doing this comedy show about people with disabilities, or The Big Gig — Wendy Harmer was just doing this brilliant political but hilarious comedy.”

It was his beloved mum who helped Anderson see his future could look like that, too.

“I went to see Billy Connolly at Hamer Hall with my mum and I am pretty sure I decided in that room, that night, that comedy was what I wanted to do with my life,” he says. “Mum took me as a birthday present, three hours down from the country, to see Billy Connolly. It was the greatest thing I’d ever seen in my life. I think it was an amazing thing for a parent to do, because part of her probably knew it was more than just me wanting to go and see a comedian.”

Anderson took his mum back to see Connolly perform when he last toured Australia; this time it was his treat. “That was an amazing experience to be able to take her to see that and thank her. She’s been amazing support. She comes to see my show every year. Dad comes, too. I know there’s been plenty of stuff over the years that probably embarrassed them, but they’ve never told me not to use something,” he says.

“I stopped doing shows in Sale, which is the nearest place to where they’re from. Not because the audiences weren’t good, but what I would hear about later is locals would rib my parents about how much I swore or things that I had said, and I didn’t want to put them through that.”

When he first started out in comedy, Anderson railed against authority. Celebrity, pomp and ceremony — they were all targets. In one well-documented instance, he caused a furore with his live tweeting from the 2010 Logies, when he let loose on John Mayer, Molly Meldrum and Sigrid Thornton. Anderson makes no secret of his disdain for the Logies and any awards that honour the arts.

“I was nominated for the Gold Logie. And I didn’t want to go,” he explains. “I should have said ‘No!’ – but I was pressured into it. So I did what I do in those situations where I’ve been forced to do something. I a), got drunk and then b), decided that I would [make fun of it].”

Today, he tells Stellar: “I’m a bit more live and let live.”

Wil Anderson features in Stellar magazine.

One person who had been in his line of fire over the years is now somebody he spends hours with most mornings. “There’s no-one I went after harder and more regularly than Eddie McGuire and now we work together,” says Anderson, who co-hosts Triple M’s Hot Breakfast radio show in Melbourne with McGuire and Luke Darcy. “He was Eddie Everywhere at the time, you know, and so for a kid like me he [was an easy target]. The good thing about Eddie is that he has a sense of who he is. Sometimes, people think that he is unaware of what people think about him. He understands; he’s a smart guy. We made peace with it. Because we’re both adults and we love this show.”

Already flat-out living part-time in America, touring his stand-up shows, hosting Gruen for the ABC and recording regular podcasts, Anderson was in no rush to return to breakfast radio — until McGuire made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Many thought the two men would butt heads, but Anderson says he and McGuire have as much in common as they do differences.

“We’re both working-class kids who went into journalism. We both like news, we both like politics, we both like football, so there are a lot of things.”

So one final question: does he still fly with Qantas? “I do,” he replies. “I’m not going to stop flying my favourite airline. It’s not like I’m going to stop ordering my favourite food because, like, one day out of a thousand I found a pube in it. I’ll just get the pube out.”

Wil Anderson — Wilegal plays the Melbourne International Comedy Festival from March 28 to April 22 and the Sydney Opera House on October 13; tickets at comedy.com.au.