The thing that annoys Hamish Blake the most
The comedian is known for his affable and larrikin-like personality — but there is one sure-fire way to irritate Hamish Blake: by referring to wife Zoë Foster Blake as his spouse, rather than as a successful woman in her own right.
Stellar
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Fatherhood is a great leveller. It can suck the humour even from Hamish Blake, the comedian who at 37 still comes across as an eternal kid.
His eldest, four-year-old Sonny, and his one-year-old sister, Rudy, are accustomed to hearing the word “no”. They are also familiar with what their father dubs the “parenting classics”.
“I’m counting to three. I am asking sternly, ‘What did I just say?’” Blake tells Stellar.
“I definitely have got a dad voice. I am doing all the same sh*t every other dad is doing.
“You hear it out of your mouth, and you can’t believe that you’re counting. I reckon every parent gets surprised the first time they count to three because suddenly you sound just like your own parents.”
Blake hasn’t lost his sense of fun — he’s been known to rev up the kids before bedtime, to the annoyance of his wife, author and make-up doyenne Zoë Foster Blake. It’s just that he understands fatherhood is not a joke.
“Without wanting to get too serious, I think you do short-change your kids if you don’t [set boundaries],” he says. “I think the best gift you can give them is to, in a loving way, help them to understand where the boundaries are.”
The boy Australians embraced more than 15 years ago fresh out of uni, goofing around on radio with his mate Andy Lee, is now a grown man.
These days, he’d rather stay at home with his kids and wife than race around the world donning gloves lined with bullet ants or spending time in jail for farting on a plane.
He still does it, but only for projects he loves.
“An idea has to be so fun and so worth it to leave them,” he says, estimating he turns down 95 per cent of the jobs he is offered because he doesn’t want to sacrifice time with his family for work that he’s not passionate about.
“I don’t want to sound ungrateful,” he says. “If you don’t have an audience, you don’t have a job. So we are extremely grateful for our audience. But the goal is not to be famous and be on TV. That is just the thing that happens as a by-product of it.”
Happily, Blake has found a project that satisfies both his inner child and his love of fatherhood.
It’s Lego Masters, a reality TV series in which contestants take on block-building challenges. Blake has been a lifelong fan of Lego, and grew up building little spaceships that would sit on his windowsill gathering dust.
Some things never change. Foster Blake says her husband has busied himself making his own Lego art — an array of pancakes, tiny cans of drink and spaceships — in-between takes on his new show.
“They’re all on display at home now,” she says. “I’m too sentimental to bust them up, so I guess they’re staying. Even the C+ ones.”
In fact, she has encouraged the habit. For Blake’s 30th birthday — long before Lego Masters was a twinkle in any television producer’s eye — Foster Blake commissioned Dirk Denoyelle, one of the world’s only certified Lego artists, to create a portrait that now hangs on the wall of the couple’s home in Melbourne.
“I got a Lego portrait of Hamish because what do you get the man who has everything? A portrait of himself made of his favourite toy, of course,” says Foster Blake.
“Hamish thought it was a bit obnoxious having a portrait of himself on the wall at first, but he’s proud of it now.”
Sonny is being initiated into the family hobby, too. “I bought a bunch of Star Wars stuff for Sonny when it was re-released, as an heirloom,” says Blake.
“I was like, ‘Look, I can’t guarantee that this is going to be a nest egg for you when you grow up, but who knows what will happen with our finances with me at the helm? But I can promise you that there will be the collectible Death Star for you no matter what happens down the track.”
Hosting Lego Masters has taken Blake out of his comfort zone as he works without the safety net of his screen sidekick Andy Lee.
They have both had success as individuals — Lee as a regular panellist on Talkin’ ’Bout Your Generation and author of kids’ story Do Not Open This Book, and Blake with roles in the Kiwi film Two Little Boys and Foster Blake’s TV series The Wrong Girl — but they remain best known as a duo.
“I kind of had to put my big-boy pants on,” he says of hosting Lego Masters.
“It was my job to figure out the best way to host the show. It wasn’t a group decision. At the end of the day, if you do a good job, well done. And if you don’t, it’s on you. That was a fun challenge to this show. But it also means you don’t have anyone to blame if it goes wrong.
“The beauty of working in a duo is that, even if it’s a real stinker, if you’re in it together, you can walk away and have a laugh and be crushed together. The massive advantage of being part of a duo, too, is even if everything is going wrong, it’s still a fun day because you’re with your best mate.”
Lee and Blake met while studying at The University of Melbourne in 2000 and forged a bond over cheap beers and pizza.
It was Lee who first realised that they could have a future as entertainers. “I reckon we just fluked it that we found each other when we did, when we were young,” reflects Blake.
“I suppose chemistry is one word for it. A simpler way to put it is we have a very similar idea of what good [work] looks and feels like.”
He was lucky to make two great lifetime partnerships. The other is with Foster Blake, who is adored by legions of young women for her make-up, her books, and her sharp sense of humour.
Yet he still remains the best-known of the couple, and references to her as his spouse, rather than as a successful woman in her own right, never fail to annoy him.
“I find it a very bizarre thing,” he says. “Especially because I am sitting there seeing firsthand that Zoë has created her own skincare line, she’s written 10 books, she had a TV series. She is just an amazingly beautiful and unique voice in the world that a lot of people have fun with, and a lot of people identify with.
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“So as her closest bystander most of the time, it’s the weirdest for me to see that work is sometimes not the thing that she’s known for, and it’s instead who she’s married to. Having said that, I will ride her coat-tails! I will be Zoë’s husband all day long.”
Blake laughs that he also owes his lustrous beard and youthful complexion to Foster Blake, admitting he helps himself to her many beauty products when he’s in the bathroom.
“I have parties in the shower,” he says. “Me and the kids will put face masks on. And I have been using some of her hair mask on my beard, and I have been using it every single shower and I noticed this morning that it’s gone. I think she’s hidden it.
“I feel like we’re at a hostel and she’s bringing her toiletries in and out of the shower, so I don’t use them. But I’m doing it for her,” he jokingly protests. “For the kissing and the kids. To keep the beard soft.”
Blake says he and Foster Blake tag team their various work commitments so one of them is at home to care for Sonny and Rudy.
“We do a lot of iCal [online calendar] sharing,” he says. “I would say we are in a good spot because we probably still send more loving texts to each other than we do iCal alerts, but if that balance ever shifts, then we will have to up our loving texts. It will be a sign we need to get back to what it’s all about.”
Blake has everything a larrikin from Melbourne could wish for. Except, perhaps, one thing: being immortalised as a Lego figure.
“You can’t even compare a Gold Logie to that,” he muses. “I am eons away from that. You’ve got to be at Luke Skywalker level.
“As much as I am sure that the people in Denmark who officially choose who gets made into a figurine respect television’s night of nights in Australia, I can’t see Logie winners being top of their list. And I think Karl, Carrie, Kate Ritchie, Waleed... they would all agree.
“We definitely would go in the record books as the lowest-selling worldwide set of Lego of all time. I can just imagine kids waking up on Christmas morning in America all excited and then going: ‘What is this? And why is there a baby one? Oh, that’s Grant Denyer!’”
Lego Masters will air on the Nine Network and 9Now after Easter.
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