Dave Hughes revealed why he has no empathy for Kyle Sandilands

Taskmaster star Dave Hughes has revealed how he feels about Kyle Sandilands and the harsh reality of commercial radio.

If Dave Hughes thought that fellow comedian Tom Gleeson was going to go easy on him on the new season of Taskmaster because they had known each other for 30-odd years, he was sorely mistaken.

The pair had come up together in the stand-up world in the 1990s before finding mainstream success in TV and radio, but when it came to Gleeson unleashing his famously acid tongue on the fourth season of the cult comedy-game show, Hughes was fair game just like everyone else.

“At one point he introduced me as ‘the old and stinky Dave Hughes’ and I thought ‘F---, that’s a bit harsh,” Hughes recalls with a laugh. “You’re at the start of a TV show and the host talks everyone else up and then goes ‘here’s the old and stinky Dave Hughes’.”

But with three decades of experience in the high-pressure environment of stand-up comedy and the cutthroat world of commercial radio, it was all water off a duck’s back to Hughes. Thanks in part to his recent stint in the jungle as a contestant on I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here and his chequered few years on Sydney radio coming to an end last year, the veteran funnyman says he has a new lease on life and has learned how not to give a damn.

“I can deal with Tom Gleeson’s barbs these days,” he says. “It used to annoy me, but now I just embrace it. As long as you can laugh at yourself, which I think I can more and more now. I take myself less seriously, which is a good thing because as a comedian, taking yourself seriously is f---king tedious. I’m laughing more at life than I ever have to be honest.”

Dave Hughes with Tommy Little, Emma Holland and Takashi Wagasuki, as well as Logie-winning actor Lisa McCune on the set of Taskmaster Australia, season 4.

Hughes says he’s long been a fan of the Taskmaster format, in which Gleeson and his sidekick Tom Cashman hand out ridiculous tasks for the five contestants – the others are comedians Tommy Little, Emma Holland and Takashi Wagasuki, as well as Logie-winning actor Lisa McCune – who are then scored (and often insulted) for how successfully they achieve them.

Hughes particularly loves that the show is “silly for the sake of being silly” and once he leaned into the fact that scoring big laughs was more important than scoring big points, had an absolute blast filming for a week in New Zealand last year.

“I think the biggest challenge is to realise it’s all funny and you don’t get offended by being humiliated,” he says. “Failure is always funny. Getting a bad mark is good for comedy. Losing is funny, winning isn’t.”

That said, Hughes admits that his competitive side also came out through course of the show. As an avid tennis player – he casually drops Nathan Buckley and Archie Thompson as recent straight sets victims – he admits he could be relentless in the pursuit of victory, even if it meant dobbing on some of his fellow contestants.

“You want to win, no doubt,” he says. “Whenever I thought someone else was breaking the rules, I pointed that out. And I became the guy who was always snitching on other people, so that was part of my character apparently.”

With nearly 25 years of experience in TV and radio, where success is forensically defined by rises and falls in audience share, Hughes has not only grown a thick skin from being pitted against his rivals and endlessly scrutinised but has also recently come to the conclusion that “it’s all bullshit”.

Tom Cashman and Dave Hughes on the set of Taskmaster Australia, season 4.

“When the ratings work for you, it’s like ‘this is a great system’ and when they don’t you say ‘this system is broken’,” he says.

“And you can do exactly the same thing one day and you rate really well and next day ratings have gone down two points and everything you’re doing was a disaster. But then the next survey goes up two points and everything you’re doing is great but really you’re doing the same thing every time. It’s all smoke and mirrors, basically.”

Hughes’ most recent radio gig, hosting Sydney’s 2DayFM breakfast show with Erin Molan and Ed Kavalee, came to an abrupt end last August after more than three years on air. Hughes says he took the gig in the middle of the Covid lockdowns when “I didn’t know what the hell was going to go on in life” with the intention of eventually moving his schoolteacher wife Holly and their three children to the Harbour City.

“We could have been living overlooking Bondi Beach, but they’d prefer St Kilda Beach, which is madness, but that’s the way it went,” he says with a laugh. “But no regrets about that at all. I am happy I did it but I’m happy right now as well.”

But he says that not being able to fully commit to the city where he worked became an obstacle in achieving success in a notoriously tough market. Listener habits, he says, are a bigger drivers of success in radio than personalities, and can be difficult to change.

“If you stay there long enough, it’ll work,” he says. “For me in Sydney, we were never going to move to Sydney, so it was always going to be pain in the arse. Pretending you live in a city that you’re not actually living in was a pain in the arse. I could never really be honest on my socials because my family’s in Melbourne but I could never post photos of me in Melbourne.

Dave Hughes says his recent stint on I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here has given him a new outlook on life.

“But … there’s no genius show out there. It’s all bullshit and now I think that we’re finding that out. It’s just habits. You can be a rock star in one city and the other city cannot give a flying f--- about you because they didn’t have the habit for you.”

Does that then help explain why his long-time rival, the Sydney based Kyle Sandilands is struggling to gain a foothold in Melbourne and does Hughes have any empathy for his ratings plight?

“I don’t really have any empathy because Kyle doesn’t have any empathy for anyone,” he says. “If he’s on air he’ll just slag everyone off including me. So I’ve got no empathy at all. I couldn’t care less to be honest. But they’re making a fortune so I have probably got more empathy for the shareholders than the on-air people. They are the one who are bloody bleeding.”

Hughes also believes that luck plays a huge part in success, as it did when he was thrown together with Kate Langbroek in 2001 for what would become a partnership that lasted for nearly 20 years across several networks. He says the pair have discussed getting back together at some point, but right now he’s not missing the daily grind of commercial radio.

“That band might be reunited at some point and I would look forward to it but … we’re busy at the moment and I’m looking for a break from radio,” he says. “Basically I don’t need the money. I’ve never been on cocaine so I’ve made a lot of money over the years and I’ve still got it. But I love Kate and working with her again is definitely a possibility.”

Dave Hughes says he and Kate Langbroek have discussed a return to radio together. Picture: Foxtel / Narelle Portanier

One thing that will never change for Hughes though is his first love of stand-up comedy. His recent stint in the jungle was the longest he had been away from a stage he can remember and one of the first things he did when he got back was road test some new material for his WTF show, which is now making its way around the country.

“It’s my joy,” he says. “Some people play golf on the weekend, some people ride bikes or bake or whatever – I love stand-up comedy.

“The great thing about comedy is that it requires things to go wrong in your life. So every failure I have or every time I’m insulted or every time things don’t work out, I get material. And there’s been a lot of material lately there’s no doubt about it.”

Taskmaster Australia, March 27, 8.30pm, Channel 10. WTF is touring now – dates and details at comedy.com.au

Originally published as Dave Hughes revealed why he has no empathy for Kyle Sandilands