‘It’s always worth having fun’: Hamish Blake’s guide to the good life

Hamish Blake had just got back to his table after accepting one of his Logies on Sunday night when his wife Zoe Foster Blake sprung a surprise.

There’s someone here I want you to meet, she told him.

“And I was like, ‘what is she on about,’ because I have never heard her say that phrase in her life,” says Blake the morning after the Logies. “And she goes, ‘look over there’. And I lost my mind. ‘Oh my God, it’s Jude from Night Sky’.”

Hamish Blake with his newest Gold Logie. Credit: Nine

The Jude in question is Thai-born Australian actor Chai Hansen, who played Tim the cameraman in The Newsreader – the show that had brought him to the Gold Coast for the 62nd TV Week Logie Awards. And Hansen is also one of the leads, alongside Oscar winner J.K. Simmons, in the Amazon Prime Video sci-fi series the Blakes had fallen in love with, and just finished watching a few nights earlier.

“I was genuinely starstruck to meet him,” says Blake. “We had a real fan-out over Jude, we were just pummelling him with questions.”

That moment perhaps offers a small glimpse into why Blake has just collected his second Gold Logie, awarded to the TV personality deemed Australia’s most popular: even on a night that was all about him, he somehow made it about others.

Starstruck: One of Blake’s Logie night highlights was meeting Thai-Australian actor Chai Hansen, who plays Jude in the US series Night Sky.Credit: Prime Video

As well as collecting his second Gold, Blake also became the inaugural winner of the newly named Bert Newton Award for most popular presenter (his show Lego Masters also won the industry-voted outstanding entertainment program award).

“Without ever wanting to downplay the Gold – and I don’t think Bert would want me to downplay the Gold – the Bert Newton Award really did mean something special,” he says.

He admits he hadn’t fully processed what it meant to be the first recipient of a prize that Newton’s widow Patti said she hoped might go some way to fulfilling her late husband’s wish to not be forgotten.

“It caught me off guard,” he says. “I felt overwhelmed to realise I was the first keeper of the flame for Bert’s legacy. I felt a responsibility to hopefully start a chain where people do remember him, and do remember the decades and decades and decades of amazing things he did.”

With Patti Newton.Credit: Chris Hyde

Does he think there’ll ever be a Hamish Blake award, for ... well, whatever?

“The Hamish Blake award for pestering contestants who are trying to concentrate and build Lego,” he jokes. “Hey, we can only hope.”

It’s a remarkable fact that Blake has won for a show that aired precisely 14 times in its most recent season, for around 20 hours of screen time. That leaves around 8740 other hours in which he was not on television at all last year.

When he compares his own workload to those of some of the other Gold Logie nominees – like Home and Away‘s Ray Meagher (“they get like 10 weeks off from filming a year”), MasterChef’s Melissa Leong, I’m a Celebrity’s Julia Morris and Seven’s Sonia Kruger (“she’s on, like, 25 shows”) – he admits “a bit of the impostor syndrome creeps in”.

He assuages that by acknowledging these awards, while personal, are not really just about him at all.

“You know, I could be the greatest host in the world but if the show wasn’t there, if the contestants weren’t who they are, and the energy wasn’t what it is, I’d be useless.”

By all accounts, Blake really is as nice as he presents. But it may also be that what’s made him so popular is the package he represents: adorable kids, an independently successful wife, a great friendship with Andy Lee on which he’s built a career that’s spanned decades while still leaving him, at 40, seeming forever young.

Hamish Blake and Zoe Foster Blake at the 62nd TV Week Logie Awards.Credit: Chris Hyde/Getty Images

It’s not a perfect life, he insists – “Like anyone else, we have all the ups and downs that marriages have” – but it is a life in which “fun is held in high regard as a priority”.

“The only guiding philosophy I’ve ever had is it’s always worth trying to have fun with what you’re doing,” he says.

“If you’re applying effort to having fun and creating something, and trying to spread a good feeling around the world, that’s always effort well spent.”

Australia, it seems, could hardly agree more.

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