‘I think I am without purpose’: The career twilight of Shaun Micallef

The most embarrassing thing that could happen when I interview Shaun Micallef, I decide, would be if the comedian caught me just before lunch on the street where he lives, skulking near his home like a fanboy or a stalker or worse.

This is exactly what happens.

Shaun Micallef ponders the twilight of his career at Tick Tok cafe in Williamstown.Credit: Eddie Jim

It is just before lunchtime in the pleasant Melbourne bayside suburb of Williamstown on a Friday that cannot decide what sort of changeable spring day it wants to be.

I am here early working on a different story, checking out a newsworthy house somewhere near the comedian’s family abode when I see a figure wearing a blue checked blazer, smart blue shirt, reddish trousers and a jaunty green felt hat stride towards me, looking like he has stepped out of a vintage copy of The New Yorker. The outfit is decidedly non-Williamstown, but totally Micallef.

The comedian, actor, TV host, writer and forthcoming contestant on Dancing with the Stars (but who doesn’t do stand-up and shuns appearing as a guest on panel shows) looks puzzled as I stand looking at him expectantly, but then the penny drops and he offers a cheery recognition.

It must happen all the time, I later say, weird people staring and acting like they know you. (We met once before at the Logies, years ago.)

“No, no, it’s all fine, particularly in this area because I live here, and people are always saying hello,” Micallef says.

He has chosen Williamstown institution the Tick Tok cafe (where he receives people “like a mafia don”) to talk about life after his popular ABC show Mad As Hell, his replacement TV interview shows and his new book, Slivers, Shards and Skerricks, an anthology of new writing and pieces he had published in The Age, Meanjin, The Monthly, The Big Issue and News Corp.

Unexpectedly, he discusses the twilight of his career, the “general shitification” of television and the one word his publisher banned him from using.

More than two decades ago, Micallef and his wife moved from Adelaide to Melbourne so he could try to make it as a comic writer, and Williamstown got on his radar after he filmed the final season of ABC comedy-drama SeaChange in the suburb, circa 2001.

“We didn’t have the usual Melbourne prejudice about living in the west,” he says, recalling people used to express surprise at his suburb choice.

Now that the intense atmosphere of producing a weekly news satire with a tight-knit team is behind him, he finds himself summoning former colleagues to Tick Tok for what they presume is a business meeting – until they discover he just wants to catch up as friends.

“I think I’m without purpose,” he says as we settled at the very back table in the courtyard. “That sounds a grand theme to explore.”

This is topical because when Mad As Hell ended two years ago after running for more than a decade, Micallef talked about handing on the baton, leading to criticism about the older generation hogging the airwaves, which even dragged in radio figure Fran Kelly.

It flared again this year when Micallef popped up on the ABC interview show Eve of Destruction and SBS travel interview program Origin Odyssey, where he accompanied younger comedians to explore their heritage in their country of family origin.

Micallef accompanied comedian Aaron Chen to China in Origin Odyssey.Credit: SBS

There will be, he declares as definitively as anyone in television talking about their future, no more Mad As Hell.

“I am kind of in the twilight of whatever I have got to offer on television. So I want to make sure I kick some fresh goals,” he says.

“I don’t want to outstay my welcome.” He adds quickly as both rejoinder and punchline: “I will.”

Micallef is 62, so it feels right to test how knowledgeable he is about contemporary culture. Can you tell us what a brat summer is?

“No idea.”

Micallef hosted Mad as Hell for 15 seasons.

But he defends himself, saying he plays his age and his character as an authority figure who wears his knowledge – or lack of it – openly.

“I’m an old white guy – but that doesn’t land as it did back in the late ’90s.”

So some of the criticism he copped about returning to the ABC for Eve of Destruction was fair enough, he says.

‘I don’t want to outstay my welcome. I will.’

Shaun Micallef

“Having said that, the first episode featured Felix Cameron, who’s, like, 13 years old and never appeared in front of a live audience before and had done a fantastic job in Boy Swallows Universe.

“So I am not sure that you can criticise the show as being one that didn’t give an opportunity … to a young person.”

The Japanese souffle pancake at Tick Tok.Credit: Eddie Jim

OK, but the general point: isn’t it somebody else’s time?

“And I completely agree with that, absolutely. But I still think I can probably help.”

Much of the attack centred on Micallef supposedly taking the spot of a younger TV host, which had been suggested by the comment about passing the baton.

“Maybe,” he concedes before pointing out, “but that didn’t happen” – no such TV show appeared.

“I think that’s because some people who write about TV don’t necessarily understand how it works, and people watching it clearly don’t have any idea how it necessarily works, rightly or wrongly.”

We pause to eat.

Micallef turns out to be another comedian with dull lunching habits (teetotal and doesn’t drink coffee) and while he is being photographed, I put in our agreed order of the salmon grain salad, on a bed of avocado, pearl barley and edamame beans for him, and the snapper special, with asparagus, peas, bacon and mussels drizzled in lemon for me.

But then it turns out the cafe manager, excited by the presence of either the comedian or The Age or both, has thrown in the cafe’s signature chicken waffle, with southern fried chicken tenders, bacon and avocado and sriracha aioli on a Belgian waffle, as well as the cafe’s signature Japanese souffle pancakes with crystallised chocolate soil and passionfruit curd and crush meringue. It takes an extra 20 minutes to prepare, we are told.

It is a mountain of food, but be rude not to accept it, I decide.

Tick Tok cafe’s chicken waffles. Credit: Eddie Jim

We eat the lot. The bill, including a couple of beverages, is $122.70.

By this time, we are more than one hour in and Micallef is yet to plug his new book.

Slivers, Shards and Skerricks is terrific, funny, startling, wry, clever, unexpected, the product of a fine mind fizzing with a mix of topics and styles, including a homage to one of his comic heroes, New Yorker writer S.J. Perelman, who mixed highbrow with popular culture.

“It’s a sketch show in a book. The characters I am playing are the authors,” Micallef says.

So what about the state of the Australian television industry buffeted by a collapse of local advertising dollars and the rampant budgets of global streaming services?

Much of the media is in a state of “general shitification”, he says.

“It is not that they intend to make shows as bad as they are, it’s just that the process makes them terrible. And you don’t have enough people who care about what’s important, which is doing the best job you possibly can.

“The handle gets turned and the thing gets extruded and that’s what it is. And the audience sits back and they watch it. I think they know deep down, they go ‘that’s not quite as good as the thing I watched on Netflix’.”

But to Micallef, “general shitification” extends to us – the audience – and affected the publication of his book.

On page 89 of Slivers, Shards and Skerricks, towards the end of a parody piece How to be a successful TV comedian, a single word – the punchline of a joke – has been removed, a black oblong printed over the word by publishers Affirm Press, who were worried about the blowback on social media should the word remain.

After back and forth, Micallef ultimately agreed to censor it.

He takes the book and reads an extract. “Mainstream success for a comedian is guaranteed if you follow the basic rules outlined above, but be careful, for uneasy sits your crown. If you do or say something, anything that people don’t like, your career is over.”

The long list of forbidden topics – war, poverty, gender, sexual orientation, old age, News Corp – ends with the redacted word.

Micallef explains that the comic voice of the comedian is a “clueless idiot”.

“The word itself is rightly regarded today as a slur,” Micallef says. “It is not a word I would use today with approval.”

Hence, the clueless idiot thinks he is writing down a descriptive word, “but he is actually using the slur”.

He argued that the word was needed “because it ups the stakes as to his cluelessness”.

“Just because you represent the way some people talk or a character in any novel smokes or is misogynistic, you are not necessarily presenting that with approval. Certainly not in this case.”

So will you tell me the word?

“No,” he says, before suddenly changing tack as his voice rises. “I will tell you, Stephen, as we walk home, off the record.”

I ask him to sign his book for me.

“Oh, you want me to say hello, do you?” he asks, taking the book.

We walk back through the streets of Williamstown and for some reason I don’t press him on the censored word. We say our goodbyes opposite the newsworthy house and I get into my car and drive away.

Later at home, I take a look in the book to view the personal witticism the great Shaun Micallef has written just for me as he signed his name.

It reads: “Hello Stephen.”

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