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Mick Molloy has a word of warning for his famous friends. “If you did a uni revue back in 1982, and you did some blackface, someone can find it, someone can get there.”
He should know. In the course of putting together the new show Glenn and Mick’s Celebrity Intervention, he and co-host Glenn Robbins have had the dubious pleasure of trawling through reams of material from the darkest corners of their guests’ lives with the aim of finding the most embarrassing material they can put to air.
If Molloy’s other show on Seven aims to capture the mood of a conversation in the front bar of your local pub, this one has the feel of an altogether different bar – the prosecution bench in the courtroom of public opinion.
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“The audience is the jury, and we’re sitting there going, ‘What have you got to say for yourself?’” he jokes.
Molloy, who came up with the concept, admits he loves “doing an archaeological dig on someone”, but says the task is made that much easier by the fact friends of the celebrity guests – who in this run of eight episodes include Sam Pang, Carrie Bickmore, Chris Brown, Dave Hughes and Guy Sebastian – “are more than willing to cough up [material] to bring out the dead”.
Of course, it’s all in the name of fun. This show is essentially the love child of This is Your Life and the celebrity roast, the way they used to be done back in the Dean Martin days.
“It’s all made with love,” says Molloy, who adds that in his view, modern-day roasts have become “really nasty shit”.
This version asks, “How can you capture the vibe of tearing your mate down with friendly fire in a modern context?” His answer: you make it “touchy-feely”.
“If you say something to your friend, it should be coming from a place of help,” says Molloy. “Even footy coaches at half-time can’t thump the table any more. You’ve got to slip the pill in the dog food.”
Mick Molloy (left) and Glenn Robbins with two of their celebrity co-hosts, Kate Langbroek (left) and Carrie Bickmore, on Glenn and Mick’s Celebrity Intervention.
There was a bit of sleight of hand about Molloy’s approach when he invited Robbins, best known as Kath’s butcher-dancer-lover husband Kel in Kath & Kim, to be part of the show he was cooking up.
“He said to me, ‘I’ve got this idea where you and I help people with their relationships’,” says Robbins, who first met his co-conspirator in the late 1980s when the pair worked together on sketch show The Comedy Company (Robbins as a performer, Molloy as a writer, where he was credited – for the first and only time – as “Michael Molloy”).
Robbins’ first response was disbelief. “I’m going, ‘Mick Molloy helping people?’ I didn’t want to say no, though; I was happy to have a chat.”
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Still, when they met, he recalls: “I’m sitting there thinking how am I gonna say to Mick that I am not in any way qualified, and nor are you, to advise people. That’s just got f—ing danger written all over it. I was gonna say, ‘You know what, don’t do it’. But because it had taken so long [to set up the meeting] it had evolved, and when he told me the idea, I went, ‘Oh, that’s great’.”
Of course, he admits, that might just have been the relief kicking in.
At first, Robbins wasn’t sure what he could bring to the concept. “I trust other people’s judgment of me more than I trust my own,” he says. “Mick saw something in my approach that fitted the model, and I now agree.”
You might boil that something down to playing the good cop to Molloy’s bad.
Molloy (second from left, back row) with the D-Generation in 1992.Greg Noakes/ABC
“We don’t overplay that card,” says Robbins. “But it’s really fun to see the guests get whacked by Mick, and then for me to whack him.”
The show is filmed before a studio audience, then trimmed to produce a lean, mean 40-odd minutes of air time.
I’m invited along to a recording in the same South Melbourne studio complex where The Front Bar is filmed. There’s room for about 100 people in the audience, and the crowd files in about 10 minutes before the episode is taped. The warm-up guy works hard to get everyone revved up – “the more you laugh, the better the show will be; they feed off your energy”, he says – and then Molloy enters, with this week’s guest co-host by his side.
You’re kidding: Molloy originally pitched Robbins the idea of a show in which they would help people with their relationships.Simon Schluter
This time out, it’s Denise Scott, the 70-year-old veteran stand-up, Mother and Son reboot star and cancer survivor. Her schtick is loose, rambly, a little befuddled, and her interaction with the meat on this evening’s roast – one Dr Chris Brown, aka the Bondi Vet – is hilarious. It will definitely need to be trimmed of fat, but what’s left should have a very high marble score indeed.
There’s a quick intro, then Molloy throws to Robbins, who is ostensibly out in the field, concocting some lame cover story to get the celebrity into the studio. This pre-taped segment is so transparently fake it might have come from The Late Show, where Molloy first emerged as part of the D-Generation alongside the Working Dog crew, Rob Sitch, Santo Cilauro, Jane Kennedy and Tom Gleisner (plus Jason Stephens and Tony Martin).
Then Robbins leads Brown into the studio, he acts surprised, and we’re off. Lots of gags about his preternaturally square jaw and his propensity for appearing in budgie smugglers follow, with Scott fawning over his physique and Molloy telling him he should be embarrassed.
It is unashamedly light entertainment, pitched squarely at the audience of The Front Bar, and making extensive use of the Seven stable as well as the co-hosts’ contact books. But not everyone said yes.
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“Ed Sheeran said no,” Molloy admits. “It was a polite no. Kylie was a polite no.”
They think some of that might have been down to the talent not quite knowing what they would be in for, and with a series in the can – and no one hurt (much) in the process – it might be easier to get people over the line in the future.
Other than Ed and Kylie, who would be on the hit list?
Molloy offers Russell Crowe and Hugh Jackman, predictable enough names, then adds Andrew Denton to the mix. “There’s someone we’d love to do – his back catalogue would be awesome, and he’d give as good as he’d get.”
Top of the list, though, is a real surprise. “Salman Rushdie. I think he’s got it all.”
“Well, I’ve got his number,” says Robbins. “So…”
If there was some hesitation among the celebrities, that’s understandable as far as Molloy and Robbins are concerned. After all, they weren’t entirely convinced they had a viable product, right to the very last.
“An hour and a half before we recorded our first episode, we were sitting on set, trying to waddle our way through muck, through the rehearsal, and we were both convinced it was a disaster,” Molloy confesses.
Glenn Robbins (second from right) as Kel on Kath and Kim, with (from left) Gina Riley, Magda Szubanski, Peter Rowsthorn and Jane Turner.
Adds Robbins: “I flashed a look at myself on the big monitor in the studio and I had that look on my face, ‘What have we done? What are we doing?’”
Molloy caught the look, and flashed one back. It said, “We’re screwed”.
“And when Mick admitted to that I just went, ‘That’s fantastic’,” says Robbins. The tension dropped from his shoulders as he told himself “it doesn’t matter any more, just get on board, let’s see where it goes”.
That episode was the Bickmore one, with Kate Langbroek as guest co-host, that opens the series. “And it’s one of my favourites,” says Molloy.
He hopes audiences will agree, but he knows it can take time for a new show to find its feet.
Andy Maher, Mick Molloy and Sam Pang on AFL chat show The Front Bar.David Cook
“It took five years with The Front Bar for people to go, ‘I love that show’,” he reflects. “We started online, then we went to 12.30 at night, then we went to 9.30pm, where we nearly tanked. So it took a while.”
This time around, Seven is dropping the show straight into prime time. And with the free-to-air TV environment more cut-throat than ever, they’ll need to hit the ground running.
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“Trust me, I know, the clock is ticking,” Molloy says. “Seven have been wonderful to us, but they expect it to go well. We’ve got eight episodes for people to go, ‘That’s a show I’d watch again’.”
If it is, who knows, maybe they’ll be tuning in to watch Kylie, Rusty, maybe even Rushdie get the treatment.
But if not, the roast just might go up in flames.
Glenn and Mick’s Celebrity Intervention premieres at 7.30pm on Monday, April 20, on Seven.
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‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.theage.com.au ’
