Rumours of Shaun Micallef’s retirement have been greatly exaggerated. When the final episode of his much-loved satirical news show Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell went out two years ago, the then 60-year-old comedian said he wanted to free up resources for someone younger, just as John Clarke had once given him a hand, not that he was done done.
Hence the recent proliferation of eponymous content, re-emerging on SBS’s new globe-hopping documentary show, , alongside a dozen comedians – Aaron Chen, Lizzy Hoo, Michael ‘Wippa’ Wipfli, Dilruk Jayasinha, Nina Oyama and Arj Barker – as well as ABC chat show Shaun Micallef’s Eve of Destruction.
“I gave myself an out,” he says. “And with this SBS show, I am working with people who are young enough to be my children, with maybe one exception in Arj.”
Shot across five weeks, the show’s set-up is reasonably straightforward. Each episode pairs Micallef with a fellow Australian funny person as they set out to reconnect with certain aspects of their heritage. However, missed planes, trains and possibly automobiles threw several spanners in the works of what feels like an occasionally sleep-deprived, genuinely exciting, if a little chaotic adventure, allowing home truths to spill like tea.
“We went from Ireland to Japan, and we had a nice little day off in there, just to recover from the trip, but we missed the connection and spent 12 hours sitting in an airport,” Micallef laughs. “We missed all those sorts of things, but we made a virtue out of that. There’s a kind of frenetic energy associated with some of the conversations, which you probably wouldn’t have if you were relaxed and well-rested.”
An equal parts rambunctious and reflective journey, Shaun Micallef’s Origin Odyssey opens with Micallef and Chen touching down in Shanghai. From there, they set off across China to learn more about Chen’s dad’s time spent on a (better-fed) pig farm during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. A term Micallef’s visa outlined he wasn’t allowed to use on camera, though our esteemed host spells it out via establishing the timeline 1966-76.
It may start with the pair comparing Trump accents, like Roby Brydon and Steve Coogan’s series of semi-fictional travelogue films beginning with 2010’s The Trip, but by the episode’s end, the travel companions have a lovely heart-to-heart about the very un-Trump-like traits of humility, self-doubt and vulnerability.
Aaron Chen and Shaun Micallef. Credit: SBS
“That dinner with Aaron is a good example of talking about the very thing that most comedians fear, which is that we’ll inadvertently reveal too much of ourselves,” Micallef says. “I do sketch comedy, therefore I do nothing but conceal myself, sometimes literally with prosthetics and that sort of thing. But this is more like true stand-up, where they say here’s something that happened in my life and I’m going to make a joke out of it. Or they avoid it completely and just tell a nonsense story. And it’s a way of dealing with things.”
Emotions inevitably spill out across the show, as guards drop like heavy bags. The amiably ruffled Micallef, seldom out of long pants much duller in hue than , was keen to ensure that each fellow comedian felt as comfortable as possible. “So we have lots of conversations that obviously aren’t in the documentary and probably weren’t even filmed,” he says. “Eventually, I couldn’t tell the difference between those moments. And quite inadvertently, that ended up being a positive for the show, because you really feel those little unpack moments.”
Micallef says they didn’t count on those moments. “Those are offers made by decent people because they trust everybody making the program. If the show were nakedly aiming for that slow zoom-in with the minor key being played on the piano, I think we wouldn’t have got them.”
Shaun Micallef's Origin Odyssey: Shaun Micallef and Lizzy Hoo in Ireland.
Sydneysider Hoo, whose comedy act tends to focus on her Malaysian dad Chan’s side, headed to Ireland to trace the stories of her mum’s ancestors. It veers from cute revelations she’s a natural in the cooper or (butter exporting) barrel-making industry, to unpicking the truth over the murder of an alleged IRA soldier from her line. “We were sitting by a loch, trying to tell the story of a death that led up to the killing of her own ancestor and it really underlined that life is a huge mess,” Micallef says.
Deadloch and Utopia star Oyama’s deeply moving episode focuses on how, when white kids at high school started overtaking her home-learned Japanese when, she disconnected from that side of her identity. A gorgeous moment occurs when she’s dressed in traditional attire. “When she sees herself in the mirror and goes, ‘Oh yeah, that works, I can see myself as Japanese, it’s great,” Micallef says. As is a kick-ass moment practising Samurai sword fighting or Oyama discovering she’s amongst the roughly 10 per cent of Japanese people who can claim that lineage.
Shaun Micallef and Arj Barker. Credit: SBS
It’s not all emosh, unless you count Micallef being driven to distraction on a steamy Indian train as the California-born Barker philosophically insists that the colour green doesn’t exist. “It’s the maddest conversation I’ve ever had,” Micallef says. “It was very, very hot, and there were people all around us, many of them snoring.”
For the most part, Micallef kept his cool. “I wanted to know where the wall is before you run into it,” he says. “And there’s some fun in hitting it, occasionally, because you go, ‘Oh, that’s where the wall is. You don’t really know what you can do until you suddenly reach what you can’t achieve. But once I reach the limit of my ability, I employ my skills as a writer to write around those deficiencies, which is what I’ve been doing for 30 years.”
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Shaun Micallef’s Origin Odyssey premieres on Tuesday 24 September on SBS and . The six-part series airs on SBS at 7:30pm Tuesday nights, with new episodes available to stream on SBS On Demand weekly from September 24. The series will be subtitled on SBS On Demand in Arabic, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean. All episodes will be available with audio description.
