Last Tuesday, Shaun appeared on The Circle (a less annoying version of the US show The View) to promote Your Gen, his book and Good Evening going to Brisbane and Perth. You can watch it below; especially worth seeing him pulling faces at the very end.
Category: TV Shows
Rewind: Newstopia begins on SBS
It was October 2007, and the industry was abuzz of a new show on SBS. Some were already comparing it to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. But this was something unique – Australian, absurb and very Micallef.
Yes, it is 3 years since the first season of Newstopia began. “Shaun Micallef rewrites the headlines” was how The Age Green Guide described it. It was meant to debut during 2008, but was bought forward to coincide with the 2007 Federal Election. It would have no live-studio audience and could almost be mistaken for a real news show. And it would be a great platform to judge the news of the world because “we (Australia) have no control over it.”
Described as the “luckiest unsuccessful” comedian in Australia by The Age Green Guide, Micallef was quoted as saying “I’m a white-faced comedian rather than a red-nosed comedian. I don’t have baggy pants and a ‘love me’ attitude. If you want to find the joke, it’s here somewhere. You just have to look for it.” This goes some of the way why some people might ask: what’s so funny about this guy. To which an equal number respond: everything.
Memories of Micallef Tonight still loomed, even 4 years later. And Shaun himself acknowledged some of reasons why it didn’t work: his lack of experience, the overly-fast-past alienated some viewers – but he was still immensely proud of it.
During an interview, Shaun admitted “I do get depressed sometimes. But it’s not a huge thing. It’s really a very small dog. It’s a chihuahua.”
Shaun himself wasn’t sure Newstopia would be his ‘breakthrough’ success (leaving “target demographics” to the bean counters); he would just try to be funny.
The Librarians starts next Wednesday
The third season of The Librarians starts this Wednesday 13th on ABC1 at 8:30pm.
OK, so Shaun isn’t involved, but many friends and colleagues of Shaun are: Robyn Butler, Wayne Hope, Roz Hammond and Tony Martin. And if the previous seasons are any indication, it should be very funny.
A sketch from MousePATROL
The thought of Shaun Micallef and Tony Martin working on a TV project together sounds like it would be the most amazing thing EVER! Well, it almost happened in 2004.
A show with the working title MousePATROL was the vehicle, but unfortunately the ABC shelved it, and not much of the material was ever released. But this week, Tony’s post on Scrivener’s Fancy revisits one of the rejected scripts on the topic of ‘Footytainment‘.
Enjoy, and we’ll keep wishing these two comic geniuses will get the chance to work together again.
Shaun gets LAID?!
He certainly is very busy at the moment – Shaun has been listed as a guest star in a new ABC TV show, LAID. Written by Marieke Hardy, the black comedy is about a woman who discovers the men she has had relationships with are dying mysteriously, one by one.
Shooting has just started, and no air-date has been set, so we’ll have to see if Shaun is one of those men!