SoundBite
After I finished work on Totally Full Frontal I wanted to keep some career momentum going by getting up something that featured me doing more of what I'd done on TFF. I collaborated with Marc Gracie (director/producer on TFF) and Rob Caldwell (writer) on SoundBite, five five-minute vignettes for cable network Foxtel's thecomedychannel.
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Peter Allen was heaps of fun to perform. We framed the idea as a 'Video Will' but he didn't actually bequeath anything to anyone. He just paid tribute to his loved ones, and himself. It featured one of the many fantastic make up jobs by Karchi Magyar. We did it all for virtually no money. Another steep learning curve for me.
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Dave Letterman had been such a favourite on Totally Full Frontal we decided to write a 'How to' video for tonight show hosts. The first lesson was "to try not to look like Jay Leno." The last lesson was to "hate yourself" because then you would need to spend every day in front of an audience. Imagine, every evening?
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The only political figure I attempted to impersonate for the series was Mikhail Gorbachev, who at the time had just begun touring the world as a public speaker on peace and the modernisation of Russia. His showbiz inspiration was Elton John and his song 'Nikita'. A little surreal, quite tenuous, but it is a song about the Cold War (kind of). We thought Mikhail could be a huge Elton John fan. You never know.
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Jerry Seinfeld. Another character we thought we could transfer from the Totally Full Frontal series to SoundBite. When we recorded this tribute to him his sitcom had just ended its highly successful run. We asked ourselves what he might do after finishing his show. Go into therapy? Most likely not, but why not? Rob Caldwell, my co-writer on SoundBite plays Dr Gruber in this angsty rave that ends with Seinfeld realising he is the "nabob of nothing." I didn't even know what a nabob was at the time. I'm still not completely sure.
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I had never attempted an impersonation of Aussie music hero John Farnham before we conceived this project (I have since performed him on Comedy Inc). Because I can't sing like John Farnham (I mean, his voice is amazing) we decided to focus on something we could parody... Farnham's way of presenting himself in interviews, his persona, which is as a breezy, jocular, blokey everyman. We portrayed him as determinedly unfazed by the international success he lacks compared with many of his musical contemporaries.
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